“…Seeking comfort, and the escape to some monastery, to some temple, to some god is not a religious way of life. To understand ‘what is’ and to change ‘what is’, is the way of religious life. To find out why we suffer, go into it very, very deeply and end that suffering, end fear and understand the whole structure of pleasure which is our consciousness. Our consciousness with its content is the many hurts, the images that one has built about in relationship, fear, the pursuit of pleasure, the ending of sorrow and finding out what love is – which we don’t know in this consciousness. And to transform that consciousness is the responsibility of every human being who is serious, who is really religious. That’s what I mean, gathering all your energies to transform the content of our consciousness… We know how we live: the quarrels, the misery, the confusion, the sorrows, the limited life that one leads, to change that, not into something, to end that, is the way of religious life.”
J. Krishnamurti
The quest for the sacred – something beyond the daily routine of petty boring life, has been of great interest for human beings since the beginning of human history. The concepts of God and the ways of life based on them were formulated as different religions and were practised by human beings. Most of the religions in the world have divided the humanity instead of uniting it. Majority of wars in the human history were fought for the religious purposes and every warring side claimed that the God was fighting on their side. What is religion? Is it merely a set of beliefs to be accepted and followed by human beings? Do human beings need to invent different religions based on their different self- interests or is there a universal impersonal basis of religion which is not man-made? Is the quest for sacred a vain human activity or is there something really sacred? This workshop is an endeavour to explore these questions and associated queries. Through various interactive sessions during the workshop, an attempt will be made to grasp what J. Krishnamurti has talked about these things and how it actually relates to our daily life.