Page 152 - JOURNAL OF THE KRISHNAMURTI SCHOOLS

the journal of the krishnamurti schools no.25

The values that shaped our development as we turned to farm-
ing and later to industry are beautifully expressed in Genesis:

God said to them be fruitful and multiply,
fill the earth,
and subdue it.
Take dominion over the fish of the sea,
And the birds of the sky,
and over every creature that crawls upon the earth. 2

This approach clearly helped us survive when our ancestors lived
in small, isolated groups, struggling to stay alive as they developed
the new skills needed to grow their food. But it makes no sense to
use the moral law from desert kingdoms in the Old Testament to
conduct life in the twenty-first century. We now have a presence so
colossal, and technologies so powerful, we could catch every fish
in the sea and cut down every tree on earth. And if that were not
enough, we have weapons of mass destruction equivalent to the
asteroid strike that clobbered the dinosaurs.
The ‘Genesis’ approach is imbedded in our thinking. It’s not
clear how we adopt values, but they have tremendous power. They
affect anger, fear, hate. We’ve not chosen to give them that power,
though we may think we have. Values and beliefs don’t seem to be
open to examination. They are defended in some automatic way,
so there is a failure of reason to operate properly. We are trapped,
defending values that don’t work and are no longer appropriate for
the conditions we now face.
On the basis of what police call ‘form,’ we are earthly defilers
beyond reason. But must it always be so?
In 1983, I took the photograph of Krishnamurti and David Bohm
for the book jacket of The Ending of Time at Brockwood. This gave
me the chance to talk to David about the ‘time travel’ project I’d
been working on. I suggested we make a book that showed the span
of human development as a backdrop to exploring how a wrong

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