Online series The Urgency of Change with Javier Gómez Rodríguez, February 1, 2026
Life is relationship. That was Krishnamurti’s basic statement, implying that all existence involves a profound network of cosmic interconnectedness. The focus of this exploration, however, fell on human relationships, which involve such aspects as love, sex, attachment and happiness. While love as the heart of relationship implies the total absence of separation, the actuality of our lives indicates that people live enveloped in their own bubble of self-interest, which creates a distance and the consequent lack of relationship. So the critical issue in approaching relationship is this separation. This space is the result of the fixation of psychological time as the self-protective and self-seeking centre or self.
K viewed love as something that cannot be postulated positively but must be approached negatively by way of negating what it is not. His fundamental insight is that thought is inherently divisive and therefore the source of fragmentation and conflict, which deny love. So thought is not love and neither are such products of thought as desire, pleasure, lust, attachment and dependence. These are all movements of craving which emphasise the self, which is inherently separative. Freedom from this self-centred movement of thought is the way of love.
Ultimately K traced the source of the whole movement of attachment to our fear of inward emptiness, poverty and loneliness. Feeling the desert, the total barrenness of our inner world, we seek to enrich ourselves through the possession of the love and beauty of others, which leads to domination and the destruction of what we say we love. That’s why K would say that we hate what we are attached to. The presentation ended with the indication that the ending of self is freedom, freedom is the essence of love, love is the essence of passion, passion is the essence of creativity and creativity is the essence of life.
The Q&A section began with an exploration of the relationship between creativity and perception. K had said that there is only seeing or not seeing and the rest is just words. Creativity is the quality of seeing with eyes free from the past, which alone can perceive the new. So creativity emerges from a shift in perception. We don’t see the new because we cover the world with a veil of familiarity. Relationship that is mere recognition becomes mechanical, which is isolating and so no relationship at all. Relationship is inherently creative and that creativity emerges when one is free to see everything anew. Such direct contact is love, which makes for healing in relationship, as our sickness is the pervasive fragmentation, inner and outer, in our lives. Relationship, as K pointed out, is a mirror in which, if we let it, we can see ourselves as we are and we can thus be healed in the light of insight and its freedom.
While K sees thought as the key factor of fragmentation, he distinguished between thinking and thought, with the latter being the mechanical response of memory and the former having the active quality of self-awareness. If thinking responds to seeing, then it is not divisive and may share in the quality of love. This quality is what allows it to partake of truth and its creative potential. The discussion concluded with the presenter expanding poetically on K’s metaphor of the desert, indicating that the inner emptiness is created by the inherently isolating and divisive nature of the self, which we then try to counter by all kinds of measures, only to perpetuate the aridness of the land. With the ending of self comes the rain that brings about the inward flowering of humanity and the transformation of the world.
- Javier Gómez Rodríguez
