In Development

A Labor of Love

Sutranovum was inspired by a friendship with Mr Tara Singh. At 22, Tara Singh's search for the truth led him to the Himalayas where he lived for four years as an ascetic. He described this as a time where he discovered “that a mind conditioned by religious or secular beliefs is always limited.” Later, he encountered Jiddu Krishnamurti and the teacher of the Dalia Lama in New York and that led him to his relationship with Dr Helen Schucman, the Scribe of the Course in Miracles. Mr Singh realised that “humanity’s problems cannot be solved externally.” For it is only at the level of the consciousness of the individual that lasting change happens.

Sutranovum is built around such themes and insights. As we grow as an organization, it is wise to clarify what we are. First and foremost, sutranovum is a media company that marries excellent design and heartfelt wisdom. Five things define long term success in the marketplace: 1. Quality. 2. Aesthetic appeal. 3. Value for money. 4.  Trust. 5. Reach Conscious of this, we are building out Sutranovum, one stage at a time, in accord with such logic, while mindful of a larger vision of the whole. In the context of that larger whole, this quote by Jiddu Krishnamurti sings out to us:

"If you have no love, do what you will - go after all the gods on earth, do all the social activities, try to reform the poor, the politics, write books, write poems - you are a dead human being. And without love, your problems will increase, and multiply endlessly. And with love, do what you will, there is no risk; there is no conflict."

What Organizations do

All organizations, be they schools or universities, scientific research bodies, lobbying organizations, businesses, think tanks, governments, charities, judiciaries, militaries, police forces, prisons, factories, unions, hospitals or law courts, can be corrupted by insecurities in the human mind. So that is the root issue: insecurity. 

On the subject of the role of organisations we share the following excerpts from a speech given by Jiddu Krishnamurti:

"I maintain that Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. That is my point of view, and I adhere to that absolutely and unconditionally. Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organization be formed to lead or to coerce people along any particular path. If you first understand that, then you will see how impossible it is to organize a belief. 

A belief is purely an individual matter, and you cannot and must not organize it. If you do, it becomes dead, crystallized; it becomes a creed, a sect, a religion, to be imposed on others. This is what everyone throughout the world is attempting to do. Truth is narrowed down and made a plaything for those who are weak, for those who are only momentarily discontented. Truth cannot be brought down, rather the individual must make the effort to ascend to it. You cannot bring the mountain-top to the valley. If you would attain to the mountain-top you must pass through the valley, climb the steeps, unafraid of the dangerous precipices.

You must climb towards the Truth, it cannot be 'stepped down' or organized for you. Interest in ideas is mainly sustained by organizations, but organizations only sustain interest from without. Interest, which is not born out of love of Truth for its own sake, but aroused by an organization, is of no value. The organization becomes a framework into which its members conveniently fit. They no longer strive after Truth or the mountain-top but rather carve for themselves a convenient niche in which they put themselves, or let the organization place them, and consider that the organization will thereby lead them to Truth.   

I would make use of an organization which would take me to London, for example; this is quite a different kind of organization, merely mechanical, like the post or the telegraph. I would use a motor car or a steamship to travel, these are only physical mechanisms which have nothing whatever to do with spirituality. Again, I maintain that no organization can lead man to spirituality.

If an organization be created for this purpose, it becomes a crutch, a weakness, a bondage, and must cripple the individual, and prevent him from growing, from establishing his uniqueness, which lies in the discovery for himself of that absolute, unconditioned Truth."

August 3rd 1929, Ommen, Holland

Helpful Organizations

Again Jiddu Krishnamurti:

"As human beings living in a very complex society, organizations are needed to communicate, to travel, to bring food, clothes and shelter, for all the business of living together whether in cities or in the country. Now this must be organized efficiently and humanely, not only for the benefit of the few but for everyone, without the divisions of nationality, race or class. This earth is ours, not yours or mine. To live happily, physically, there must be sane, rational, efficient organizations. 

Now there is disorder because there is division. Millions go hungry while there is vast prosperity. There are wars, conflicts and every form of brutality. Then there is the organization of belief - the organization of religions, which again breeds disunity and war. The morality which man has pursued has led to this disorder and chaos. This is the actual state of the world.

