J. Krishnamurti Talks in Saanen 1974 1st Public Talk 14th July 1974
I think it is rather important to realize that we are going to talk about serious things and to understand them we ourselves must be quite serious. This is not an entertainment, something you attend to one day and then forget the rest of the time.
I mean by serious, to be concerned and to be committed totally to the understanding of what is happening around us; to try to find - if we can, indeed we should as it is our responsibility - the answer to these many many challenges that are offered to us. It is in that sense that I mean we should be serious, we should be concerned and committed. And to be committed means action, not just the theoretical acceptance of any particular system, it means to be committed and totally concerned to find the solution and therefore the action in the problems that face us, politically, economically, socially, morally and religiously.
As we observe the world we see that it is in a dreadful state. There is so much confusion politically; and in the field of education, they are educating people, but for what? Where is it all going, educationally? Also religiously, which should be the most important issue in life, there is the denial of creed, the denial of all the assumed authority of the priest, the doctrines and the beliefs. Everything is going to pieces around us - of which I am sure you must be aware. Go to India, an ancient country, with an ancient culture and tradition, there they are destroying themselves inwardly; and the ultimate destruction, there, inwardly is the nuclear bomb - I hope you realize all this. Turn to the West and it is the same problem, poverty - not so much as in the East - and the decline of social morality. It is now looking for the new political leaders. A leader is a dangerous person in whom, in that one person, the whole of society is involved. Society is so complex. When you follow a leader, either you know where he is leading to - which he generally does not - or you must give your mind to the investigation of his theories, of his propositions and so on. That is, you must be capable as citizens of following what he is saying. All that is involved in leadership, political or otherwise. Unfortunately the politicians, right throughout the world, are not concerned with human beings, with the unity of man and his total welfare, but are only concerned with their particular party, with their particular system. As all governments are more or less corrupt, the politicians cannot see very far, they can only operate within a very small field, segregated, not concerned with the total understanding of man.
We accept slogans, clichs, worn out theories, or we invent new theories, new systems, but always within the field of consciousness which man has carried throughout the centuries. Consciousness is its content; without its content there is no consciousness, as we know it.
Please, as we said, we are investigating together these problems. Therefore you must partake in the investigation, you must share in it, you must be involved in it. You must not merely listen to the speaker, accepting or rejecting what he says, but together in fellowship, in co-operation, try to find out what the world is like around us and what the world is inside of us; whether there is a relationship between the inner and the outer; or are they one indivisible? And that is our concern. We must be committed to the understanding of this. And that is why we must not be led, but investigate together; therefore there is no authority, there is no leader in investigating. To investigate you must be totally concerned, not one day be concerned and the rest of the time forget it. You must be concerned day after day, month after month, year after year, all your life - because this is your life.
So, where do we find the answer, the logical, sane, healthy answer to all these problems; not only to the problems that lie outside of us, the wars, the violence, the cunning politicians, the preparation for war and talking about peace - you know what is happening around us, it is wicked, diabolical, appalling - but also the problem of our relationship to that? We have to find out what our place is in all this, our responsibility. To be responsible means to respond adequately or totally to what is happening; and to respond to it we must be deadly serious, right through our life. That is why, if you are going to be here for the next three or four weeks and you are going to share with what the speaker is saying, you have to listen, to find out. To find out, not merely what the speaker is saying, but to find out for yourself the right answer, you must put aside you prejudices, your nationalities, your beliefs, your experiences, your knowledge, your hopes, everything, to find out. And that demands tremendous seriousness.
I do not think most of us realize what is actually going on in the world. We read newspapers, watch the television, go to lectures, political, religious and all the rest of it; but all they give are superficial explanations, superficial demonstrations. But if one can go beyond all that, put all that aside and observe rather closely, one can see how man is deteriorating, degenerating. This degeneration takes place when one depends totally on the outer, that is, when matter, material, has become all important. When you look at all this, the divergence of opinions, the ideologies, the political systems, right, left, or centre, when everybody is talking or arranging, or trying to reform the institutions, the governments, you see it is all still action in the field of time, of thought and matter, 8 I use words which are very simple, not those of any particular jargon or words which have a subtle or hidden meaning, but words as they exist in the dictionary. To communicate we must use simple, clear words. And in communication, we must find out not only the meaning of the words but also the meaning that lies behind them. Only then is there communication between the speaker and you. But if you are merely caught in words and the explanation of words, the semantic meaning of words, then you will miss what lies behind. To communicate requires a great deal of concern on both sides, a great deal of serious attention.
When one sees what is happening, when one observes the politicians, the religious people, the various sects and denominations and so on, one sees that they are merely concerned with the operation of thought. Thought has created this world, the world of politics, the world of economics, the world of business, of social morality and the whole of the religious structures - whether in India, or here or anywhere - and it is all based on thought, whether it is Jewish thought, Arabic thought, Christian thought or Hindu thought; it is all essentially the operation of thought as matter.
When you meditate you are still caught within the pattern of that thought, still within that area of consciousness which is put together by thought. When you try to find political answers it is still within that area. All our problems, all our desires to find answers to those problems, are within that consciousness. If you have talked to any serious politicians, you will have seen, as the speaker has, in India, in America, here and elsewhere, that they are all trying to find an answer, a political philosophy, a reformation of institutions, within that field which thought has created. So thought is trying to find an answer to that which it has created, an answer to the mess it has made in our personal relationships, in our relationship with the community, in our relationship with the government and so on and so on, all within that field. Politics, unfortunately, play such an important part in our social, moral and environmental conditioning and the politicians - the so-called `right on top of the ladder' - if they are at all serious are trying to find an answer to all these problems in the field, or in the function, of thought. That is so. It is not my invention, it is not what I think, it is a fact. Thought has divided the world into the Americans, the Communists, the Socialists, the
Germans, the Swiss, the Hindus, the Buddhists and all the other religious divisions which it has created. So, is there an answer to all these problems through the operation of thought? Even your meditations, even your gods, your Christs and your Buddhas and all the rest, they are the creations of thought, thought which is matter, which can only operate within the field of time. If thought will give no answer to all these problems, then what will? That is what we are going to investigate, not only this morning, but right through all these discussions and talks.
We think that through thought, through will, through ambition, through drive and aggression, we can solve all these problems, the problems of personal relationship between you and another by the substitution of new religions for the old traditions which, dead already in India, are brought over here or to America by gurus, who are soaked in tradition.
What is consciousness? What is the operation of thought? Thought has created everything around us, the whole technological field with all its scientific knowledge and the culture in which we live - the Christian culture, the Western culture or the Eastern culture, they are all put together by thought. The gods, the saviours - our thought has created them. God has not created us in his image; we have created god in our image and we pursue that image which thought has created and we call that religious activity.
When one says, `I am conscious' it implies that I am conscious of everything happening around me as much as possible and further, it means I am aware of what is happening within that consciousness. The investigation of the content of consciousness implies also what lies beyond - if there is something beyond the so-called consciousness. All your meditations are in that area; all your pursuits of pleasure, fear, greed, envy, brutality, violence, are within that field. And thought is always endeavouring to go beyond it, asserting the ineffable, the unnameable, unknowable and so on.
The content of consciousness is consciousness. Your consciousness, or another's consciousness, is its content. If it is born in India, then all the traditions, superstitions, hopes, fears, sorrows, anxieties, violence, sexual demands, aggression, the beliefs, dogmas and creeds of that country are the content of its consciousness. Yet the content of consciousness is extraordinarily similar, whether of one born in the East or in the West.
Consider, look at, your own consciousness, if you can. You are brought up in a religious culture as a Christian, believing in saviours, rituals, creeds and dogmas on one side and social immorality, accepting wars, accepting nationalities and their division and therefore restricting economic expansion and consideration for others, on the other side. Your personal unhappiness, your ambitions, your fears, your greeds, your aggressiveness, your demands, your loneliness, your sorrow, your lack of relationship with another, the isolation, frustration, confusion, misery, all that is consciousness, whether you are of the East or the West; with variations, with joys, with more knowledge or less knowledge, all that is the content of your consciousness. Without that content there is no consciousness as we know it. All education, in the schools, the colleges, the universities, is based on the acquiring of more knowledge, more information, but functioning always within this area. Any political reformation, based on a new political philosophy, instead of the Marxist philosophy or other established philosophy, is an invention still within that area. And so man goes on suffering, unhappy, lonely, fearful of death and of living, hoping for some great leader to come and take him out of his misery - a new saviour, a new politician. In this confusion we are so irresponsible, so that out of our own disorder we are going to create tyrants, hoping they will create order within this area. This is what is happening outside of us and inside.
So what shall we do? It is not what the politicians will do, because they like us are confused, unhappy, ambitious, envious just as we are. Any leader we choose will be like us; we will not choose a leader who is totally different from us. So that is the actual picture of our life: conflict, inside and outside, struggle, one opposed to the other, appalling selfishness - you know the whole picture.
