Most of people around the world want to have some power over someone. Someone may include the son or the husband or the wife or a group of people or it may include a country also. Having some power over someone means to control his all activities. There are many examples you find around your neighborhood. Just talk about the servant. How you order your servant and get angry with him on his mistakes.
How and where does this desire for power arise from? Do you know? It arises from a feeling of loneliness. If you don’t have any friend on whom you can rely and trust, it will make you feel a condition of a complete self-isolation. Most of people generally don’t like this situation and thus they try to escape from it when it comes in their life.
You now try to understand what this power means and how it influences your life. Some people are self-centered with extraordinary sense of power, called ascetic. Having desire for a few things for themselves, they want to have power over themselves through self-control. But when you start controlling the function of others, you experience a great happiness, because you think that you can govern a group of people through your ideas.
After all, need of having some power arise when you compare yourself with someone. You think that you could not achieve because you are not so powerful like him. Thus the desire for getting something, it creates a sense of power within you.
To know the power of “power”, you must have a sense of power which most of people would like to have in their life. In real life you find many examples such as the senior clerk have power to order junior clerk and Boss is all and all. He has power over their all employees. The ministers can command the top bureaucrats to implement their legitimate orders. They have much power to suspend or transfer their bureaucrats, they can also terminate them. The possession of huge power makes you happy and its absence makes you unhappy.
Sometimes, powerful man may explain his actions and say that it was his duty towards his country. But the fact is that he wants to have power over someone in the name of his country.
This is very important to think if you can live without controlling and dominating people while you are in student life. Because everyone in this world is as important as the man who has extreme power and everybody desire to live in such world where each one is free to do what he wants to do. This thought will save you from dictators who have supreme power and try to shape someone’s life as they plan.
When powerful persons dominate you or control you through money, through status, they forget that you are also a human being. So, when you are at school you must make the feeling of ‘ourness’. It means that this is our school, yours and mine, not the Japanese or the Americans or the Englishmen’s . You as a student are also as important as the teachers and principal. Actually, the feelings of ‘ourness’ is completely disappeared throughout the world.
If people want to have any kind of power, then they are ignoring the importance of living. You know that all parents have control over their child and want they should grow in a certain way. But education teaches us to grow in a freedom environment and not to have any desire for having power over someone’s life. You should make a school that teaches such thoughts. If it is not possible then you will go out of your school like others with superficial information. After then, your power will be very low and you will be controlled by some powerful man. So you must take advice from your teachers and the principal to create the best school.
The world can be saved if everyone has the above thoughts. But it is not possible right now, because everyone has only one thought that everything is ‘mine’ and not yours’. The feeling of ‘ourness’ is disappeared and until it is created among all of us, the peace will not come back in our world. So, you must absorb these ideas completely to make a new world.
-by J Krishnamurti (adapted)