“When you look at those chestnut trees with their blooms like white candles against the blue sky, what relationship exists between you and that, what relationship have you actually got—not emotionally nor sentimentally—what is your relationship with such things? And if you have lost the relationship with these things in nature, how can you be related to man? The more we live in towns, the less do we have any relation with nature. You go out for a walk on a Sunday and look at the trees and say, “How lovely”, and go back to your life of routine, living in a series of drawers, which are called houses, flats. You are losing relationship with nature. You can see this by the fact that you go to museums and you spend a whole morning looking at pictures, abstractions of what is, and this shows that you have really totally lost your contact, your relationship with nature; pictures, concerts, statues, have all become terribly important and you never look at the tree, the bird, the marvellous lighting of a cloud.”
“The essence of the content of our consciousness is thought. Thought has brought about a structure in consciousness, of fear, of belief. The idea of a saviour, faith, anxiety, pain all that is put together by thought and is the content of consciousness. We are asking whether that content of consciousness can be wiped away so that there is a totally different dimension altogether. It is only in that dimension that there can be creativeness—creativeness not within the content of consciousness.”
J. Krishnamurti
As human beings progress more and more technologically, they seem to be losing touch with nature. They don’t consider themselves as part of nature but think that everything in nature is for their use and consumption. Animals are killed and eaten and exploited in various ways. Trees are cut down to free the space for industrial activity or to be used in various ways. Although human beings share the same consciousness with the other living beings in nature, they don’t have any sense of being related to them. As they relate with nature, so they relate with each other. What is nature? How are human beings related to it? How does relationship with nature affect the relationship among human beings? What is the natural way of living? What is cosmos? What is the place of human beings in cosmos? All such questions cannot be explored without understanding the nature and structure of our consciousness. So what is our consciousness? How does it come into being? Consciousness is common to all living beings, yet every human being thinks that his consciousness is separate from that of the rest of the living beings. So, without transforming this separative consciousness, we may not be able to discover our true relationship with nature. Understanding our relationship with all that exists through transformation of our consciousness will be the main focus of study in this workshop. Various selections from Krishnamurti’s works relevant to the theme of this workshop will be provided as a reading material to each participant. Also links to the relevant videos of Krishnamurti will be provided. Each participant is expected to devote these two days fully to the study in order to benefit maximum from this workshop.