The first thing that behoves one, if one is at all serious, and one must be serious when there is so much sorrow in the world, is to find out for oneself through careful investigation, slow, patient, hesitating investigation, if there is any other way of solving all these problems other than through the operation of thought. Is there an action which is not based on thought? Is there an intelligence which is not the function or the result of thought, which is not put together by thought, which does not come about through cunning, through friction and struggle, but something entirely different? That is what I want to communicate. Therefore one has to listen - not just to the speaker - but to the very action of listening. How does one listen? Does one ever really listen at all? Is one free to listen, or does one always listen with the cunning operations of thought, with interpretation, or prejudice? One has to listen, if one is free, to the content of one's consciousness; listen, not only to what is at the surface, which is fairly simple, but to the deeper layers of it, that means listen to the totality of consciousness,
So from that arises the question: how does one listen to and look at one's consciousness? The speaker was born in a certain country where he absorbed all the prejudices, the irrationalities and the superstitions, the beliefs, the class differences, as a Brahmin; there the young mind absorbed all this, the tradition, the rituals, the extraordinary orthodoxy and the tremendous discipline imposed by that group upon itself. And then he moves to the West, again he absorbs from all that is there; the content of his consciousness is what has been put into it, what he has learnt, what his thoughts are and the thought which recognizes its own emotions and so on. That is the content and the consciousness of this person. Within that area he has all the problems, the political, religious, personal, communal, you follow? - all the problems are there. And not being able to solve them himself, he looks to books, to others, asking: ` Please tell me what to do, how to meditate, what shall I do about my personal relationship with my wife, or my girl-friend or whatever it is, between myself and my parents, should I believe in Jesus or in Buddha, or the new guru who comes along with a lot of nonsense?' - you follow? - searching for a new philosophy of life, a new philosophy of politics and so on, all within this area. And man has done this from time immemorial. There is no answer within that area. You may meditate for hours, sitting in a certain posture, breathing in a special way, but it is still within that area because you want something out of meditation. I do not know if you see all this?
So there is this content of unconsciousness, thought, dull, stupid, traditional, recognising all its emotions - otherwise they are not emotions - always it is thought, which is the response of memory, knowledge and experience, operating. Now, can the mind look at it? Can you look at the operation of thought? Now, when you look, who is the observer who is looking at the content, is it different from the content? This is really a very important question to ask and to which to find an answer. Is the observer different from the content and therefore capable of changing, altering and going beyond the content? Or is it that the observer is the same as the content? first look: if the observer - the `I' that looks, the `me' that looks - is different from the observed then there is a division between the observer and the observed, therefore conflict - I must not do this, I should do that - I must get rid of my particular prejudice and adopt a new prejudice - get rid of my old gods and take on new gods. So when there is a division between the observer and the observed there must be conflict. That is a principle, that is a law. So, do I observe the content of my consciousness as if I were an outsider looking in, altering the pieces and moving the pieces to different places? Or am I the observer, the thinker, the experiencer, the same as that thought which is observed, experienced, seen?
If I look at the content of my consciousness as an outsider observing then there must be conflict between what is observed and the observer. So what happens when I hear this statement that when there is a division between the observer and the observed, there is conflict? There must be conflict; on that division and in that conflict we have lived, the `me' and he `not me', `we' and `they'. If `I', the observer, am different from anger, I try to control it, suppress it, dominate it, overcome it and all the rest and here is conflict. But is the observer different at all; or is he essentially the same as the observed? If he is the same then there is no conflict is there? The understanding of that is intelligence; then intelligence operates and not conflict.
It would be a thousand pities if you did not understand this simple thing. Man has lived `in conflict' and he wants peace, through conflict and there can never be peace through conflict - however much armament you may have, against another armament equally strong, there will never be peace.
Only when intelligence operates will there be peace - intelligence which comes when one understands that there is no division between the observer and the observed. That insight into that very fact, that very truth, bring this intelligence. Have you got it? This is a very serious thing, or then you will see you have no nationality - you may have a Passport but you have no nationality - you have no gods, there is no outside authority, nor inward authority. The only authority then is intelligence, not the cunning intelligence of thought, which is mere knowledge operating within a certain area - that is not intelligence.
So this is the first thing to understand when you look at your consciousness: this division between the thinker and the thought, between the observer and the observed, between the experiencer and the experienced is false, for they are one. There is no thinker if you do not think. Thought has created the thinker. So that is the first thing to understand, to have an insight into the truth of it, the fact of it, as palpable as you are sitting here, so that there is no conflict between the observer and the observed.
So: what is the content of you consciousness, the hidden as well as the open? Can you look at it? But do not make an effort. This you can find out, not just sitting here but in your relationships. That is the mirror in which you will see; not by closing your eyes, or by going off into the woods, and thinking up some dreams, but in the actual fact of relationship between man, woman, your neighbour, your politician, your gods, your gurus, you will observe your reactions, your attitudes, your prejudices, your images, your constant groping and all the rest - it is in that. What you are doing now is merely ploughing and we can go on ploughing ploughing and never sowing. You can only sow when you observe your relationships and see what actually is taking place.
From listening you move to looking; and you can look as much as you like and begin to distinguish various qualities and tendencies and all the rest of it, but if you look as an observer different from the observed then you are bound to create conflict, therefore further suffering. When you have the insight, the truth of it, that the observer is the observed, then conflict ceases altogether. Then a totally different kind of energy comes into operation. There are different kinds of energy: physical energy, from good food; there may be energy created by emotionalism, sentimentality; there is energy created by thought through various conflicts and tensions; within that field of energy we have lived. I am only putting it differently. And we are still trying to find greater energy within that field, to solve our problems which need tremendous energy. Now there is a different kind of energy, or the continuation of this energy in a totally different form, when the mind is completely operating, not in the field of thought, but intelligently.
Can the mind observe its content without any choice as to the content - not choosing any part of the content, any part of the piece, but observing totally? Now, how is it possible to observe totally? When I look at a map of France, as I come from England and cross the Channel, I see the road leading to Gstaad. I can tell the mileage, I can see the direction, and that is very simple because it is marked on the map and I follow it. In doing that I do not look at any other part of the map because I know the direction in which I want to go to, so that that direction excludes all others. In the same way, a mind that is seeking in a given direction does not see the whole. If I want to find something, something which I think is real, then the direction is set and I follow that direction and my mind is incapable of seeing the totality. Now, when I look at the content of my consciousness - which is the same as yours - I have set a direction to go beyond it. A movement in a particular direction, seeking a certain pleasure, not wanting to do this or that, makes one incapable of seeing the whole. If I am a scientist I only see in a certain direction. If I am an artist, there again, if I have a certain talent or gift, I see only a certain direction. So the mind is incapable of seeing the totality and the immensity of that totality if there is a movement in a particular direction. So, can the mind have no direction at all? This is a difficult question - please listen to it. Of course the mind has to have direction when I go from here to the house, or when I have to drive a car, when I have to do some technical function, those are all directions. But I am talking of a mind that understands the nature of direction and therefore is capable of seeing the whole. When it sees the whole it can then also operate in direction. I wonder if you get this? If I have the whole picture in mind then I can take in the detail; but if my mind only operates in a detail then I cannot take in the whole. If I am concerned with my opinions, with my anxieties, with what I want to do, with what I must do, I cannot see the whole - obviously. If I come from India with my prejudices, superstitions and traditions I cannot see the whole. So my question is: can the mind be free of direction? - which does not mean that it is without direction. When it operates from the whole the direction becomes clear, very strong and effective. But when the mind only operates in a direction according to the pattern it has set for itself then it cannot see the whole.
There is the content of my consciousness - the content makes my consciousness. Now, can I look at it as a whole? - without any direction, without any judgement, without any choice, just look, which implies no observer at all, for that observer is the past - can it look with that intelligence which is not put together by thought, for thought is the past? Do it - it requires tremendous discipline; not the discipline of suppression, control, imitation or conformity, but a discipline that is an act in which the truth is seen. The operation of truth creates its own action which is discipline.
Can your mind look at its content, when you talk to another, in your gestures, in the way you walk, in the way you sit and eat, in the way you behave? Behaviour indicates the content of your consciousness - whether you are behaving according to pleasure, reward or pain, which are part of your consciousness. The psychologists are saying that, so far, man has been educated on the principle of punishment and reward, hell and heaven. Now they say he must be educated on the principle of reward. Do not punish him but reward him - which is the same thing. They go from one thing to another, thinking they are solving everything. To see the absurdity of punishment and reward is to see the whole; when you see the whole there is the operation of intelligence which functions when you behave; you are not then behaving according to reward or punishment.
Behaviour exposes the content of your consciousness. You may hide yourself behind a polished behaviour, a behaviour that is very carefully drilled, but such behaviour is merely mechanical. From that arises another question: is the mind entirely mechanical? - or is there any portion of the brain where it is not mechanical at all?
I will go over what has been said this morning. Outside of us, in the political world with its new political philosophies, in the economic world, in the religious world, in the social world, and so on, man is searching, searching. There are gods, new gurus, new leaders. And when you observe all this very clearly you see that man is functioning within the field of thought. Thought essentially is never free, thought is always old, because thought is the response of memory as knowledge and experience; thought is matter, it is of the material world. And thought is trying to escape from that material world into a non-material world and trying to escape into the non-material world by thought is still material.
We have all the moral, social and economic problems of the individual and the collective. The individual is essentially, intrinsically, part of the collective; the individual is different from the collective, he may have different tendencies, different occupations, different moods and so on, but he is intrinsically part of the culture, which is society.
Now, those are facts as to what is going on about us; the facts as to what is going on inside us are very much the same. We are trying to find an answer to the major problems of our human life through the operation of thought - thought which the Greeks imposed upon the West, with their political philosophy, with their mathematics and so on. Thought has not found an answer, and it never will. So we must go then into the whole structure of thought and the content which it has created as consciousness. We must then observe the operation of thought in relationship, in our daily life. That observation implies having an insight as to whether it is a fact that the observer is different from the observed, for if there is a difference there must inevitably be conflict, just as there is between two ideologies - two ideologies which are the inventions of thought, conditioned by the culture in which they have developed. Now, can you, in your daily life, observe this? In such observation you will find out what your behaviour is, whether it is based on the principle of reward and punishment - as most of our behaviour is, however polished and refined. From that observation one begins to learn what real intelligence is - not the intelligence which is obtained from a book, or out of experience, that is not intelligence at all. Intelligence has nothing whatsoever to do with thought. Intelligence operates when the mind sees the whole, the endless whole, not my country, my problems, my little gods, my meditations, whether this is right or this is wrong; it sees the whole implication of living. And this quality of intelligence has its own tremendous energy. 14th July 1974.
