Truth is a Pathless Land

We had a spontaneous guest speaker, a Gandhian named Dr. Prasad:

• How people react depends on the mindset
• Basic problem in rural areas -- what do we live for?
• We're all responsible for each other
• Life based development, not death based development.
• If every villager has a cigarette, we can make money but is that progress?
• Exploitation has taken subtle forms -- advertisment, marketing
• Greed is the base of the problem -- we are creating more and more loss to society.
• Instead of creating wealth, our paradigm has come to grabbing maximum wealth. As Gandhi said, there is enough for everyone's need but not greed.

Some notes from the roundtable:

• Are organization are useless? Not always.
• As organizations get larger, purity is lost.
• Organization can't lead to freedom ... it's not spirituality.
• El dorado by Edgar Allan Poe
• Truth -- there's no one truth; it's all true. But until we experience it, it's just a belief.
• It's not enough to hear somebody's truth.
• Words don't describe things as well as experiences.
• Truth is one thing that manifests in different ways; love's opposite is hate, pleasure is pain, but Truth has no opposite.
• To find one's blind beliefs, one should question oneself.
• Is killing is a natural part of life or can it be avoided? What's the "truth"?
• Krishnamurti's brother's death proved to be a pivotal experience for JK's journey to a "pathless" land.
• Truth has to be internal and personal; that can't be organized; but for practical things, people should come together and cooperate
• Be quiet for truth to rise; no longer a question of right or wrong
• One life is the same as many lives
• Don't lie, you gotta go to God, there's no means of transport and you gotta walk your way
• Krishnamurti has a point but it's overstated.
• Karen Armstrong.
• What's the difference between religion and cult? "Religion is to help you discover yourself but a cult is to use your weakness to manipulate you."
• Confucious: you can make someone follow your system, but can't make them believe in it
• Just because you're an organization, doesn't mean all constituent understand what it stands for.
• My grand uncle, Dr. V talks about institutions as temples; ultimately it doesn't belong to one person.
• Idea of a belief being a personal thing didn't resonate -- I get comfort when others share same beliefs.
• It's not the organization but the people that participate in it.
• Being addicted to religion is better than being addicted to crack.
• Organization can be very liberating if they're founded on the right principles.
• How does an individual stand up for oneself in the face of fundamentalism? Organizations are often too strong.
• Really, what's an organization? Three friends sitting and talking is organization?
• Ultimately, each one has to walk their own path -- that's the crux of it.
• If "truth is a pathless land" and there's no path, then where is it? It should be where you are.

Krishnamurti 's statement of 'Truth is a pathless land and you can not reach it by following any path' may be a matter of debate. I think his most revolutionary affirmation is: 'Religions are divisive in nature,; they divide humanity. What is required is cultivating a religious mind, which rejects all organized religions at one stroke and questions every belief. To him a religious mind is naturally disciplined and has virtues like integrity, love, affection and compassion--without having to consciously practise them.'