Won’t You Join Our Animal Welfare Society?

Won’t You Join Our Animal Welfare Society? - Conversation with Jiddu Krishnamurthi

Of course we must work together, that is most natural, but co-operation isn't a matter of following a blue-print laid down by the State, by the leader of a party or a group or by any other authority. To work together through fear or through greed for reward is not co-operation. Co-operation comes naturally and easily when we love what we are doing. And then co-operation is a delight. But to love, there must first be the putting aside of ambition, greed and envy. Is not this so?

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If action arises from seeing the necessity of a certain work and from having the capacity to organize it, such action leads in a direction quite different from that of action which is the outcome of love and in which also there is the capacity to organize. When action springs from frustration or from the desire for power, however excellent that action may in itself, its effects are bound to be confusing and wrought with sorrow. The action of love is not fragmentary, contradictory or separa¬tive. It has a total, integrated effect.

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I am only pointing out that if your motive is not that of really helping the animals, then you are using them as a means to your self-aggrandizement which is what the bullock-cart driver is doing. He does it in a crude, brutal way whereas you and others are more subtle and cunning about it. That is all. You are not stopping cruelty as long as your efforts to stop it are profitable to yourself. If by helping the animals you could not fulfill your ambition or escape from your frustration and sorrow, you would then turn to some other means of fulfillment. All this indicates - doesn't it? - that you are not interested in animals at all except as a means to your own personal gain.

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Of course, that is what the vast majority of people are doing. From the biggest politician to the village manipulator, from the highest prelate to the local priest, from the greatest social reformer to the worn-out social worker, each one is using the country, the poor or the name of God as a means of fulfilling his ideas, his hopes, his utopias. He is the centre. His is the power and the glory, but always in the name of the people, in the name of the holy, in the name of the down-trodden. It is for this reason that there is such a frightening and sorrowful mess in the world. These are not the people who will bring peace to the world who will stop exploitation, who will put an end to cruelty. On the contrary, they are responsible for even greater confusion and misery.