My introduction to Krishnamurti came while I was at art school studying photography in the late 1960s. This was a wonderful time to be young; there was a feeling that everyone should re-invent themselves, and the world at large. It was OK to make mistakes but not to follow in other people’s footsteps—especially those of our poor, bewildered parents. Of course, we tripped up all the time—we were busy creating what we felt was an exciting, progressive culture, expressed in music, the arts and science.
A lot of that cultural wave was about the freedom to realise our desires, but it did sweep away the lingering constraints that held society to stale, post-War values and it broke down some of the class barriers that were so prevalent in Britain. Krishnamurti was part of the cultural landscape of that time; his revolutionary approach chimed with a growing audience of young people.
I read every ‘K’ book I could find—and went to a talk he gave in Wimbledon with my girlfriend. He spoke from a deep silence which made a profound impression on me. I’d been educated at a Quaker School where the gathered silence was the foundation of their meetings. As a schoolboy I found it constrained and brittle. The silence that emanated from Krishnamurti was something totally authentic. I met him by chance after his talk, in a corridor in the Town Hall, and exchanged a shy handshake—the first of many as it turned out.
One element of his talk wouldn’t let me go—his assertion that there had been no psychological evolution. We had better bathrooms, he said, but we were essentially the same tribal people we had descended from thousands of years ago.
I had been bought up by very sincere, left leaning parents. They had both been conscientious objectors in the War; they supported Gandhi’s civil disobedience movement aimed at Indian independence and spoke up for the left-wing causes of their day. I absorbed the idea of human development—a world gradually improving as people engaged with problems and campaigned for social and political reforms.
Krishnamurti’s dismissal of this gradualist approach stopped me in my tracks. It made me intensely curious to explore the whole idea of progress and transformation. I realized that if you travelled across the world you could visit hunter gatherer bands and ‘medieval’ farming villages and get a glimpse of our past. Each age leaves evidence of its dominance in remnant communities. Our most recent development, the Industrial Revolution, is still unfolding in cities in rapidly developing countries.
When I left art school, I set myself a fascinating project—to photograph the sweep of history. You can have an interesting life if you follow your passions!
For over a million years everyone was a hunter-gatherer. It was humanity’s first and most successful adaptation, occupying ninety-nine per cent of human history. I was privileged to stay with Ashaninka, Yanomami and Surui communities deep in the Amazon jungle, cut off from the modern world. Anthropologists, who spent long periods with contemporary hunter gatherers, all say they were generally happy. This was my impression, but it wasn’t Eden as some leading thinkers in the environmental movement claim. They romanticise indigenous people to promote the idea that humans, at our core, can live harmoniously in nature and with each other. They propose that somehow, we might return to the mind-set that operated before we were banished from Eden. It’s a tempting idea— that the way forward is to somehow scrape away at the psychological deposits built up over the last 10,000 years and regain our lost innocence. But it doesn’t correspond to what I observed.
The hunter-gatherers I met were like any cross-section of humanity. They lack the technologies developed over the last 10,000 years, but they are essentially the same as us. There were story tellers, healers and hunters; some were sensitive to nature and some treated it as a resource to be exploited; there were people whose gourd was half full and those whose gourd was half empty. They lived without shops or bathrooms or cars. They hadn’t even invented the wheel. Why would they? They had rivers and streams to wash in and food in the jungle super-store all around them. They shared everything, food, lovers and children. Their capacity to damage their environment was limited, not by some inherent respect for nature—they simply could not do much damage with the tools available to them. Had their population increased we would have a very different story.
There are many cultural features in these communities to be admired. No two modern hunter-gatherer bands are identical, but they treat everyone more or less the same. No one should be much richer than anyone else or be much more politically powerful. Men and women have roughly equal freedom to live how they think best. People generally enjoyed good health, plenty of leisure time and freedom from any form of government. They had fun. It was wonderful to be in their company.
Then about 10,000 years ago hunter-gatherers started to settle down and farm. We might note that Jared Diamond1 calls farming the worst mistake humans ever made, a catastrophe we never recovered from. Well, there’s no going back; as we climbed the ladder of progress, we kicked out the rungs below.
The plough was the break-through invention that characterised the farming age. Once the plough had been developed, farmers were five or six times more productive than hunter gatherers; a fifth of the population could feed everyone. The other four fifths were freed up to cook, build houses, trade, smelt metal, weave, create cities and establish armies to protect cities.
You need laws to deal with the problems that arise in a more complex society. With laws came rulers and the ruled, masters and servants. Women deferred to men. Very important people appeared. Inequalities developed which were unheard of in hunter gatherer communities.
The great Roman poet, Ovid, expressed his concerns about progress 2,000 years ahead of Jared Diamond in this poem:
Long ago Earth had better things to offer—crops without cultivators, fruit on the bough, honey in the hollow oak.
No one tore the ground with ploughshares
Or parcelled out the land
Or swept the sea with dipping oars—
The shore was the world’s end.
Clever human nature, victim of your inventions,
Disastrously creative, why cordon cities with towered walls?
