Page 27 - JOURNAL OF THE KRISHNAMURTI SCHOOLS

“The inner always overcomes the outer”

All this relates to the violence that has been endemic in human
society. But simultaneous to this form of violence is the violence
done to the natural environment by our technology-driven forms
of living. No enumeration is needed of the ways in which the
environment is being rapidly degraded and destroyed. This has
increasingly become part of the common consciousness of think-
ing people all over the world in recent decades.
What, we may ask, is the fundamental cause of this environmen-
tal crisis? Here we recall that at the very beginning of the scien-
tific revolution of the seventeenth century, Rene Descartes, one of
its pioneers, had said that he sought knowledge so that mankind
could benefit by becoming “masters and possessors of Nature”.
Francis Bacon, another philosopher of the seventeenth century
roundly declared “Knowledge is Power”. He wished “to put Nature
on the rack” to make her yield her secrets. The three master crafts-
men who made Nature yield her secrets were Descartes himself
(a philosopher and mathematician, originator of our now ubiq-
uitous Cartesian coordinate system), who said, “I have described
this earth and indeed the whole visible universe as if it were a
machine”; Galileo who said that the “book of Nature is written
in the language of mathematics” and Isaac Newton who said, “It
seems probable to me that God, in the beginning, formed matter
in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, moveable particles…”. This is
the threefold grid of Mechanism, Mathematics and Materialism,
through which we continue to view the outer world. Children are
taught in schools all over the world, tacitly or overtly, that the phys-
ical world is a machine made of inert matter functioning on math-
ematical principles. This is basically a vision of a Universe drained
of any meaning or purpose. As Jacques Monod, the Nobel laureate
in Biology, put it, “The universe is not pregnant with life nor the
biosphere with man … . Man at last knows that he is alone in the
unfeeling immensity of the universe, out of which he emerged only
by chance. His destiny is nowhere spelled out, nor is his duty.” As

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