The Urgency of Change

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The origin and publication of The Urgency of Change has several interesting facets. The source of the dialogues in the book is what is known in the Krishnamurti archives as The Holiday Book'. In the winter of 1968, when Krishnamurti was staying in Malibu, California, his companion and personal secretary, Alain Naudé, decided to go on a holiday; but Krishnamurti asked him instead to stay back and work with him on a book. Almost every day, Krishnamurti dictated answers to the deeply probing questions put to him by Naudé, who took them down in longhand. However, as Naudé felt that his handwriting would be hard for others to decipher, he edited his own handwritten notes of the dictations and read the piece into a tape-recorder. The tape was played back to Krishnamurti the same day, usually at supper time. The resultant book of dialogues therefore has the clear imprimatur of the author.

The topics in these thirty-three chapters range from conditioning and awareness, fear and God, to morality and art, suffering and suicide. Unlike the freewheeling dialogues in which several people take part and which therefore often tend to meander, the dialogues here sparkle with a crispness and clarity that would be the delight of any reader who seeks to widen and deepen his understanding of Krishnamurti's teachings The art of inquiry and communication through the medium of dialogue finds its finest expression in passages such as the following:

KRISHNAMURTI: If there is no illusion, what is left?

QUESTIONER: Only what is.

K: That what is the most holy.

Q: If what is the most holy, then war is most holy, and hatred, disorder, pain, avarice, and plunder... If what is sacred, then every murderer and plunderer and exploiter can say, don’t touch me, what I'm doing is sacred.'

K: The very simplicity of that statement, 'What is the most sacred', leads to great misunder- standing because we don't see the truth of it. If you see that what is sacred, you do not murder, you do not make war, you do not hate, you do not exploit. Having done these things, you cannot claim immunity from a truth which you have violated.

**Contents and Sample Pages**