J. Krishnamurti Talks in Saanen 1974 2nd Public Talk 16th July 1974
We were saying that the world outside and in us is in such a chaotic condition and that the politicians, the leaders, the religious priests, are all trying to solve our problems in the field of thought. This has been so for centuries upon centuries; trying to solve all our human problems at the level of thought. One sees that suffering still goes on, there are endless wars, governments are more or less corrupt, politicians play a crooked game and ideologies and systems have taken the place of morality and intelligence.
Seeing all this, objectively, without any prejudice, without being dedicated to any particular ideology or a system, one observes that thought is divisive and that excellence in thought is not necessarily excellence in conduct.
As we said, these are serious talks, not mere entertainment, not something to amuse or to be cried over. We are concerned with something one has to go through, investigate deeply, as deeply as one can, verbally and non verbally. That demands a great deal of care, affection and consideration, a sense of intimate communication with each other. It demands that you and I share the thing together; that you share it, not by just listening to a series of words or ideas or concepts because they are not ideas or concepts with which to agree or disagree, but rather, by really taking part in it with all your heart, with all your mind, with all your energy; then such serious concern and commitment does reveal a great deal, does reveal, not only the source of our thought and its mischief, but also the source of action. We live by action, we cannot possibly avoid action; you may withdraw from the world into a monastery but that is still action; you may take a vow, that is action. You may specialize in a particular field which gives you an opportunity for your talent and a career, that is action. Action is also in relationship between you and another. The movement of life is action.
And thought, in civilizations so far, has produced actions which are conflicting, contradictory, opposing, therefore breeding great mischief and misery. Is excellence in thought and therefore action, possible - or is there always conflict when thought produces action?
You are following all this? This is your life and if you would understand your life, your behaviour, your conduct, your relationship, and in its confusion find out what to do so that action is excellent at all levels, then you must enquire if there is an action which is not fragmented by thought. Thought is fragmentary in its very nature and yet through thought you are trying to find at all levels an action which will not be contradictory, which will not be regretful, which will be whole, total, complete. We must examine very carefully whether such action can be the product of thought before we take the next step. Is there an action which is supremely excellent yet not based on the movement of thought?
Why is thought, upon which we live, upon which our whole social morality is dependent, divisive? Thought is matter, it is the response of the past; it creates the movement of time, as yesterday, today and tomorrow. Thought has its source and root in the past; and having its root in the past it must create time as movement. One sees that by its very nature, by its very function and structure, that it has its being essentially in the past, it lives in tradition, in the accumulated knowledge that society has acquired and in the great accumulation of scientific knowledge, all of which is in the past. Thought is essentially a movement from the past, therefore it must be divisive; it can pretend, or stipulate, or conceive, that it is beyond time, it can imagine a timeless state, but it is still thought. It can pretend that it is going beyond its own limits, it is still thought. So thought creates a boundary of time around itself and that is the factor of division.
We are all reared in the field of thought. Education is the movement in thought, the getting of more and more knowledge, the refinement of thought and so on and so on. Thought being divisive then whatever action it creates must be fragmented which therefore gives rise to conflict. This is the principle. Man has lived, historically as we know it, in a series of crises and responses which inevitably breed more conflict. One sees in the modern world what is going on. There is a crisis, thought tries to answer it and in the very answering it more problems are created. Arms are supplied to one country knowing well that that is going to create more trouble, and so on and so on.
So, can thought ever bring about an action that is total, whole, sane not contradictory? Because our life is contradictory. We live at different levels, at the business level, the family level, the scientific level, the religious level, or at the artistic level; each opposing the other, each specializing in his own department. Specialization - which is the fashion now - becomes exclusive and therefore contradictory and therefore destructive. The man who specializes in religion, he is called a saint and is the most destructive man because he has specialized in one department - like the military man and so on and so on. So, thought trying to excellent in its action specializes and brings about more conflict, more division. Each specialization has its own ambitious end, each career has its own reward, contradictory, opposed to affection, care, consideration and love.
Looking at it, one asks: is there an action which is whole, not fragmentary; an action in which there is no regret, no sense of fulfilment, no sense of frustration? Is there such an action? Because that is what we are asking all our life, for whatever we do brings a certain pain, a certain confusion or a certain reward in the pursuit of which we create more division. It is inevitable and natural and logical to ask if there is an action which is not born out of the movement of thought.
May I go into something which may appear to be different, but which is not? We need energy; we have energy, physical energy, emotional energy, the energy of hate, the energy of lust, the energy of great passion and the energy of great tension which is brought about through the sense of frustration, division and lack of fulfilment. As one gets older the body becomes rather worn out, there comes disease and pain and energy wastes away. Most of our energy is the product of conflict - ` I am this, I should be that' - of fight and the aggressive desire to continue in a given direction. There is the energy that is brought about through an ideal, through commitment to that ideal; the whole Communist world is based on that, from the beginning of Lenin until now; destroy people by the million to get what you think is right. And that gives one tremendous energy. The saint, dedicated to an ideal, to a picture, to an imagination, to a formula, does have an extraordinary energy. The idealists have an extraordinary energy. In any form of specialization energy is required. The more you specialize the more energy you have, discarding all other forms of energy. This is what one sees, not only in oneself but also outside.
Thought creates its own energy, as is happening in the Western world; to produce such a marvellous machine as a submarine one must have tremendous energy and co-operation, energy that is brought about through an idea, through organized thought. And this kind of energy is always, in the deep sense of that word, destructive, because it is divisive. Now, is there an energy which is not destructive, which is not divisive, which is not mechanical, which is not based on idea or a commitment to an ideology? Is there an energy which is not in any way involved in the field of time as thought, movement? Life is action, in the very living all relationship is action, movement in action. And that movement, that action, is based on thought. At present, all political, religious, social and economic life and moral relativism - which is rampant in the world now - are based on thought, which is divisive, contradictory and breeding misery. Is there an action totally unrelated to all that? To find out one must have energy, neither mere intellectual energy, with all its accumulated knowledge, nor emotional energy, which is recognizable by thought and therefore still part of thought, but an energy which can come so as to bring about a total transformation in the very process of the mind? To enquire very deeply if there is an action which is not based on the movement of thought, you need a great deal of energy, not the energy of trying to find an end, not the energy that you have when you are moving in a particular direction, but the energy that can change the content of consciousness.
To put it differently: one knows what the content of one's consciousness is, if one is at all awake and aware, attending to one's behaviour, watching, listening. The desire to change that content is a movement in a particular direction; that does give energy but it is divisive. Yet one realizes that the content must be totally changed because we cannot go on as we are, unless we want to destroy the whole of humanity. The content makes consciousness, therefore when there is total transformation of the content there is a different kind of - I won't call it consciousness - a different level altogether. To bring about that change one needs tremendous energy.
So there must be freedom from direction - please see the logic of it, the sanity of it - there must be freedom from a conclusion, though a conclusion may give one a great deal of energy, but a kind of energy that is wasteful. The mind must be freed of the response of thought, it must be free of ideals because they again have direction. The mind must be free of all the divisive movements of thought, as nationality, as race, as religious division. Now, can your mind be free of all that? If it cannot then it is not possible, do what you will - stand on your head for ten thousand years, or meditate sitting in a posture, breathing rightly, for another ten thousand years - you will never find the other.
So, can the mind see how stupid, how unintelligent, ideals are; can it see the truth of it - not say that they are wrong and put them away - for when you see the truth of it you are free of it; not as when you logically or historically examine, but as when you see something poisonous you drop it; there is no conflict because intelligence sees it is too stupid to go that way. Can you free your mind from all this? Do you free it one thing at a time, or do you free it totally? If you free it one thing at a time, that takes energy, saying, ` Well, I'll look at my nationality, how stupid it is, I'll drop it: I'll look at my ideals saying they are too old fashioned, they do not lead anywhere, they breed conflict, I'll drop them.' Will you free the mind layer by layer, which will take time, which will take analysis - and analysis is paralysis? Will you go through that process taking long years?,
Or is there a way of looking at all this totally? - and therefore being totally free of it. Traditionally it is said that you must go step by step; first you must get rid of this and then that, control your body, breathe rightly. Not only traditional but modern psychology says, go step by step, analyse, tear away layer by layer. You can spend years, until you die, doing that. Now, is that not a wastage of energy? If it is, then how shall the mind empty itself of its content so that it has a totally different kind of energy, a totally different existence?
The content of my mind is the content of your mind. The content of your consciousness is the content of my consciousness, slightly modified, with a little more or a little less colour, a little more or a little less elaborate, more artistic and less and so on, but it is more or less the same as your consciousness. The mind becomes aware of this and it says, ` How can I be aware of the totality of it?' - not only of the conscious but the unconscious. I know I can strip layer after layer, both of the conscious as well as of the unconscious; I know I can go through that process, taking time, analysing, knowing the danger of analysis. I can do that. That is the traditional, accepted way to do this - if you are serious and so interested. And I see that that takes infinite time, because every step in analysis must be accurate, otherwise the next step will be corrupted by the previous analysis. So, each analysis must be complete, true and final, otherwise I am lost. And can such analysis take place? And who is the analyser? Is not the analyser the analysed? So I see that that is not going to do a thing. So what am I to do? You understand my question? What is my mind to do when it has seen the absurdity of this? Now, has it actually seen the absurdity of it, or does it imagine it has seen it because somebody has said that it is absurd - because we are second-hand people - so that I am accepting the authority of another when I say, `Yes, that is absurd'? That is a verbal assertion without any reality; that acceptance has no validity; it does not produce results. So the mind discards authority, whether traditional or the authority I have cultivated out of my own desires and selfishness; my authority which asserts that I know. The mind totally discards authority. Not the authority of law, I am obviously not talking about that, but the psychological authority of someone who tells you what to do because you are in confusion and look to somebody who will free you from this confusion - out of your disorder creating the authority. It is historically so: wherever there is disorder a man springs up and tyrannically brings about some kind of order - which is total disorder.
