War
Every war ends with the hope that there would be lasting peace. In five thousand years of recorded history, there have been more than 5000 wars. Peace is always short-lived. One would think that after two world wars in the 20 century, with an estimated 100 million casualties, we would have learnt our lesson well enough to avert war and live in relative peace. If anything, this world is in far greater strife—nations warring to annex more land, religions fighting to prove whose God is real, countries waging economic warfare to gain ascendancy, political ideologies battling to be in power and thousands of other localized conflicts.
Why is it that despite our wanting to live in peace and harmony, we find ourselves in chaos, time after time? Is there a way out? And if there is, how do we find it? Delving into the human condition, J. Krishnamurti, one of the greatest religious teachers of all time, lays bare why we find ourselves caught in the pattern of conflict and war. ‘War’, he says, ‘is a spectacular and bloody projection of our everyday lives’. What we are inwardly is what is projected in the outer world. What Krishnamurti said and wrote for more than five decades is contained in this digital booklet of fifteen excerpts which provide a brief but clear glimpse into the causes of war and the way out of it.