Why arm for war?From Amores, Book 3
In Asia, Africa and South America—even on the edges of Europe— you can still find communities living a life that would be familiar to people from the Middle Ages. Familiar not just with the demands of daily life but also with the beliefs and superstitions that arise as technology develops. If you can imagine making a plough, you can also imagine those awful people on the other side of the valley. And you can imagine your death, a disturbing and scary thought if ever there was one. Fear of death is surely the foundation of religion and belief.
It is counter-intuitive to acknowledge that superstition and technology share the same common trait, but both require the capacity to make vivid, mental images. You need to be able to imagine a piece of wood being pulled across soil in order to make a plough. If you can do that you can also imagine your own death. Imagination is one of homo sapiens defining capacities—only a few animal species have this capability, and only to a very small degree.
The third age, the Industrial Revolution, developed as the world turned to fossil fuels to power a new economy. The steam-engine transformed society. It soon replaced animal powered transport. Engines powered by coal and later by oil fuel soon overtook energy derived from renewables—wind- and river-powered mills—to drive a new economy which again ushered in new values.
In cities in rapidly developing countries, you can still witness the great migration as people leave the countryside to find work in factories—an echo of what happened at the start of the Industrial
Revolution in Britain toward the end of the 1700s.
Its beginnings were brutal. It came at a terrible human cost. Workers were essentially slaves to factory owners who focused on meeting a new impulse—consumer demand.
So, what has the Industrial Revolution done for those of us seated at the best tables? Alright, clean hot and cold water, light and power at the touch of a switch obviously, ample food, health care, travel—we can point to a long list of things we could no longer do without. But this progress puts us in headlong collision with nature and with human nature.
It takes the earth one year and four months to regenerate what humans use in a year. If we go on as we are, projections show that we will need two earths to support us by the mid-2030s. Annoyingly we have only one.
Has our shopping spree made us happy? An immense and ever accelerating technological development has in principle brought about enormous new possibilities for a creative and happy life. But many of us in the modern world have felt a sense of loss, of missing something, in spite of our great technological gains, which should have made us feel that life has been enriched rather than impoverished.
F. Scott Fitzgerald said the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two contradictory thoughts at the same time. I suggest these—the world is registering important progress, but it also faces mortal threats which result from that progress. The first observation should empower us to act on the second. It doesn’t, because we don’t see the deeper cause of our problems.
The values that shaped our development as we turned to farming and later to industry are beautifully expressed in Genesis:
God said to them be fruitful and multiply,
fill the earth,
and subdue it.
Take dominion over the fish of the sea,
And the birds of the sky, and over every creature that crawls upon the earth.2
This approach clearly helped us survive when our ancestors lived in small, isolated groups, struggling to stay alive as they developed the new skills needed to grow their food. But it makes no sense to use the moral law from desert kingdoms in the Old Testament to conduct life in the twenty-first century. We now have a presence so colossal, and technologies so powerful, we could catch every fish in the sea and cut down every tree on earth. And if that were not enough, we have weapons of mass destruction equivalent to the asteroid strike that clobbered the dinosaurs.
The ‘Genesis’ approach is imbedded in our thinking. It’s not clear how we adopt values, but they have tremendous power. They affect anger, fear, hate. We’ve not chosen to give them that power, though we may think we have. Values and beliefs don’t seem to be open to examination. They are defended in some automatic way, so there is a failure of reason to operate properly. We are trapped, defending values that don’t work and are no longer appropriate for the conditions we now face.
On the basis of what police call ‘form,’ we are earthly defilers beyond reason. But must it always be so?
In 1983, I took the photograph of Krishnamurti and David Bohm for the book jacket of The Ending of Time at Brockwood. This gave me the chance to talk to David about the ‘time travel’ project I’d been working on. I suggested we make a book that showed the span of human development as a backdrop to exploring how a wrong way of thinking is behind the environmental crisis and most of the troubles of the human race. Changing Consciousness: Exploring the Hidden Source of the Social, Political and Environmental Crisis Facing our World was published in 1991.
It was an extraordinary privilege to work with David. He had a boundless intelligence and extraordinary mental energy, even if physically he was becoming frail. Our collaboration came at a point in my life when I’d travelled widely enough to witness the gathering collapse of our life support systems. Nearly thirty years later it’s not quite in free-fall, but we have very little time to arrest the decline.
The text in Changing Consciousness explores David’s ideas and insights about the way thought operates. Readers are invited to join in the enquiry and to go on with it, not only by themselves but also with others who may be interested.
The pictures in the book present environmental problems through the eyes of people at the sharp end of the debate. They bring out a basic human response to help people in need and take the immediate practical steps required to avert a cataclysm that might engulf us all if our problems escalate around the world.
Are these two approaches at odds? Not to me, but there is a tension that tends to divide people who share these concerns. I wanted to bring this out in the book, and in the talks I give. If I’m speaking to people campaigning to deal with the crisis in the environment, some will say, “OK Mark, it’s all very well sitting around exploring the process of thought—but the world is on fire! We need to act—all hands to the pump”. Nods and whispers of agreement all round.
The same talk to those interested in Krishnamurti’s approach elicits the counterpoint position, “We need to understand the fundamental cause of our problems. If we don’t, we will extinguish one fire only to start another”.