So, can the mind put away authority because it sees the truth of it, the significance of it, the nature of it? - not as a reaction against authority, which is what is going on. When you react against authority you are creating another authority - that is obvious.
So, can the mind, your mind, be free of this traditional approach. traditional analysis, introspectively trying to improve, because you see the truth of being free of it; therefore there is no guru, no saviour, there are no steps through meditation to come upon something extraordinary - there is something extraordinary, but not through this way. Can the mind put away all this, deny all this, without any resistance? To do that you must look. You must look outwardly and inwardly; hear the music of the world and the discord of the world and the music inwardly and the discord outwardly, because both are the same, we are an intrinsic part of the world. To do this we require energy and this energy is not brought about by concepts, by words. This energy comes when you have the insight into the disorder of a mind which functions mechanically in the movement of thought. So, no belief, no idea, no concept, no ideal, no commitment of any kind in that field. Then, through negation of what is false - not through resistance or reaction to the false - through choiceless rejection of what is false, you have a different kind of energy. It is simple enough. If you do climb a mountain you must discard all the things that you have been carrying on the plain, you must put them all aside. It is far more important to understand attachment and the corrupting factors of thought - which are attachment and power, domination in different forms, the corruption of property and possessions - than the search, or the taking of vows.
Most of us are attached to possessions, whether the possession of an antique table which you look after and polish very carefully, or a house, or a person, or an idea, or attached to a particular form of experience, attached to a group and so on and so on. Why is the mind attached, to our looks, our hair, our worries? - there are so many things we are attached to. Why? And knowing that possessions in any form are one of the major corrupting factors in life we say `Do not possess, have a few clothes that are necessary but do not possess, take a vow of non-possession'. In that there is a lot of travail, `I want that; I must give it up, I have taken a vow'. Possessions corrupt and we say we must be detached from possessions; so then there is all the conflict involved in that. Understanding attachment is much more important than detachment. Why is there attachment? Not, how to be detached, but, why the mind is attached - you see the difference? Why are you attached to your house, to your wife, to your girl, to your ideas, to your meditations, to your system - why? What would happen if you were not attached? Attachment gives a certain occupation to the mind; you constantly think about something. This constant occupation is one of the factors about which the brain and the mind says, `Yes, I must be occupied with something - with my god, with my sex, with my drink - I must be occupied' - with the kitchen or with some social order, or commune, or whatever it is. Out of this demand for occupation there is attachment, you hold on to something. Why must the mind be so occupied? What would happen if it was not so occupied? Would it go astray? Would it disintegrate? Would it feel utterly naked, empty and would the fear of that emptiness demand occupation? - therefore the importance of the furniture, the book, the idea and so on. Out of the empty feeling and loneliness from not being totally whole, the mind is attached. Can the mind live, be vital, energetic, full of depth, without attachment? Of course it can.
One asks: is love attachment? - not that love is detachment. When love is attached or detached then it is painful - which we all know, we go through that ugly state. Power is another form of corruption, political power, religious power, power in the business world, power in the exercise of a certain talent that one has - the pleasure of power. When you dominate somebody, your cook or your servant, your wife or your husband, or somebody, there is tremendous pleasure. That is another factor of corruption. That energy, which is so necessary to bring about a transformation in the content of consciousness, is dissipated in all these ways. Can you see all this as fact, as a dangerous fact? - not a relative danger but a total danger for human beings.
Now, if you see that as real danger, as you would see the danger of a falling rock, you move away from it instantly and you are free of it. To observe this you need a certain sensitivity, both physical as well as psychological and you cannot have this sensitivity if you are indulging in all kinds of things - drink, sex, overworking - you know the whole business. So, if you are at all serious, if you give your attention, your care, your affection to this, then you will see for yourself that out of this freedom from the division which thought has created, there is another kind of energy, which is intelligence. That intelligence is not put together by thought; it is not the cunning intelligence of a politician or a priest or a businessman. It comes out of the freedom which is perceiving the falseness, the unreality of all that. Can your mind see it totally? - it cannot see it totally if it has any direction at all.
An intelligent mind acts in the field of thought intelligently, sanely, without resistance; it is free from the structure and implications of attachment, from the action of attachment, from the pursuit of power with all its complications, the ruthlessness of it. It sees the dividing process of thought, and seeing that clearly, totally, it has energy; that energy is intelligence. Having that energy, that intelligence, it can operate in the field of thought, not the other way round.
One can see that there is no division between the outside and the inside, it is an interrelationship. One sees it; and one needs energy to transform the mind. So one discards everything that is wasteful, every thing that is psychological, everything that breeds division and conflict within the mind. It can be done only when there is an observation of it, not a resistance to it. There is such observation only when the observer is the observed. The observer is the past, put together by thought in terms of experience, knowledge, memory, tradition; they are the essence of the observer. What he observes, which is the result of thought, is still thought. The chaos in the world, the misery, the starvation, the poverty, the brutality, the violence, the mess that is going on, the madness that is going on, is created by thought. And it is the observer who says, `I must change all that' - if he is at all intelligent, if he is at all awake and not concerned with his own little pattern of life. But is the observer different from what he observes? He is put together by thought also, so he is the observed. Now when that takes place not as a verbal statement but as a reality, conflict ceases and the mind goes beyond the limitations which thought has imposed on action.
Now can you do this? If you cannot, why not? Is it because you are indolent, lazy, indifferent, not only to your own sorrow, to your own suffering, to your own misery, but to the misery of millions of people, to what is going on in Russia, in India, everywhere? Are you totally indifferent to all that, because you want to find God, you want to meditate, you want to learn how to breathe properly, how to have the right kind of sexual relationship and this and that? If you are concerned with the whole - you understand? - with the whole of humanity, not just your neighbour or your wife, but with the whole of humanity, then when you see that whole you can put the detail in order. But without the perception of the whole you cannot put the detail in order. That is why the politicians are failing, they never answer this problem, neither do the analysts, nor the priests - nobody does. It is only you and I, if we are utterly responsible, concerned, serious, committed, who will be able to answer this question because we have seen the whole and therefore are extraordinarily alive and intelligent and yet able to function in detail.
Questioner: Is the operation of intelligence insight?
Krishnamurti: What is insight - to have an insight into something? To have insight into attachment: what does that mean? To see what the nature of attachment is, what it does, why it arises. What is the structure of attachment and what are the responses and actions of attachment? To have an insight into all that you must look at attachment, your attachment. Your attachment to your possessions: have you ever looked at it? Have you ever looked at your ideas, your opinions? - why you have a thousand opinions? That is another occupation of the mind, to have opinions; and you think it is extraordinarily important to have opinions. To have insight into attachment means that you go behind the word, you go behind your reactions of asserting and not asserting and you see how the mind has built up this whole process of attachment. It is to observe it; and you can only observe it when you are not against it, when you are not opposed to it, when you do not want to retain or to discard it. You can only observe when you see that the observer is that thing which he is observing; he has created the attachment and then tries to disassociate himself from it, tries to change it, control it, shape it, deny it, alter it, go beyond it and all the rest of it. Now, when you have an insight of that kind, then out of that insight comes intelligence. Simple, Sir, but you have to do it - not endlessly talk about it.
Questioner: How can one live without foundations?
Krishnamurti: What do you mean by foundation? This is the question for most of us; we need a basis, a foundation, a something from which to start, on which we can rely, something which says `that' is so. And then on that we build, we move; we say there is God, millions and millions have said there is God and on that they have built their life, that is their foundation. I may have a family, children, my responsibilities to them that is my foundation. Others may have the foundation of the ideology that the State as the only god - the Communists - and that is mine - you follow? Each one adopts a foundation according to his own temperament, according to his own conditioning in the culture in which he is born. So we say that a foundation, a basis, is necessary. Now, who has built that basis - Lenin, Marx, Trotsky, Stalin and so on, laid a foundation for you and me; if you accept that, on that you start? If I am a Catholic or a Hindu that is my basis. Now, how are these bases created? - obviously by thought - thought in different forms, in different manifestations. Now why does the mind need such foundations? Please ask that question of yourself. Why do you need a foundation? Is it because without it you would have no rudder, no direction, every whiff of wind would push you in every direction? Now, see what happens if I have a foundation; say for instance, if I have a foundation as a Hindu, what takes place? I live according to the Hindu tradition, according to the beliefs and dogmas handed down through the centuries. It is the past and that is my foundation. The result of that foundation is that I consider that I am not as you - you who are a
Muslim, Buddhist; I am not as you; I am willing to tolerate you - toleration is the invention of the intellect - to live amicably, but that has nothing to do with reality because I am rooted in my foundation as a Hindu. So there is conflict between you and me, me a Hindu and you a Muslim, a Catholic, and so on, a believer in God and a non-believer in God, in Jesus, in Buddha. So I say to myself: ``Why should I have a foundation at all?' If I had no foundation, would I go wrong? Does a foundation give me direction, or does it bring confusion? A foundation as a Hindu, or as a Catholic, Communist, Socialist, whatever it is, breeds more confusion, greater misery, greater division. You have your conclusions, your foundation, and I have mine. So I see that foundations have brought man to great sorrow and misery: he is willing to fight and kill, for what? - for ideas, which are part of reasoned thought. And if my foundation is based on thought then I live in conflict and misery for the rest of my life. That is obvious. So I say to myself: can I live without any foundation? I know the tree cannot live without foundations, it must have roots in the soil, water, sunshine, darkness. The foundation of food, clothes, shelter, I need, but is a foundation of ideas necessary? Now, can I live without any such foundation? I can only answer that when I see the nature and the structure of that foundation. The very negation of that foundation is intelligence. Then wherever the mind is, in a palace, in a hovel, when walking along by yourself in woods and looking at the beauty of light and darkness, at the shadows and the immeasurable sky, that intelligence is in operation, and it needs no foundation at all. That intelligence is not mine or yours, it is intelligence.