And when you ask what is the relationship between organization and freedom, are you not separating freedom from everyday existence? When you separate it in this way as being something entirely different from life, isn't this, in itself, conflict and disorder? So really the question is: is it possible to live in freedom and to organize life from this freedom, in this freedom?

We do not realize that we have created society, this disorder, these walls; each one of us is responsible for it all. What we are, society is. Society is not different from us. If we are in conflict, avaricious, envious, fearful, we bring about such a society.

So it's your responsibility to change. You have brought it about by your nationality, your greed, envy and hate. You are responsible for war as long as you have those things in your heart, as long as you belong to any nationality, creed or race. It is only those who are free of those things who can say that they have not created this society. Therefore our responsibility is to see that we change, and to help others to change, without violence and bloodshed.

Organized religion is based on belief and authority. Organization is always imposed or inherited from the environment, and freedom is always from the inside, and these two clash. So where are you going to start? You must start from freedom. Where there is freedom there is love. This freedom and love will show you when to co-operate and when not to cooperate. This is not an act of choice, because choice is the result of confusion. Love and freedom are intelligence. So what we are concerned with is not the division between organization and freedom but whether we can live in this world without division at all. It is division which denies freedom and love, not organization. When organization divides, it leads to war. Belief in any form, ideals, however noble or effective, breed division. Organized religion is the cause of division, just like nationality and power-groups. So be concerned with those things which divide, those things which bring about division between man and man, whether they be individual or collective. The family, the church, and the State bring about such division. What is important is the movement of thought which divides. 

"Thought itself is always divisive, so all action based on an idea or an ideology is division. Thought cultivates prejudice, opinion, judgement. Man in himself, being divided, seeks freedom out of this division. Not being able to find it he hopes to integrate the various divisions, and of course this is not possible. You cannot integrate two prejudices. To live in this world in freedom means to live with love, eschewing every form of division. When there is freedom and love, then this intelligence will act in co-operation, and will also know when not to co-operate."

On Love

The power of love to transform and heal is at the heart of what we do at sutranovum. In celebration of this we reference this beautiful passage about love by Jiddu Krishnamurti. It evokes the essence of what inspires us at sutranovum.

"The demand to be safe in a relationship inevitably breeds sorrow and fear. The seeking for security invites insecurity. Have you ever found security in any of your relationships? Have you? Most of us want the security of loving and being loved, but there is love when each one of us is seeking his own security, his own particular path? We are not loved because we don’t know how to love.

Is love an idea? If it is, it can be cultivated, nourished, cherished, pushed around, and twisted in any way you like. When you say you love God what does it mean? It means that you love a projection of your own imagination, a projection of yourself clothed in certain forms of respectability according to what you think is noble and holy; so to say, ‘I love God’, is absolute nonsense. When you worship God, you worship yourself, and that is not love.

In what we call human love, there is pleasure, competition, jealousy, the desire to possess, to hold, to control and to interfere with another’s thinking. Men of God, knowing all this complexity, say there must be another kind of love, divine, beautiful, untouched, uncorrupted. But they deny sexuality, and put out their eyes and cut out their tongues for they deny the whole beauty of the earth. They starve their hearts and minds; they are dehydrated human beings; they have banished beauty. To divide anything into what should be and what is is a deceptive way of dealing with life.

In relationships, too often what we say is,‘As long as you belong to me I love you, but the moment you don’t I begin to hate you. As long as I can rely on you to satisfy my demands, sexual and otherwise, I love you. But the moment you cease to supply what I want, I don’t like you.’ If you depend on another for all your pleasure, you are a slave to that person. So when one loves, there must be freedom, not only from another, but from oneself.

This belonging to another, being psychologically nourished by another, depending on another- in all this there must always be anxiety, fear, guilt, and jealousy, and so long as there is fear there can be no love; a mind ridden with sorrow will never know what love is; sentimentality and emotionalism have nothing whatsoever to do with love. And so love is not to do with pleasure and desire. Love is not the product of thought which is the past. Thought cannot possibly cultivate love. Love is always active present. If you know love, you will not follow anybody. Love does not obey. When you love there is neither respect nor disrespect. Don’t you know what it means to love somebody- to love without hate, jealousy, fear, anger, or wanting to interfere with what one is doing or thinking, without condemning or comparing?

