Question: If you go to the end of conflict for yourself, must you then just accept the conflict which is in the world?

KRISHNAMURTI: Can you divide the world so very neatly and definitely from yourself? Is the world so very different from yourself? You see, sirs, I think, if I may say so, that there is something which has not been understood by us. For me, conflict is a very destructive thing, inwardly as well as outwardly, and I want to find out if there is a way of living without being in conflict. So I do not say to myself that it is inevitable, and I do not explain to myself that as long as I am acquisitive, there must be conflict. I want to understand it, to go through it, to see if I can shatter it, to see if it is possible to live without it. I am hungry to do that, and no amount of description, explanation is going to satisfy me—which means that I have to understand this whole process of consciousness, which is the ‘me’, and in understanding that, I am understanding the world. The two things are not separate. My hate is the hate of the world; my jealousy, acquisitiveness, my urge for success—all this belongs also to the world. So can my mind shatter all this? If I say, “Tell me the way to shatter it,” then I am merely using a method to conquer conflict, and that is not the understanding of conflict.

So I see that I must keep awake to conflict, be aware of it, watch every movement of it in my ambitions, my greed, my compulsive urges, and so on. And if I just watch them, perhaps I shall find out, but there is no guarantee. I feel I know very well what is essential if I would find out—namely, a passion, an intensity, a disregard for words and explanations so that the mind becomes very sharp, alert, observant of every form of conflict. That is the only way, surely, to go to the very end of conflict.

The Collected Works of J. Krishnamurti -Volume XII 1961: There Is No Thinker, Only Thought
Jiddu Krishnamurti