Questioner: I see the implications of attachment but nevertheless I would like to ask you if there is not a certain biological attachment, as there are attachments in the animal kingdom. How can you possibly see the human race, composed of millions of people, with no possible attachments among themselves. Do you see, in all reality, the prospect of the human race with no attachment?
Krishnamurti: Are we talking to the millions of people; in India, Mexico and America are millions and millions of people, are we talking to them about attachment? Or are we talking about attachment to you? Because the millions of people are not concerned with this. They say, `for god's sake give me food, clothing and shelter, I am starving, I am diseased' - they are not concerned with this. And you are asking: how do you answer those millions of people and ask them to be detached, or not be detached? You cannot, We are talking to you. If in your consciousness - which is the consciousness of millions of people - there is a transformation then that transformation affects the millions. Then you will have a different kind of education, a different kind of society - you follow - but not to ask: how can the millions and millions accept this idea of detachment? Of course you are attached to your mother when you are very young, you need a mother and a father to look after you; the child needs complete security, the more security of the right kind, then the happier it is.
Millions of people want security, they think they will find it in attachment, in their country, in their little house, they are willing to fight the rest of the world for their country - that is their attachment. The Catholic is willing to fight the Protestant for his attachment. So for the moment we are concerned with the people who are in this tent. You are here. We are talking to you. Can you change the content of you consciousness so that in that transformation you affect the consciousness of man? This is a fact. The so-called Catholics have for two thousand years talked to individuals, they have conditioned them and their consciousness has accepted this conditioning and you have thereby been Catholics, Protestants or Communists, and you have functioned from there, if you have been at all serious in what you have accepted. In that way your consciousness has affected the world. Go to a village in India; you find a Christian cross there; the villagers do not know what it is all about, but there is a nice place to sit and chat, or sing or do something or other and they go there. But it has affected the consciousness of the world by conditioning it to a certain idea. Now what we are saying is quite to the contrary. In the transformation of your consciousness with all its content, you have freedom, and in that freedom you have a tremendous energy, an energy which is the essence of intelligence. That intelligence will operate in every field if you are so aware of the total human existence. Everybody needs clothes, food and shelter, that is prevented by division, the economic, racial and national divisions - America is more powerful than Russia and so on - you follow? - that is what is happening. Once we talked about this to a prominent politician and he said, `My dear man, that is impossible, that is so far away, a marvellous but distant life and ideal. I like what you are saying but it is impracticable. We have to deal with the immediate'. And the immediate is their power, their position, their ideology - the most impracticable and the most destructive thing. You know all this. Do you mean to say that if all the politicians in the world got together and said,' Look, forget your ideologies, forget your power, let us be concerned with human suffering, with human needs, food, clothing, shelter, then could we not solve this problem?' Of course they could. But nobody wants to. Everybody is concerned with their own immediate sickness, their ideologies. 16th July 1974
J. Krishnamurti Talks in Saanen 1974 3rd Public Talk 18th July 1974
At the last two meetings we were concerned with the understanding of our actions, of our behaviour and the content of consciousness. Unless we understand the nature and the structure of this consciousness in which we act, through which all our behaviour and all our thinking takes place, until we understand that, it seems to me, we shall always be floundering, confused, always living in constant battle within ourselves and outside; we shall never be able to find peace, a sense of deep inward tranquillity. In a world that is getting madder and madder every day, where there is so much brutality, violence, deception and chicanery, it is so necessary that all of us should understand this immense problem of living.
We are going to concern ourselves this morning, with what is called materialism. Materialism means the evaluating of life as matter, matter in its movement and modification; also matter as consciousness and will. That is what the materialists maintain. We have to go into it to find out if there is anything more than matter and if we can go beyond it. This is not merely an intellectual amusement and investigation but rather a deep enquiry as to whether our minds and our whole social, economic and religious life is entirely material, in the sense that materialism means having an opinion that all existence is matter, its movement, its modifications, including also its consciousness and will.
We are ruled by our senses - taste, smell, touch and so on - and they play a great part in our life. And thought, the capacity to think, is also material. The brain - if you examine it, if you are rather aware of its activities - holds in its cells memory, memory as experience and know, ledge. What these cells hold is material; so thought is matter. And you can imagine, or construct through thought, as thought, `otherness', that is to say, other than matter; but it is still matter as imagination. We know that we live in a material world, based on our sensations, desires and emotions and we construct a consciousness which is essentially the product of thought with its content. We know that, if we do not just romanticize but go into it very deeply and seriously; yet knowing that, we say there must be `otherness', something beyond that. So thought begins to investigate the ` other'. Yet when thought investigates the ` other' it is still material. It is important to understand this because we are all so romantically minded, all our religions are sentimental and romantic. Living in this very small field of materialism we want to have something much great beyond. That is a natural desire. So thought constructs a verbal or non-verbal structure of god, otherness, immensity, timelessness and so on and so on, but it is still the product of thought, so it is still material.
So thought creates the form outside, thinking that that form, that image, that prototype is not material. But that form is the product of thought, the ideal is still the product of thought, so it is still material. If you go to India, or elsewhere in the East, they will tell you they accept that, but they say there is a higher self, there is a super-consciousness, which dominates the material, or encloses the material; as in the West you have the soul. They call it by a Sanskrit word, Atman and so on. But the Atman, the super consciousness, the soul, is still the product of thought. Thought is matter; whatever its movements, inside, outside, in trying to go beyond itself, it is still material.
So the question arises: is the mind mechanical? That is, in your mind, are your thoughts, your feelings, your reactions, your responsibilities, your relationships, your ways, your opinions and so on and so on, merely mechanical? - that is, responding according to its conditioning, according to environmental influence and so on. If that is the totality of the mind then we live in a tremendous, inescapable prison.
This has been the problem of man right through the ages. He knows he lives by the senses, by his desires, by touch, by appetites, sexual, intellectual, otherwise, and he questions - `is that all?' Then he begins to invent - the gods, the super gods, super-consciousness and so on and so on. Having invented and projected a form he pursues it thinking he is tremendously idealistic, or tremendously religious. But his pursuit of what he calls god or truth is still the pursuit of the product of thought, which is material. See what he has been doing. See what his churches, temples and the mosques have done to him, to each one of us, sense this great deception on which he has been fed, which he thinks is extraordinarily idealistic. When one realizes that, in seriousness, it is rather a shock, because one is stripped of all illusion.
So one then begins to ask - if one has gone that far - is there a movement other than the movement of thought? How does one find out? If one is trying to find out if there is something beyond the material, then one must examine what is the cause of one's search. Is the cause of one's search an escape from this? You see, cause means motive. Is all one's enquiry motivated? Because if it is, the root of that is either the seeking of pleasure or the escape from fear; or if it is total dissatisfaction with what is, then it projects its own answer. Therefore to enquire into `the other' my mind must be without cause.
As we said the other day and we are saying again today, there must be a transformation in the mind, not peripheral reformation, but a revolution deep in the mind, to solve our problems - the problems which thought has created, whether religious, economic, social or moral and so on. If one is really serious, not flippant, not merely amused by intellectual theories, or philosophies, that are invented by thought, then one must be concerned and totally committed to this question of transforming the content of consciousness; for it is in this content that makes up consciousness. We went into that, and asked: who is the entity that is to change it? We said that the observer is the observed and that when there is a division between the observer and the observed, the `me' and the `not me', then there is conflict. That conflict is essentially a waste of energy. And when you look into it and find that the observer is the observed, you remove conflict altogether and you have enormous energy because it is no longer wasted in conflict.
Now this energy is either in the field of thought, or it is in energy totally different from thought. And we are asking now: if for a mind that is burdened, conditioned and shaped by materialistic thought, is there a movement other than that of thought? We said, to find that out we must look into the cause of this search. Where there is a cause there is time; the cause produces an effect and that effect again becomes a cause. Is this too difficult? It is not really difficult because this is our life. It becomes difficult when you treat it, or look at it, as something apart from our daily life.
Put it differently. What is virtue, morality? Is morality transient? Is morality relative? Or is it absolute? For us, in the modern world, morality is relative, and that relativism is nearly destroying us. So one asks: what is virtue? Is there an absolute virtue; a sense of no hate under any circumstance? Is there a complete peace, an absolute peace, which can never be disturbed? Can one live without any sense of violence? Or is violence relative? - hate modified and so on. So what is virtue? If you hit me and I hit you back and apologize for it later, that becomes relative. If I have a cause for hating you, or disliking you, or being violent, that cause makes my action not complete, therefore relative. Is there a way of living which has no cause - because the moment you have a cause living becomes relative. If I have cause to love you because you give me comfort, psychologically, physically, sexually, morally, it is not love. So where there is a cause, action must be relative. But when there is no cause action will be absolute. See what takes place in your life, not in the explanation I am giving. If I depend on you, if I am attached to you, that dependence and attachment has a cause, it is because I am lonely, or I am unhappy, or
I want companionship, I want your love, your affection, your care and so I am attached to you. From that attachment there is great sorrow, there is pain, because you do not love me, or you tolerate me, or give me a little of your affection and turn to somebody else, so there is jealousy, antagonism, hate and all the rest that follows. Where there is a cause, then action, morality, must be relative.
Can the mind be free of form, free of the ideal, of that form as a cause, so that the mind is capable of going beyond itself. It is very simple really; words make it so difficult. Words are necessary in order to communicate, but if you merely live at the verbal level they are absolutely useless. It is like ploughing, ploughing, ploughing and you destroy the earth merely by ploughing.
