| "So, what is one to do? Despair? Live for the present, enjoy oneself? Just let things go? You understand the issue? You cannot rely on the outside, you can't rely on yourself. Your self is the result of the outside world in which you have lived and which you have created. The society is you and you are the society; the two are not separate. If you reject that you reject also this, and you must. So what is it that is rejecting? You're following this? When you reject the outside world, the outside authority, the priest, the church, the whole structure, are you not also rejecting yourself, throwing it away? Because that which is outside of you is part of you. You're Christian, Catholic, Protestant, Buddhist, Hindu, Communist, this or that. You're conditioned and when you reject that you must also reject your own conditioning. And can one be free of one's conditioning? Not partly, in patches here and there, but entirely, completely, wholly, both the conscious as well as the unconscious. After all, that is freedom. And it is only in that freedom that there is right action, there is a total action, which will respond wholly to this vast phenomenon.
So that is the issue: to free the mind. The mind, not your mind or my mind, but the mind of man - which is you - from all its conditioning. Can one attack the problem that way? Because otherwise we are not free, and because we are not free there is chaos in the world. And freedom is this absolute unconditioning the mind. And if we don't, we shall always live in prison, decorate it more or less, become great technicians, go to the moon and further, put the flag on Venus, or the cross on Mars, or the red flag somewhere else, and so on. But we will always be in sorrow, in confusion."
– J. Krishnamurti
Public Talk
Rome, Italy - 04 November 1969
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