Good News…We Won!

The Olympic Games are in full swing and this morning someone said … “Hey good news, we won!” My reply was, “What did we win?” “The hockey game!” Came the response. She then asked if I followed the Olympics. I said, no not really, I tend not to have any interest in team competition. From here especially agressive team competition is divisive and tends to divide people leading to all kinds of other conflict, violence and  even war. I like to fly over different apparent countries and see if I can see any dotted lines in the landscape to separate one country from another. This brought up the subject of “pride”. I tried to explain that if one identifies with a country, a race, a cause and especially one’s personality, then pride will rear its ugly head and cause conflict. And I am emphatically not against any sport or competing per se, it is all part of what is at the moment, and it’s all good. Later I goggled J. Krishnamurti links on this website and found this quote. K went far deeper into this subject and most of his talks and writings centred on the apparent conflict caused by identifying with the apparent “I” or self of the personality – with most of the conflict being seemingly internal, rather than external or “out there.” “Man has accepted conflict as an innate part of daily existence because he has accepted competition, jealousy, greed, acquisitiveness and aggression as a natural way of life. When we accept such a way of life we accept the structure of society as it is and live within the pattern of respectability. And that is what most of us are caught in because most of us want to be terribly respectable. When we examine our own minds and hearts, the way we think, the way we feel and how we act in our daily lives, we observe that as long as we conform to the pattern of society, life must be a battlefield.” Jiddu Krishnamurti – Freedom from the Known