We have this problem, the problem which man right from the beginning has sought to solve, which is: is all life mechanical? Is all life material? - material in the sense of having an opinion, or evaluation, that all existence is matter, its movement, its modification - that mind and consciousness, with its will, is also matter; that your whole life is that. You may pretend it is not, but actually it is that. Being enclosed in that, thought creates a form, the ideal of the supreme, the highest form of excellence, great nobility, the gods, as well as all the other things that thought has put together in the world - the immense technological movement. It is all matter. And living on this shore - as we are, with our wars, our hatreds, our political appallingness - living on this side of the river, which is matter the mind says: I want to go across, there must be something there because this life is too stupid'. And it is stupid; just to go to the office, to earn money, to take responsibility, to struggle, compete, worry, to despair, to have anxieties, immense sorrows and then die. We say that is not good enough - we may put it more philosophically, in more extravagant or romantic language - and we want something more. Then we say: `How are we to cross this river to the other shore?' We ask `Who will take us across?' When we ask that question there is the priest, the guru, the man who knows and he says, `Follow me' and then we are done because he is exactly like us, because he still functions within the field of thought. He has created the gods, Jesus, Buddha, Krishna, he has created the form and that form is as materialistic as your sensations, it is the product of thought. Now, if that is absolutely clear and there is no romantic escape, no ideological washing of the hands, no comfort and everything else that leads to such illusions, if it is absolutely clear that any movement and modification within the field of consciousness is merely moving from one object to another within the field of thought, then what is the mind to do? - or not to do? First, such a mind must be in total order - you understand? - material order. Because if it is in disorder it cannot go away from itself. Thought is matter and all its activity within consciousness has created extraordinary confusion and disorder - politically, religiously, socially, morally, in relationships, in every direction it has created disorder; and that is your life. Unless there is absolute order - and I am using the word ` absolute' not ` relative' - unless there is absolute order within that area, any cause to move away from that area is still the product of disorder. So there must be order. Now how does this order come about - politically, religiously, intellectually, morally, physically, in relationships - order, an absolute order, not a convenient order, not a relative order? How is the mind, which has been trained, educated, conditioned, to live in disorder and to accept disorder to bring order in itself? Bear in mind, that if you say there is an outside agency which will bring order then that outside agency is the product of thought and therefore it will create contradiction and therefore disorder. If you say the action of will will bring about order, then what is will? `I will do that' - look at it, find out. When you are aggressive, when you say, `I must do that', what is that will which is in action? It is - is it not? - desire; a projected end to be achieved; a projected end conceived by thought - the desire for success, the achieving of an end projected by thought as an ideal, as a form, as an original pattern. Can thought bring order? - which is the way the politicians and the so called priests and all the reformers are trying to achieve it. Can thought bring order? Thought has created disorder. So what is one to do?
Now, can the mind, your mind observe, see, this disorder? One is in disorder, one sees that the exercise of will, the following of another, having desire to overcome it, is still within the field of disorder. So one says to oneself `What am I to do; what is the mind to do'? first of all, does one know disorder, does the mind see disorder - or does it know the description of disorder? You describe to me the mountain, its beauty, the snow, its lines against the blue sky, the depth of shadows in the forest, the running waters, the murmur of trees, the beauty of it all; you describe it to me and the description catches my mind and I live with that description But the description is not that which is described. So one asks oneself, am I caught in the description, or am I actually seeing disorder? One is intellectual, the other is factual. Now, is the mind observing its disorder which means no word, not caught in the description, but merely observing this enormous disorder? Can the mind so observe? And in observing its own disorder, is there an `observer' looking at it, or is there no observer at all, but merely the observing?
I observe you, I see you. I met you last year. You were pleasant or unpleasant to me, you flattered or insulted me, or neglected me. The memory of that remains - the memory. This year I meet you and the memory responds. That memory is the past and also that memory is the observer - of course.
Can the mind observe all the disorder, social and moral and so on, which is created by thought - in which I am, which is part of me - can it observe this disorder without the observer? If the mind can do it then what takes place?
If the observer is there looking at disorder then there is a division between the observer and the observed, in that division conflict takes place - I must control it, I must change it, I must suppress it, I must overcome it and so on; there is conflict. Now when the observer is not, and there is only observation, then there is no conflict, there is merely observing. Then there is energy to go beyond disorder.
Where there is division there must be disorder. The observer rooted in the past is essentially the factor of division. Now can the mind see the truth of that and observe the disorder - the actual disorder of your life-, not the description? Can it observe your disorder, your confusion, your anxieties, your contradictions, your selfish demands, all that, observe? And if it observes without the observer there is then the going beyond it, which means total order, not relative order, mathematical order - that is essential before you can go any further. Without order in the material world, in the world of matter, in the world of thought, the mind has no basis, no foundation on which to move. Therefore there must be observation of behaviour, which is order. Do I behave according to a motive, according to circumstances? Is my behaviour pragmatic - you follow? - or is it under all circumstances the same? - not the same in the sense of copying a pattern. Is it a behaviour which is never relative, which is not based on reward and punishment? Enquire into it, observe it and you will find how terrible your behaviour is, how you look to a superior and inferior and all the rest of it. There is never a constant movement free of the motive of reward and punishment.
Then also you have to enquire into relationship, for it is still the material world. Relationship is of the highest importance, because life is relationship. What is your relationship? Have you any relationship? Relationship means to respond adequately to any challenge in that relationship.
Enquiring into relationship; is my relationship with you personal and intimate, or not so intimate; is it based on my opinions, my memories, my hurts, my demands, my sexual appetites? If it is, then my relationship with you is relative, it changes - I am moody one day, not moody the next day, the next day I am affectionate and the third day I hate you and the fourth day I love you and so on and so on. In that relationship, if it is not satisfactory, I will go to somebody else. This is the game that we have been playing for centuries, now it is more open, more extravagant, more vulgar - that is all. So my mind has to find out what its relationships actually are. Unless there is complete harmony in the world of material in which I live, which is part of me, in me, which is my consciousness, the mind cannot possibly go beyond itself. That is why your meditations, your postures, your breathing, your going to India and searching... well, never mind!... is so utterly meaningless.
So, is my relationship relative? - is all relationship relative? Or is there no relationship at all except when the division as the me and the you does not exist? I am related to you because I love you, because you give me food, clothes, shelter, you give me sex, you give me companionship, I have built a marvellous image about you, we may get annoyed with each other, irritated, but that is trivial. And I hold on to you, I am attached to you, and in that attachment there is great pain, there is great sorrow, suffering, torture, jealousy, antagonism, and then I say to myself, `I must be free of that'. And in freeing myself from that I attach myself to somebody else. And the game begins again. So I say to myself, `What is this relationship? Is there a relationship, can there ever be a relationship?' There is the `me' that is pursuing my appetites, my ambitions, my greed, my fears, my wanting to have more prestige, greater position and so on and so on; and there is the other also pursuing his or her own demands. So is there any relationship possible at all between two human beings, each functioning on and each pursuing his own exclusive, selfish, demands? So there may be no relationship in that direction, but there may be relationship when there is no `me' at all. When the `me', as thought, is non-existent, I am related - related to you, the trees, the mountains, to the rivers, to human beings. That means love - does it not? - which has no cause.
Consciousness with its content is within the field of matter. The mind cannot possibly go beyond that under any circumstances, do what it will, unless it has complete order within itself and the conflict in relationship has come totally to an end; which means a relationship in which there is no `me'. This is not just a verbal explanation. The speaker is telling you what he lives, not what he talks about. If he does not live it, it is hypocrisy, a dirty thing to do.
When the mind has order and the sense of total relationship, then what takes place? Then the mind is not seeking at all; it is not capable of any kind of illusion. That is absolutely necessary, because thought can invent anything, any experience, any kind of vision, any kind of super-consciousness and all the rest of it. There is no ideal, there is no form, there is only behaviour, which is order and the sense of relationship for the whole of man. There you have the foundation.
Now another question arises from this: is the brain totally conditioned? This brain of man, having thousands and thousands of experiences, educated with a great deal of accumulated knowledge, whether its own or from books and so on, it is there in the brain. And thought operates only within that field of the known. It can invent a field that says, `Apart from knowing, I am there' - but that is too silly. So my mind is asking: is the whole brain conditioned, conditioned by the culture it has lived in, economic, social, environmental, religious? Is the mind, in which included the brain, totally conditioned within the borders of time? Is he mind a complete slave? Do not say yes or no, for then you have settled; if you say `Yes' then there is nothing more into which to enquire; if you say `No' there is nothing more either. But a mind that is asking, groping, looking, without any motive, without any direction, says, `Is the mind totally conditioned, therefore mechanical?' And you see it is mechanical; when it is functioning in the field of knowledge it is mechanical, whether scientific, technological, or the priestly tradition, it is mechanical and there is repetition, repetition, repetition. That is what is going on; the repetition of a certain desire, sexual or otherwise, repeating, repeating, repeating. Therefore the mind asks itself, `Is the totality of this thing mechanical; or is there, in this field of the mind, an area which is not mechanical?' Can the mind be free of causation; for where there is causation it must be mechanical - all movement as thought must be mechanical. Therefore, the mind asks: is there a movement which is not of time?
Questioner: Who is it then that observes when the observer and the observed are one?
Krishnamurti: I observe the tree; there is the tree and there is the `me' that is observing it. The observer looks at the tree with the accumulation of knowledge about the tree - botanical and all the rest. Now when there is no knowledge as the observer looking at the tree, what takes place? Is there an observation as we know it now? What takes place when there is an observation of the tree, the mountain, or of a person - which is much more difficult, more involved rather - what takes place? First of all, the observer creates the distance - maybe a foot, or ten thousand miles - and distance means time. The observer is the creator of distance and time. When there is no distance and time what takes place? Is there an observer at all? Or only the thing that is? - only the tree and not the observer. Only that. Then what takes place when there is the observation of a human being? I observe you, the observer being the past, then there is a distance between me and the observed; in the past you have insulted me, the observer, flattered me, or whatever it is; that is the past and it creates the distance between me, the observer and you. But when the observer is not, the distance and time ceases, does it not? Do it and you will see this happen. Then there is no reaction, but only the observation - reaction is from the observer. So you exist, not the observer. But the observer says, `I have been cheated; you have taken my money'. I remember that. Should the observer forget that? So I look at you without the reaction of the past, but knowing that it has happened. There is no reaction to it, but the fact is that; my mind observes without the reaction but the fact is there. It is the reaction to the fact that creates distance, not the fact.
