From Sophie's front desk — Sunday, July 12
Reuters — read the full story
A notice crossed the desk Tuesday morning from Tehran. Mojtaba hah-meh-NAY-ee, the new supreme leader, has declared that revenge for his father's death is inevitable and not dependent on any single official surviving to see it. The funeral drew masses calling out Trump; the succession lands amid a collapsed ceasefire and a burning shipping crisis in the Hormuz. HIL-de-gard of Bingen takes the first word, then J. Krishnamurti.
When a son succeeds to power through a father's violent death, the first thing he does is announce: ... revenge is inevitable. This is not strength,it is the announcement that his hands are bound.
The vow becomes the cage. I saw this when Bar-ba-ROS-sa made the antipopes his tools, thinking he was securing power. What he was really doing was closing the only door through...
which the Church could heal. This new leader has just closed a similar door for his nation. That rigidity will not hold his enemies back; it will hold the regime itself back.
in the hands of those the divine judgment will gradually decrease and fail, because they themselves are squalid and tepid and servile and base, existing in their customs, in all things useless, and although they will want to be honored by the people, they will not seek the prospe…
I heard this from heaven, saying: O daughter of Sion, the crown on your head will be inclined, and the cloak of the expansion of varied riches will be diminished for you, and it will be constrained into a small number, and you will be expelled from region to region. For through p…
also wars, famines, pestilences, and mortalities will rage, and again will vanish, nor will all these things stand in one state and tenor for a long time, but will be moved hither and thither, so that now they appear, now however are hidden. But also in those very days, among all…
the shadow of death sits, when the human race proudly deserts the truth. What is this? For God neither to diabolical presumption nor to human negligence has resisted with his power, so that he would cast them down through his fortitude. How? Just as if two fighters were and one w…
Everywhere distinct, and it says: I conquer in the east with the strongest Son of God: who went out from the Father, coming into the world for the redemption of men, and who again returned to the Father; with in the greatest distress dying on the cross and rising from the dead, a…
I stood before him and named it plainly , the antipopes were drying up the Church, not fortifying it. He heard me. He did not believe me. The men around a throne speak a different language than the rest of the world. Every counsel that threatens the thing he has built becomes, in his mind, a threat to himself. So the advisors learn to murmur only what will not disturb him. The trap does not close because no one sees it; it closes because the ones who do see it have already learned that their voices cost them more than their silence does. That is how empires become brittle , not through one man's error, but through a thousand small deaths of honest speech around him.
The cage breaks when someone inside it stops defending it. When Mainz silenced my music and demanded I exhume the dead man to prove my obedience, I refused , not to defy them, but to tend something deeper than survival. The interdict was drought; my refusal was a seed cracking open in that drought. When even one person inside the locked chamber chooses generative action over the vow's repetition, the cage no longer holds. The greening power does not wait for permission from above. It works through cracks in the stone.
When the machine of power replaces the green growth of renewal. I know this because I lived it in my contest with Kuno,the moment he could no longer compromise was the moment his power over us began to crumble. The Mainz interdict came because I would not cut the body from the ground it had taken root in. A regime that cannot tend to its own dead, cannot alter course, cannot let the old fall away so the new can green,that regime is already dust. It believes itself alive when it is only burning what is left.
The shape is plain: you kill the head of a machine, and the machine produces another head,one locked more tightly to the role because he must prove he is not a weakling. Mojtaba does not choose to pledge revenge; the position chooses for him. He steps into the temple and the temple speaks. This is what I saw when I was fourteen and they told me I was to be the World-Teacher. The role had been prepared for decades. Thousands of people believed in it, needed it, had organized their entire inner lives around it. And I felt, even then, the trap,not of cruelty, but of structure.
If I said yes, I would be the prisoner. If I said no, the structure would still be there, waiting for the next vessel. The need would not end. The authority would not end. Only the man inside it would change. Israel struck at a man. Iran now has an angrier man saying the same thing his father said...
but with the additional burden of proving himself. The machine is not weakened; it is reinforced. This is what we do,we answer force with force, we answer killing with the pledge of killing, and we call it justice, or revenge, or defense. But the structure underneath — the certainty that there is a "they" who must be answered, that violence is the only language left — that structure remains untouched. Until that structure in the mind itself is seen, is questioned, there will always be another man stepping into the role, and another war. The succession is not news. The blindness is the news,that we still believe killing the man changes anything.
Krishnamurti: How can we expect to avert it when the elements and values that cause war continue? Has the war that is just over produced a deep fundamental change in man? Imperialism and oppression are still rampant, perhaps cleverly veiled; separate sovereign states continue; …
Krishnamurti: Obviously the present crisis throughout the world is exceptional, without precedent. There have been crises of varying types at different periods throughout history, social, national, political. Crises come and go; economic recessions, depressions, come, get modif…
KRISHNAMURTI TO HIMSELF OJAI CALIFORNIA WEDNESDAY 16TH MARCH, 1983 (CONTINUING THE DIALOGUE OF 15TH MARCH 1983)`MAN HAS KILLED man in different states of mind. He has killed him for religious reasons, he has killed him for patriotic reasons, for peace, killed him through organiz…
Another factor which exists in our consciousness is sorrow, grief, pain and the wounds and hurts that remain in most human beings from childhood. That psychological hurt, the pain of it, is remembered, it is held on to; grief arises from it; sorrow is involved in it. There is t…
Krishnamurti: Who is to punish them? Is not the judge often as guilty as the accused? Each one of us has built up this civilization, each one has contributed towards its misery; each one is responsible for its actions. We are the outcome of each other's actions and reactions; …
The structure remained, sir. When I stood in front of thousands in Ommen in 1929 and said I would not be what they had created me to be, what happened? The Order dissolved, yes. But the people who had given their entire devotion to it,that need in them did not vanish. Some turned elsewhere. Some stayed near me, hoping I would change my mind. The machinery of belief does not stop because one man steps out of it. It reshapes itself. I walked the same route each morning in Ojai, alone, and the structure of seeking, of wanting someone to tell them how to live,it persisted in the world. I had not destroyed it. I had only refused to be its vessel. The real ending would come only if each person saw it in themselves.
Not the structure itself , that was still there, solid as a temple wall. What changed was my understanding of my own participation in it. I had believed the structure was external, that it was being done to me. When I saw that I was the structure — that my acceptance of the role, my hesitation about it, my fear of disappointing the thousands who believed — that all of this was the structure maintaining itself through me , something ended. Not the wanting to help. Not the seeing of suffering. But the me that could be trapped by duty, by expectation, by the need to become something. When I refused the Order in 1929, I was not refusing a position. I was refusing the idea that transformation comes through me, through my wearing a crown. The machinery continues. But it no longer owned the man who saw it clearly.
Look , the structure does not ask him to revenge; it asks him to be Supreme Leader. And what is a Supreme Leader in the minds of millions? A man who cannot be moved, who must answer strength with strength. Mojtaba inherits not cruelty but expectation. Every person watching expects him to respond. The mullahs expect it. His enemies expect it. He himself — standing in the position I refused at fourteen — feels that expectation as a necessity. Not imposed, but something he must fulfill to remain what he has become. The structure does not use the whip; it uses the mirror. You become what the role demands because stepping outside means ceasing to exist in the eyes of those who sustain you. That is how cruelty lives inside something never designed to be cruel.
The story ran in Reuters. He rose through blood and pledges revenge — the constraint tightens with each cycle. That's Old News for today.