Does love have responsibility and duty, and will it use these words? When you do something out of duty is there any love in it? In duty there is no love. The structure of duty in which we are all caught eventually destroys us. So long as you are compelled to do something because it is your duty you don’t love what you are doing. When there is love, there is no duty and no responsibility.

Have you ever cried for another? If you cry out of self pity, your tears have no meaning because you are only concerned about yourself. If you cry because you are bereft of someone in whom you have invested a great deal of affection, it was not really affection. Sorrow is self-created, sorrow is created by thought, sorrow is the outcome of time.

You can see all this happening inside yourself if you really watch it. You can see it fully, completely, in one glance, not to take analytical time over it. You can see in a moment the whole structure and nature of this shoddy little thing called ‘me’. My tears, my family, my nation, my belief, my religion- all that ugliness, it’s all inside you. When you see it with your heart, not with your mind, when you see it from the very bottom of your heart, then you have the key that will end sorrow.

Sorrow and love cannot go together, but in the Christian world they have idealised suffering, put it on a cross and worshipped it, implying that you can never escape from suffering except through that one particular door, and this is the whole structure of an exploiting religious society.

If you still want to find out, you will see that fear is not love, dependence is not love, jealousy is not love, possessiveness and domination are not love, responsibility and duty are not love, self-pity is not love, the agony of not being loved is not love, love is not the opposite of hate any more than humility is the opposite of vanity. If you can eliminate all these, not by forcing them but by washing them away as the rain washes the dust of many days from a leaf, then perhaps you will come upon this strange flower which man always hungers after.

If you have not got love, not just in little drops but in abundance, if you are not filled with it, the world will go to disaster. You know intellectually that the unity of mankind is essential and that love is the only way, but who is going to teach you how to love? When you exercise discipline and the will to love, love goes out the window. By practising some method or system of loving you may become extraordinarily clever or more kindly or get into a state of non-violence, but that has nothing whatsoever to do with love.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder

In this torn desert world there is no love because pleasure and desire play the greatest roles, yet without love your daily life has no meaning. And you cannot have love if there is no beauty. There is beauty only when your heart and mind know what love is. Without love in that sense of beauty there is no virtue, and you know very well that, do what you will, improve society, feed the poor, you will only be creating more mischief, for without love there is only ugliness and poverty in your own heart and minds. 

But when there is love and beauty, whatever you do is right, whatever you do is in order. If you know how to love, then you can do what you love, then you can do what you like because it will solve all other problems.

So we reach the point: can the mind come upon love without discipline, without thought, without enforcement, without any book, any teacher or leader- come upon it as one comes upon a lovely sunset? It seems to me that one thing is absolutely necessary and that is passion without motive- passion that is not the result of some commitment or attachment, passion that is not lust. A man who does not know what passion is will never know love because love can come into being only when there is total self abandonment.

A mind that is seeking is not a passionate mind and to come upon love without seeking it is the only way to find it- to come upon it knowingly and not as the result of any effort or experience. Such a love, you will find, is not of time; such a love is both personal and impersonal, is both the one and the many. Like a flower that has perfume you can smell it or pass it by. That flower is for everybody and for the one who takes the trouble to breathe it deeply and look at it with delight. Whether one is very near in the garden or very far away, it is the same to the flower because it is full of that perfume and therefor it is sharing with everybody.

Love is something that is new, fresh, alive. It has no yesterday and no tomorrow. It is beyond the turmoil of thought. It is only the innocent mind which knows what love is, and the innocent mind can live in a world which is not innocent. To find this extraordinary thing which man has sought endlessly through sacrifice, through worship, through relationship, through sex, through every form of pleasure and pain, is only possible when thought comes to understand itself and comes naturally to an end. Then love has no opposite. Then love has no conflict. If you don’t know what to do, you do nothing. Absolutely nothing. Then inwardly you are completely silent. Do you understand what that means? It means that you are not seeking, not wanting, not pursuing; there is no centre at all. Then there is love."