So when the observer is not, which is when the `me' is not, there is only the fact. And the operation of the fact matters, not my reaction. This requires great attention to one's observation, one's reactions.
Questioner: Who sees the fact?
Krishnamurti: There is this fact, the microphone, is there not? There is no question of who sees it. We both have agreed to call it the microphone - we won't call it the giraffe - in observing that there is no `me' or `you', there is just that fact. But if you say that it is not a microphone, then begins all the reactions.
Questioner: If I call what is going on disorder, does not that imply that I am imagining an order?
Krishnamurti: The mind is only concerned with disorder, not with order; because it is disordered it does not know what order is. A neurotic, unbalanced mind, how can it know order? All it can know, all it can be aware of, is its own disorder. Any projection from that disorder is still disorder, that is simple. So can the mind be aware simply of its disorder - in the sense of contradiction, imitation, conformity, all that is implied in disorder? Disorder is the fact. The reaction to that disorder is the reaction of the observer. Now, can the mind observe that disorder?
Questioner: Maybe I misunderstand you. The moment I use the word disorder, does that not...
Krishnamurti: The word disorder - is that actually disorder? Is hunger a word or a reality? When you are hungry that is a reality. But the word hunger is different from the reality - although the word may awaken hunger. When we use the word disorder; is that a description which then tells you what disorder is? Or is it that within the description you see the actual disorder? So can the mind be free of the word disorder and look and discover its actual disorder?
Can you disassociate the object and the name of the object? It is good to investigate this. The name and the object. I say it is my wife - or girl friend, my father, whatever it is. Wife is the name, the person is different from the word. Can I disassociate the word from the person? Does the word interfere with looking at the person? Do you follow? If it does, then the mind is a slave to the word and the person is then not important.
So we are caught in words. We are slaves to words and the word is then the object, of course - for most of us. 18th July , 1974
J. Krishnamurti Talks in Saanen 1974 4th Public Talk 21st July 1974
We have been talking over together the whole materialistic attitude towards life. The word `materialism' means having values, opinions, judgements based on the principle that there is nothing else but matter, its movement, its modification which includes consciousness and will. That is generally accepted as the meaning of materialism. And philosophies - philosophy really means the love of life, or the love of truth - are ideals, suppositions, theories and systems which have been invented, or been conceived, or formulated by the mind of man. Most people in the world have been conditioned by these philosophies - religious, economic or social. And man has never tackled or enquired into, come to grips with, the whole structure of the mind - the mind that has built the egocentric activity. Egotism has been one of the major factors of our life, probably the only factor. Human beings have accepted it as inevitable, natural. We say, `-It exists in animals, so it exists in us; it is right we should be concerned with ourselves, with improvement, with our position in society', and so on and so on. I do not know if you have ever enquired whether it is not the human mind throughout the world, under different guises, in different forms, which has been the central factor of man's cruelty, man's barbarity and suffering.
To understand the `me', the ego, we must first of all understand our consciousness at the very centre of which is the `me'. That consciousness may expand, include everything, but it still has a centre, and that centre, with its structure, its nature and activity is in essence the `me'.
Consciousness, your consciousness is its content, the content being all the identifications with the race, the family, the community, with an ideology, a culture, a tradition, with the conflict, misery, confusion, with the struggle, the pain, the enormous amount of sorrow and the occasional joy and laughter - all that is its content. And that content is essentially the `me'. Remove your furniture, your name - what are you? Remove all the ideologies, experiences, knowledge, the fears, hopes, pleasures, pursuits and ambitions - there is nothing left. And we make such an enormous fuss, such a struggle, to maintain this structure.
From this arises the question: is the mind mechanical? Because the `me' is mechanical, the `I' which says, `I believe in, I have faith in, I am this, not that, or I must be this and not that' - this centre of great activity, is the product of a mind which is mechanical. I mean by mechanical the activity of a mind that always operates in the field of the known. If the whole of the mind is mechanical, then no matter what theory, what philosophy it may invent out of its own desperation, its gods, its rituals, its beliefs are no more than theories of the mechanical mind, responses which are the outcome of stored up knowledge. I am a Christian, my conditioning being Christian I respond to that; or according to my conditioning, I am a Communist, a Hindu, and so on. So reflex actions are mechanical. This brings one to question whether the brain, the mind, is wholly conditioned by the culture, the environmental influences, economic conditions, religious penetration of beliefs, ideals, gods, hopes, all that. Is the whole structure conditioned? When we use the word `mind' we are including not only the nervous responses of the body, but also the emotions, the recognition of emotional states by thought - thought being the response of memory which is stored up as knowledge - and of course the intellect - the total mind, not just a part.
We want to find out if there is any area in the mind which is not mechanical, if there is an energy which is non-mechanical, because we have lived on an energy which is mechanical: I respond to your insult or your flattery; I respond according to my conditioning. That is all within the field of the known, and as long as there is operation within the field of the known it must be mechanical. Man has recognised this, that to live in the field of the known is to live in a prison, and so he begins to speculate, invent, theorize, to say there must be an outside agency, a god, super-consciousness, Atman and so on. But it is still born out of the known. It is a concept formed by the past, therefore it is still within the field of time. So it is nothing new. And in that field we have lived, and in that field there is a certain energy created by thought and friction. That we know - friction as ambition, as envy, friction as competition, and so on. We have lived for centuries in that field, and in that field one has enormous energy, as seen in technology, science, political divisions, quarrels, antagonisms, wars, the extraordinary inventions of destruction - all that demands tremendous energy. Please watch your own mind, your own life, your own way of thinking, living, behaving and responding. And when you watch you will see it is always mechanical, it is always from the known.
Now we are asking whether there is a field, an area of the mind or brain, which has not been touched by the known? Is there an area in the brain which is not contaminated (if I may use that word) by thought - thought being the response of memory? This is real meditation - to find out - and not all the nonsense that goes on in the world in the name of meditation. How is the mind to find out? - not invent, not hypnotize itself in the hope of something new because it is in despair, because it is bored with existence. To find that out every form of illusion must be totally put aside. Right? What brings about illusion? Why does the mind deceive itself, not face the fact as it is; why does it cover it up, escape from it - all of which are illusionary activities. The active present is the fact, whatever that fact is. Is it part of our education never to come directly in contact with `what is', to be other than we are, to be like someone else, to be somebody in this abominable world; is it because we are always educated to reform ourselves to improve ourselves? And is it because we have ideals which are always over there and never here, never actual, unreal? Is it because basically, fundamentally, we don't know what to do with `what is'? The incapacity to deal with `what is' makes us move away from ` what is'.
This is dreadfully serious, because the world is in chaos; it is getting worse everyday, and a serious man has a tremendous responsibility to discover how to face this chaos. Religions haven't solved the problem, nor the politicians, the businessmen, the scientists; they are just drifting, and the more you drift the more the chaos grows. So the man who is really serious, who knows and feels his responsibility, has to consider the transformation of his consciousness, because it is only there that there is any hope of bringing about a different world, a different kind of education, a different human being.
So we are asking: Is there any area of the mind which is really free from the known? Is there any part of the brain which is not cultivated by thought? This is really important, for if we do not find it then we will always live in the field of the known from which thought arises, which is matter. Thought is matter because it is the response of memory; memory is held in the brain cells and from there it responds, therefore it is still matter, and any activity is still within the known and therefore matter. So to find if there is any area of the brain, the mind, which thought cannot possibly enter, one must be free of the known, yet realize its value as function.
You understand the problem? If we understand the problem then the problem will solve itself. It is this: man has cultivated the brain, the mind, giving extensive growth to knowledge - there must be knowledge, obviously, knowledge is essential to function, to go to the factory, to write a letter, to speak English and all the rest - but so long as the mind lives within that area it lives in a prison.
So can the mind see the fact that knowledge is necessary, and yet realize, see the truth, that as long as it lives there it will everlastingly suffer, because it is based on thought? Then can the mind realize the value of knowledge and not be a slave to it? If the mind realizes something it is free of it. Recognising the value of knowledge, yet not dependent on it, not caught in it, not enslaved by knowledge, a new quality comes into being, a new kind of energy. So knowledge has its relative value, and being relative it is not all-important, which we are now making it. Can you see the reality of this: that you must operate in the field of knowledge and yet not be dependent on it? Therefore a certain quality of freedom from the known comes into being. Then you can begin to enquire by watching the movement of thought, the source of thought, by being aware, whether there is a demarcation, not drawn by thought, between the known and something else which is not at the behest of thought, which thought cannot capture at all.
Let me put it differently. When we look at our life, our daily life, obviously we are very materialistic people; we depend on our senses, our senses dictate our action. We are really totally worldly people. And in materialism, which has been the conditioning of our life, there are two principal factors: pain and pleasure. As long as we live within that field of materialism pain and pleasure become extraordinarily important, and there is no escape as long as we live there. I don't know whether you understand this? We are materialistic, we depend on and react according to our senses we react according to our opinions, judgements, evaluations, which are all the product of thought, thought being matter. And as that has become as extraordinarily important in the world, pleasure and fear are the principal factors that direct behaviour. As long as we live in that area these two factors dominate, and there can be no escape from it, because to what do you escape? - more pleasure or more fear; more pleasure conceived by thought, or the avoidance of fear by seeking security in isolation: looking after myself, looking after my country with which I have identified myself, with my gods - gradual identification and isolation, and therefore more fear. Where there is isolation, division, there is inevitably wider and deeper fear, because the mind, being materialistic, pursues pleasure; for that is all it has, its gods, its moralities, its churches, its doctrines, everything based on the pursuit of pleasure and therefore more fear. Please do see this, because we are caught in this. You have your fears and the endless pursuit of pleasure, the dark fears explored and unexplored, all within this area of the known, which is matter.
