| "Human beings have come to the end of their inventions, their beliefs, dogmas, gods, hopes, and fears – we have come to an absolute precipice, to the end. You may not be aware of it. You may still be hiding behind the walls of your belief, of your hopes, but they are illusions, they have no validity at all when you are faced with this crisis. So, having realised this – if you are at all capable of realising – then one must proceed to begin to find out how to renew the mind, to renew the total being. Do you understand? I hope I am making my question clear.
Look, human beings for over five thousand years and more have struggled, have to face their own immense sorrow, have to face death, wars, disillusionment, the utter hopelessness of life without any meaning, and always inventing gods, always inventing a heaven and a hell, always surrounded ourselves with ideas, ideals, hopes. But all that has gone. Your Ramas and Sitas, your Upanishads, your great gods – everything has gone in smoke, and you are faced with yourself as a human being, and you have to answer. Therefore your responsibility as a human being becomes extraordinarily great.
So our question then is: how is a mind that has been so heavily conditioned for so many centuries, through so many agonies, how is such a mind to be made new so that it can function totally differently, think entirely differently?"
– J. Krishnamurti
Public Talk 1 New Delhi, India - 15 December 1966 | 