Each argument is correct—but incomplete. The world is on fire and we need to act. We also need to go ‘upstream’ to the source of our problems to deal with the kind of fragmented thinking that causes our problems.
We do have the technologies to transition to a new, sustainable age. Every week the media report on new ways to align human systems and natural systems. A large part of the world’s research efforts is aimed at creating a sustainable civilization. We are not short of solutions to deal with the unintended failures that developed during the Industrial Revolution. We are short of leaders who will take these hard-won solutions to scale. The environmental movement, (now joyfully bolstered by school students around the world) is aimed at giving our leaders the courage to go much further in dealing with the climate, pollution, population bottleneck.
The question is this—can we deal with the threats to our natural environment and very survival, without a fundamental change in consciousness? Our imbedded sense of tribal identity, expressed as nationalism, prevents us dealing with global problems that require unprecedented international cooperation. Political leaders at international meetings sound like…I was going to say kids, but that’s not correct; they sound like bigots: “Why should we do anything about our CO2 pollution if this country or that country doesn’t act first?” They all want to make their country great and exploit whatever advantage they can. The result is that they are jeopardizing civilization.
Clearly what is needed is practical action to deal with the problems downstream. But to pull this off we need a radically new, world-wide approach. But such an approach, Krishnamurti maintains, can come about only through freeing the mind from a crippling servitude to self-centeredness, expressed collectively in a destructive adherence to nationalism and sectarian beliefs. And that is just for starters…
Where it goes wrong, is that the practical action and campaigning gets all the attention. Can one influence a wholistic approach?
As David points out, “…you’ve got to begin with those who can listen, because everything new started with a few people. At the time of Newton, for example, there were not a hundred scientists of any merit in Europe. They could have said, ‘Look at this vast mass of ignorant people, going around just living their lives.’ Nevertheless, science had a tremendous effect, though not all to the good. But still, it shows that small things can have big effects—one small thing being, for example, more and more people understanding that something has to happen. Thus, we already see the Green movement growing. They are doing good work, and I think that much more should be done along these lines. But the important point is that they’re not considering thought. That is to say, they are not considering the fundamental cause, just the effect.”3
David Moody points out in his wonderful book, An Uncommon Collaboration: David Bohm and J. Krishnamurti, that throughout history radical proposals accumulate to a critical mass that may succeed in sweeping away existing structures and assumptions and usher in new approaches. He gives the example of Galileo and more recently, Gaia.
But, as Krishnamurti was fond of saying toward the end of his life, “Time is our enemy”. Natural systems can change awfully quickly if feedback loops kick in. Look at the wildfires, droughts and floods reported daily around the world. More intense weather is consistent with predictions of a warming world and we ain’t seen nothing yet—the extreme weather we’ve triggered is the result of just 1°C warming. Catastrophic climate events won’t wait for paradigms to shift. Time is our enemy, both by the clock and of thought. Shakespeare brings our predicament vividly alive:
There is a tide in the affairs of men.
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.4
Clearly, we need a new kind of intelligence if we are not to lose our ventures, because we have created a world that requires it. In the Stone Age ordinary practical intelligence was good enough. People then had an instinctive sort of intelligence developed somewhat by culture. But today we have created a complex world based on the abstractions of thought. To deal with thought we need a much higher sort of intelligence. We tend to think that thought is this sort of intelligence, but it isn’t. The key point about thought is that it is like the program, the disk, that responds to the situation. There is no reason why a disk should respond intelligently—a thing might change, and the disk might no longer be appropriate. It responds quickly and automatically according to what has been programmed into it. Similarly, what we have been thinking and learning is programmed into our memory. It’s not merely a picture of what happened in the past but a program for potential action. That program is extremely subtle; to deal with it takes much more subtlety than to deal with the objects the program deals with.’
Might the growing awareness of the need for a civilization based on sustainable principles go along with the notion that a wrong functioning of thought lies behind most of the troubles of the human race? If this insight went along with the need for a certain kind of observation of how thought is actually working, a deeper change might occur. It’s not a total transformation. It’s perhaps what Krishnamurti refers to in the Future of Humanity as “the schoolboy end” of his teachings. But that, after all is a pretty good place to start.
David was keen to acknowledge that it was Krishnamurti who made possible the insight that a wrong functioning of thought is driving our troubles. He brought a scientist’s rigorous inquiry to the most profound dialogues with Krishnamurti. The books and DVDs they produced are a testament to the meeting of two extraordinary minds from very different backgrounds.
I am more grateful than I can say for the chance to meet them both and for the thirty-year journey around the world, the result of questioning Krishnamurti.
Endnotes
1 Jared Diamond is an American anthropologist, geographer, historian and author of books like Guns, Germs, and Steel, and The Third Chimpanzee.
2 Genesis 1:28.
3 The longer passages in quotes are by David Bohm and are from Changing Consciousness unless otherwise attributed. The book will be uploaded to the Hard Rain website (www.hardrainproject.com) by mid-2020.
4 Shakespeare, William, Julius Caesar, Act 4, Scene 3.