Student: What do you mean by ordinary?
Krishnamurti: To be like the rest of men; with their worries, with their corruption, violence, brutality, indifference, callousness. To want a job, to want to hold on to a job, whether you are efficient or not, to die in the job. That is what is called ordinary - to have nothing new, nothing fresh, no joy in life, never to be curious, intense, passionate, never to find out, but merely to conform. That is what I mean by ordinary. It is called being bourgeois. It is a mechanical way of living, a routine, a boredom.
There is a film titled: "The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers".
ReplyDeleteThere is a scene in it that I thought of when I read this passage.
The scene is when Ellsberg's lawyer asks a psychiatrist for advice about how to choose the jury. (Remember that it a trial to try Ellsberg and Russo for leaking the so called "Pentagon papers", and they are facing the possibility of getting 115 years in prison).
This is the transcript:
"When we went to select our jury, we brought in an expert,actually, a psychiatrist.
He told us we were defending two young men, bright, high achievers, men with a future, who were willing to risk it all for the sake of not themselves or their own careerist interests, but for the sake of a principle, and the psychiatrist said to us, "you don't want on this jury men of middle age, "because these are people "who in the course of their lives might possibly have "sacrificed principle for the sake of career, "for the sake of family, "and they lived with that compromise, "and they will have a lot of disdain, "even contempt, for two men who did the opposite "