On Relationship

I have been reading “On Relationship” by J. Krishnamurti. It is a collection of extracts from talks and dialogues with Krishnamurti between 1940 and 1981 on the theme of relationship.

Krishnamurti was adamant that people should go to the source of teachings and find out for themselves rather than take notice of the interpretations and commentaries of others so I am not going to try and summarise the contents of this book.

"The teachings are important in themselves and interpreters and commentators only distort them. It is advisable to go directly to the source, the teachings themselves, and not through any authority." Krishnamurti

I do recommend that you read it for yourself. I have an Indian edition that I picked up a few years ago in Watkins in London but you can get a copy from the Krishnamurti Foundation Trust online shop or you can get a second hand copy from Amazon
Here is an extract from a talk at in September 1979 which I feel summarises the enquiry we embark upon when reading these teachings.

“So what is relationship, out of which we have made such a tremendous problem? Relationship means to be related to another, to one or to many or to the whole of mankind. Oh, you don’t see it! Why is there not in this relationship peace, a depth of understanding of each other that brings about love? Why isn’t there? The sexual relationship between two people, a man and woman, is called love. Right? For God’s sake don’t let us be hypocrites, let’s face these things! It is called love. Is it love? Or is it the demand for sensory satisfaction, the demand for companionship, the demand that is born out of loneliness, the demand that says, “I cannot be alone. I cannot stand this immense solitude in myself, therefore I must have somebody on whom I can depend psychologically.”


For me everything really came together in a large extract from a talk given in Bombay in January 1981 (25th according to the book, 24th according to http://www.jiddu-krishnamurti.net/. The full transcript is available online. The book contains the final passage starting “Society is an abstraction…”

Here are a few more quotes from this talk:
“The relationship between man and man has created this, which we call society. Man is violent, man is self-centred, man is seeking pleasure, frightened, insecure, in himself he is corrupt and in his relationship whether it be intimate or not, this way of relationship has created this so-called society. That is clear, obviously. But we always try to change society, not change man who creates the society in which he lives. Please, this is logic, simple, clear. And the socialist, communist, capitalist and so on and so on have always tried to change this amorphous, abstract thing called society. But never tackled the problem of relationship between man and man. Right? Now can that be changed? That is the whole point.”
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“So come to the point: why do human beings never change? This is an important question.”
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“You listen to all this, does this listening bring about an abstraction called an idea, or in the very act of listening you see the truth of it? Which is actually going on in your brain? Seeing the actual truth or listening and making an abstraction of it into an idea and therefore the idea becomes all important and not the fact, which is what is going on.”