When I say, 'I am violent,' and wish to free myself from violence, is the entity who is violent different from the quality which he calls violence? That is, is the experiencer who feels he is violent different from the experience itself? Surely the experiencer is the same as the experience; he is not different or apart from the experience. I think this is very important to understand because if one really understood it, then in freeing the mind from violence, there would be no self-centered activity at all.
We have separated the thinker from the thought, have we not? We say, 'I am violent, and I must make an effort to get rid of violence.' In order to get rid of violence, we discipline ourselves, we practice nonviolence, we think about it every day and try to do something about it-which means we take it for granted that the 'I', the maker of effort, is different from the experience, from the quality. But is this so? Are the two states different, or are they really a unit, one and the same?
J. Krishnamurti/Hamburg 1956, Talk 3
