IT IS A foggy morning, you can hardly see the orange trees which are about ten feet away. It is cold and all the hills and the mountains are hidden, and there is dew on the leaves. It will clear up later. It is early morning yet and the beautiful Californian sun and cool breeze will come a little later on.
One wonders why human beings have always been so cruel, so ugly in their responses to any statement they don't like, aggressive, ready to attack. This has been going on for thousands of years. One hardly ever meets nowadays a gentle person who is ready to yield, totally generous and happy in his relationships.
Last night there was the hooting of the owl; it was a great horned owl, it must be very large. And it waited for its mate to reply, and the mate replied from a distance and the hoot went down into the valley and you could hardly hear it. It was such a perfectly still night, dark, and strangely quiet.
Everything seems to live in order, in its own order - the sea with its tides, the new moon and the setting of the full moon, the lovely spring and the warmth of summer. Even the earthquake of yesterday has its own order. Order is the very essence of the universe - the order of birth and death and so on. It is only man that seems to live in such disorder, confusion. He has lived that way since the owl began.
Talking to the visitor sitting on the veranda, with the red climbing rose and a young wisteria and the smell of the earth and the trees, it seemed such a pity to discuss disorder. When you look around at those dark hills and the rocky mountain and hear the whisper of a stream which will soon be dry in summer, it all has such curious order that to discuss human disorder, human confusion and misery, seems so utterly out of place. But there he is, friendly, knowledgeable and probably given to thought.
The mocking bird is on the telephone wire; it is doing what it generally does - flying into the air, circling and landing on the wire and then mocking at the world. This it does so often and the world apparently doesn't care. But the bird still mocks on.
The fog is clearing, there is that spring sunshine and the lizard is coming out, warming itself on the rock, and all the little things of the earth are busy. They have their order, they have their pleasure, amusement. They all seem to be so happy, enjoying the sunshine, no man near to hurt them, to spoil their day.
If one may ask,' the visitor began,what to you is the most important thing in life? What to you is the most essential quality that man must cultivate?'
`If you cultivate, as you cultivate the fields of the earth, then it is not the most essential thing. It must happen naturally - whatever happens - naturally, easily, without any self-centred motives. The most important thing for each human being, surely, is to live in order, in harmony with all the things around him - even with the noise of the great towns, even with something that is ugly, vulgar, without letting it affect or alter the course of his life, alter or distort the order in which he is living. Surely, sir, order is the most important thing in life, or, rather, one of the most important.'
Why,' he asks,should order be a quality of a brain that can act correctly, happily, precisely?'
`Order isn't created by thought. Order isn't something that you follow day after day, practise, conform to. As the streams join the sea, so the stream of order, the river of order, is endless. But that order cannot be if there is any kind of effort, any kind of struggle to achieve, or to put aside disorder and slip into a routine, into various well defined habits. All that is not order. Conflict is the very source of disorder, is the very cause.'
`Everything struggles, doesn't it? Those trees, they have struggled to exist, struggled to grow. The marvellous oak there behind this house, it has withstood storms, years of rain and hot sunshine, it has struggled to exist. Life is conflict, it is a turmoil, a storm. And you are saying, are you not, that order is a state in which there is no conflict? It seems almost impossible, like talking in a strange language, something utterly foreign to one's own life, one's own way of thinking. Do you, if I am not impudent, live in order in which there is no conflict whatsoever?'
Is it very important, sir, to find out if another is living without effort, without conflict? Or would you rather ask if you, as a human being, who live in disorder, can find out for yourself the many causes - or perhaps there is only one cause - of this disorder? Those flowers know neither order nor disorder, they just exist. Of course, if they were not watered, looked after, they would die, and dying also is their order. The bright, hot sun will destroy them next month, and to them that is order.'
The lizard has warmed itself on the rock and is waiting for the flies to come. And surely they will come. And the lizard with its quick tongue will swallow them. It seems to be the nature of the world: the big things live on little things, and the bigger live on the big. This is the cycle in the world of nature. And in that there is neither order nor disorder. But we know for ourselves from time to time the sense of total harmony and also the pain, the anxiety, the sorrow, the conflict. The cause of disorder is the everlasting becoming - to become, to seek identity, the struggle to be. As long as the brain, which is so heavily conditioned, is measuring, the more',the better', moving psychologically from this to that, it must inevitably bring about a sense of conflict, and this is disorder. Not only the words `more', 'better', but the feeling, the reaction of achieving, gaining - as long as there is this division, duality, there must be conflict. And out of conflict is disorder.
Perhaps one is aware of all this, but being negligent of this awareness, one carries on in the same way day after day all the days of one's life. This duality is not only verbal but has the deeper division as the thinker and the thought, as the thinker separate from himself. The thinker is put together by thought, the thinker is the past, the thinker is knowledge, and thought too is born out of knowledge. Actually there is no division between the thinker and the thought, they are one inseparable unit; but thought plays a clever trick upon itself, it divides itself. Perhaps this constant division of itself, its own fragmentation, is the cause of disorder. Just to see, to realize, the truth of this, that the perceiver is the perceived, ends disorder.
The mocking bird has gone and the mourning dove is there with its plaintive cry. And soon its mate joins it. They sit together on that wire, silent, motionless, but their eyes are moving, looking, watching for danger. The red-tailed hawk and the predatory birds who were there an hour or two ago have gone. Perhaps they will come back tomorrow. And so the morning ends and the sun now is bright and there are a thousand shadows. The earth is quiet and man is lost and confused.
-J. Krishnamurti, 4th May, 1983
