Don’t Make A Problem of Any Thing

In these discussions, Krishnamurti goes deeply into the question of human problems, drawing, in the process, a most interesting distinction between the ‘professional’ and the ‘human being’. He asks whether we do not regard ourselves as professionals first and as human beings afterwards. Our education generally makes us professionals in the sense that right from childhood we are trained to solve physical problems. The brain thus gets conditioned to solving problems, and it carries over the same mentality to the psychological realm and so comes to look upon any situation, any emotion as a terrible problem to be solved. The very nature of the problem-solving mind is its inability to see itself as the problem-creating mind, and so it never comes to the end of problems. In different contexts, through various examples, Krishnamurti returns again and again to his great insight: Don’t make a problem of anything in life. Though Krishnamurti is addressing mostly teachers of the schools he founded, there is something here for everyone—for those interested in a new kind of education, for parents, for the pundits in Vedanta or Buddhism, for psychologists, for those in the ordinary workaday world, for religious seekers…