Human beings are cruel. The hunter gatherers may be lived like animals. Violence must have been part of their lives. But we now have resources, technology. We need not be cruel. But we have not changed much. We spend billions of dollars on arms and ammunition, while billions are starving for food. That is cruelty. We are violent by words and deeds to keep our imagined status. Power and wealth makes us egoistic. We want to go up the imaginary status ladder. We become cruel and less considerate of others.
"In Tibetan there is a word that points to the root cause of aggression, the root cause also of craving. It points to a familiar experience that is at the root of all conflict, all cruelty, oppression, and greed. This word is shenpa. The usual translation is “attachment,” but this doesn’t adequately express the full meaning. I think of shenpa as “getting hooked.” Another definition, used by Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche, is the “charge”—the charge behind our thoughts and words and actions, the charge behind “like” and “don’t like.”..." ~ Pema Chodron
J. Krishnamurti ~ First Public Talk in Ojai
In all this - the wars, the terrors, the appalling things that are going on, we have never tackled cruelty - not the cruelty of Central Europe or the recent war with all their horror, and the horrors of war that are going on in the world, we have never as human beings been able to be free of cruelty - not only to the animals, to nature, but to each other. The ultimate cruelty is war, naturally. Can we as human beings look at this word first - the word 'cruelty' , then feel the meaning and the depth of that word. Cruelty to one's own self as discipline - we'll go into all that. Cruelty to others, exploiting others, using each other for our own personal ambition or sexual ambition. All these are various forms of cruelty - ideological cruelty, and so on. It's not the cruelty of a particular group of people, but the cruelty that is almost in every human being wanting to hurt somebody else.
Why is it, after all the religious admonitions, long before Christianity, many, many centuries before Christianity, they said, ''Don't kill. The other is yourself.'' And we are still going on. Can this end? That's one of our great problems of life, whether this cruelty which is inherent - please listen to all this - which is inherent in self-interest. As long as there is self-interest, there must be exploitation of another, cruelty to another, using others, and so on. This self-interest, which hides under every form of expression, it hides behind the name of god, it hides in every priest and every human being. Aren't you self-interested in yourself? Of course. But one never faces it. One doesn't want to look at it. And to pursue it, to find out, all its trickery, all its hypocritical hypocrisy, its pride, its arrogance, its vanity and its humility, it requires great awareness and it demands great discipline. But we are all rather slack people. We are rather sloppy in our thinking. We are never certain about anything. We have a lot of beliefs, dogmas, faith. I wondered if you have examined certain religion as Christianity, and the world of Islam, based on books, if you begin to question them, doubt, the whole thing would collapse, because we never doubt our own thinking, our own experience. We never question...
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