The Masks We Put on in Our Public Life - J Krishnamurti

From a talk given by J Krishnamurti in Saanen, Switzerland, on July 21, 1966.

             From The Collected Works of J Krishnamurti, Vol. XVI.

I think this morning we should consider the question of action. We should go into it rather deeply and see if we can find and learn of an action which is not contradictory, a life in which there is no conflict of the opposites, no contradiction. Most of us live a private and a public life. Our public life is broken up into fragments; we live in public with different masks, different attitudes, different poses. We have so many masks; we put them on very easily and take them off only in the privacy of our own minds and hearts. In private life, if one is at all serious or if one is aware, there are also various masks. With friends we put on one mask, in the intimacy of the family we have another mask, and if we are ever alone, we have a totally different mask. Each mask is in contradiction to the others, both the public and the private. Most of us are not even aware of these masks. We just drift, adjusting ourselves to various influences and pressures, acting and reacting according to what these masks dictate. We live a life of contradiction and conflict until we die. None of these states seems to be permanent; each one has its own life, its own activity; and we become aware of them only when there is a great conflict, a crisis. Then we try to find out what to do, how to act and strangely, each phase, each mask dictates its own discipline, its own activity, its own way of life.

If we are at all serious, we become aware of that, and we try to integrate all these different contradictions. The more we try to bring these together into some kind of unity, the greater the conflict, the greater the contradiction. I think most of us know this; most of us know the various pretensions, the vanities, the assumptions that we each have, both public and private. If we take away these masks, what is left? If we are serious and earnest about the matter, we should find out not only what these pretences are, with their vanities, their hypocrisies, their contra-dictions, their activities, each in opposition to the others. We should also find out for ourselves if we can strip all these away and see what is.

© "Vasanta Vihar Newsletter" (Nov. 2004 - Feb. 2005) published by Krishnamurti Foundation India, Vasanta Vihar, 124 Greenways Road, Chennai 600 028. Website: www.kfionline.org. Reprinted with permission.

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