The following is an extract from Krishnamurti's book 'Beginnings of Learning' published by Penguin in 1978. I do own a copy of the book and could have typed this extract in but being a two fingered typist I actually found the text at http://www.jkrishnamurti.org/krishnamurti-teachings/view-text.php?tid=17&chid=69154&w= and copied and pasted the piece. I thank the J.Krishnamurti Online organisation for making the text available.
If you want to get the context of the following extract I guide you to page 220 and the pages preceeding it from the above publication.
"You have tried to give significance to a life that has very little meaning, that is very shallow and petty, and failing in this you try to expand it on the same level. This expansion can go on endlessly but it has no depth, no profundity. The horizontal movement will lead to all kinds of places that are exciting and entertaining, but life remains very shallow. You may try to give depth to it intellectually but it is still trivial. To a mind that is really enquiring, not merely verbally examining or intellectually putting together hypotheses, to the enquiring mind the horizontal movement has very little significance. It can offer nothing except the very obvious, and so the revolt again becomes trivial because it is still moving in the same direction - outward, political, reformatory and so on. The only revolution is within oneself. It is not horizontal but vertical - down and up. The inward movement in oneself is never horizontal and because it is inward it has immeasurable depth. And when there is really this depth it is neither horizontal nor vertical."
"This you don't offer. Your Gods, your preachers, your leaders are concerned with the superficial, with better arrangements, better systems and organizations which are necessary for efficiency; but that is not the total answer. You may have a marvellous bureaucracy but it inevitably becomes tyrannical. Tyranny brings order to the superficial. Your religion which is supposed to offer depth is the gift of the intellect, carefully planned, recognized and believed in, a thing of propaganda."
"But this has no inward beauty. As long as education is concerned merely with the culture of the outer, specializing, enforcing conformity, the inner movement with its immense depth will inevitably be for the few, and in that also there lies great sorrow. Sorrow cannot be solved, cannot be understood when you are running with tremendous energy along the superficial. Unless you solve this through self-knowing you will have revolt after revolt, reforms which need further reformation, and the endless antagonism of man against man will go on. Self-knowing is the beginning of wisdom and it does not lie in books, in churches or in the piling up of words."
