However, the same differences that illuminate also provoke discomfort, and societies often respond by trying to minimize them—through conformity, labels, or group identities. It can feel safer to sort people into camps (“people like us” versus “people like them”) than to meet them as they are. Yet this maneuver tends to replace real understanding with rigid categories.
Krishnamurti’s phrasing resists that simplification. If difference is inherent to being among others, then efforts to abolish it are efforts to deny a basic structure of life. The cost is often psychological: tension increases when reality is forced to match an ideal of sameness. [...]