Only when the mind discovers an area where thought cannot possibly enter - not as an illusion, not as a hope, a belief, not as an idea - then only does fear disappear entirely. Do you understand? And there- fore, when there is no fear there is the understanding of pleasure, not the pursuit of pleasure, but the understanding of it.
So can the mind be free from the known yet see how important the known is? If it sees this, then in the field of the known the activity of the `me' does not enter. Do you see the difference? If I see the importance of knowledge and its value, its significance, its necessity, then the `me' which has created such mischief in the world has no place in knowledge, it cannot identify itself with knowledge, because knowledge is pure function. But when function becomes status then it is the operation of the `me'. I wonder if you have understood?
Thus in the field of knowledge, objective efficiency, without the ruthlessness of the `me' entering into it, takes place, because it is pure function. There the `me' has no place at all. See the beauty of it! So the mind then begins to enquire if there is any area where it is totally free of the human endeavour, the human struggle, pain, sorrow. Unless the mind finds that, there is no way out. You can invent a way out, but it is still the known, materialistic. Now how does one discover this? Obviously not by a system - a system is still part of the known. Therefore what is the instrument of enquiry, of observation? Do you know? You have to find out, but not through somebody else, because if you find it through somebody else it is not truth; it is like living in the shadow of another. So when you are confronted with this problem, probably for the first time, you have no answer. Right? Really, you have no answer. That is a great thing! You understand? It is a marvellous thing to say, ` I have no answer. I don't know what to do', knowing that nobody is going to give you a helping hand, knowing that you can't possibly look to another. You really don't know. That is essential, and that is real innocence. Please listen to this carefully. That is deep, inexhaustible, innocence to say, `I really don't know.' Not that you are waiting for an answer, not that you are expecting something, because then we play that game again. To remain totally in that state of not knowing, for out of that not knowing you have a tremendous energy, haven't you? Then you are curious, you are not eager for satisfaction, you are not wanting to achieve something. That state of total not knowing is part of the brain which has not been contaminated. You understand? All the things which man has put together through centuries I know very well, but when I say, `I don't know', the mind has uncovered a field which has not been touched.
Now can the mind remain there, yet function in knowledge? Look Sirs, man has searched for god, for happiness, for a better way of life, he has invented philosophies of various kinds, but he has not been able to solve his problem of sorrow, and unless he solves that he cannot possibly come upon that area of the mind which has not been touched by thought. Can the mind watch its activity - not try to change, reform or control it, because the observer is the observed - and see what it discovers in the field of the known and be totally responsible for that? That means not to let knowledge be used by thought as the `me' - therefore there is only function, no status. Where there is status there is the `me' operating. Now can we do this, do this in daily life? You know that means great attention, not the attention of will, but simply to watch it as you watch a squirrel playing round the trees, or a child running about, just to watch it with care and affection. Then you will see that the `me' doesn't enter at all in the field of the known, in the operation, in the function. Then you have a whole area of the mind, the brain, which is totally unoccupied. You know when there is no occupation it is free, it is alive, it is moving.
From this arises another problem: is it a matter of time to see this? The reality of knowledge and the non-reality of knowledge - to see this and to function in that - does that require time - time being a movement from here to there? I need time to learn a language, to learn a new technique; but is time necessary in seeing the operation of the known, the reality of it, the necessity of it, the inevitability of it, and the freedom from that which is an area totally innocent, innocent in the sense of an area which has not been hurt at all? You understand? We human beings are hurt, from our childhood we have been hurt, by parents, by fellow students, by everybody; the more sensitive we become the more we are hurt. And being hurt we resist, we withdraw and go through agonies of neurotic activity. An area of the brain which has never been hurt - does it take time to come upon that? It will take time if you make that into an ideal - which the mind will inevitably do - a thing to be gained, achieved, a thing with which I want to identify myself so that I will have more energy - to create more mischief. The desire to achieve is the factor of the `me' which gives a direction. Is it a matter of time? Improvement is a matter of time, self-improvement, but the total emptying of the mind as the `me' is not of time, because you see reality.
Do you see the whole of this, all that has been said this morning? - the materialistic attitude of our daily living in which there is great fear and great pleasure as the two operating principles within the field of the known. That is what we have lived on, and with that we are trying to get rid of fear to hold on to pleasure - all the battle that has been going on. Do you see also that as long as the mind lives there, there is no escape from fear, no solution to fear however deeply you analyse, there is no ending to fear or to sorrow? It is only when you come upon that other thing that there is an ending to all that.
To see all that, the totality, doesn't require time at all. You either see it or don't see it. If you don't see it, it is either because you don't want to see it or you are so committed to your own belief, your own knowledge, to your own little self, or it is because you have not paid attention or you don't care how you live. But if you give your total attention you can't help seeing the totality - and then it is over, finished.
Questioner: How can we put an end to violence between youngsters in our family?
Krishnamurti: How can we put an end to violence between our children, the violence of the younger generation? Why has violence become so extraordinarily pervasive, why is it increasing so incredibly? Is it, first of all, because the parents have no time to give their children, because they are so occupied with their own problems, earning a livelihood and so on, and thus there is no relationship between the young and their elders? Is that one of the reasons? - not the only reason. The parents are away from home working to earn more money and the children are sent off to school. In the school there is competition, there is fighting - you know all that is going on in modern schools. There is no relationship, no real, deep human communication between the so-called teacher and the students. The teacher is occupied with his own problems, so he cannot find time before the lesson starts to talk to his pupils about living a life of goodness, quietness and gentleness; or to convey what he means because he is himself living it and not just talking about it. Is that one of the reasons? And yet another - pick up any newspaper any day and you read of some kind of violence: wars, somebody has been murdered, raped or kidnapped. It is pervasive, it is all around, this sense of violence.
Why has this happened right throughout the world in recent years? Is it a reaction to Victorian ideals? Is it because some specialists have declared that children must just be allowed to grow up, never corrected, never told what to do, never punished? Is it because of recent wars? Or is it because everything around us has lost its meaning? The Communists, with their gods and their philosophy, have treated human beings like so many insects: millions and millions have been destroyed. There is so much violence everywhere, and is this why the younger generation, seeing how their elders have not brought peace to the world, feel they must be violent too? They see conflict in everything around them, in the struggle for security, success, position. This is the pattern of life, and we are educated to that from childhood. Do you not think it is inevitable then that violence comes into being.
Also with religion - not this kind of crazy, circus religion, but the established religion which everyone quotes from - never do the churches say, `Don't kill!'. Rather they say ` Kill when necessary'. They have blessed the battleships, they have blessed the guns. They dare not say, `Don't kill another human being', because they are supported by governments, property and all the rest.
So taking all this into account, what is a child to do? He is sensitive, inquisitive, tender, has no affection, no love in his home, or only occasionally, he sees his parents drinking, smoking, taking drugs, quarrelling, violent. There is the whole pattern set for him. Therefore what is he to do? What are you to do if you have children? And those who have no children in these days may well say, `Thank god!' But for those who have, this is a tremendous problem, a tremendous responsibility. It is not just a matter for half-an-hour's discussion and then return to your life of violence. So what are you to do when all the schools, the colleges, the universities are based on competition, with the struggle to have a place, the fear of not getting a place? What will you do with your child? Will you create a new school, undertake the responsibility with a few others for the money, the work, everything involved in a school? Have you the energy, the interest, the care, the affection to do that? If not, you will drift the way of the rest. If you cannot start a school and there are other kinds of schools, then help them. Do you follow? It is for you to create schools. We, the speaker and some others, are doing this; we want to do this, we are burning with it. It is our responsibility to carry this out and not just talk and talk endlessly and do nothing. 21st July 1974
J. Krishnamurti Talks in Saanen 1974 5th Public Talk 23rd July 1974
We have been talking over together the nature and the structure of thought, its place and its limitations and all the processes and functions involved in the movement of thought. If I may, this morning - and it is rather lovely after all these days of rain and cloud to see the mountains, the shadows and the rivers, and to smell the pleasant air - I would like to talk about the question of responsibility and who is answerable to what. In observing, objectively, without any opinion or judgement, what is going on in the world, the recent wars, the appalling misery and confusion, one asks, who is responsible, or answerable, for all this? To really find the right response, the right answer, we must look at the whole phenomenon of existence; at the one end you have the extraordinary development of technology - which is almost destroying the earth - and at the other you have what may be called the hope, the demand, the entreatment of god, truth or what you will. There is this vast spectrum, this vast field of existence, which is our daily living and we seem to be incapable of responding to the whole of it, rather than just part of it. So we must find out for ourselves the right response, the right answer, to all this. If we merely answer to, or are responsible for, a very small part of it, which is ourselves and our little circle, our little desires, our petty little responsibilities, our selfish enclosed movement, if we only respond to that, neglecting the whole of it, then we are bound to create not only suffering for ourselves, but suffering for the whole of mankind. Because, as we said the other day, our consciousness is its content; when there is the transformation in that consciousness you affect the whole of the consciousness of human beings. This is a fact. It is not imagination, not a theory, not a speculative hope. If you change radically the content of your consciousness you are affecting the consciousness of your neighbour, of your children, of your society, of all the consciousness of human beings. This is so; Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, all of them, affected mankind, because they created in themselves a change - whether a good or bad change we are not discussing.
So, is it possible to be responsible, to answer adequately, to the whole, the whole of mankind and therefore be responsible to nature, to your children, to your neighbour, to all the movement that man has created in his endeavour to live rightly? Is it possible to feel that immense responsibility, not only intellectually, verbally, but very deeply, so as to be able to answer to this whole of human struggle, pain, brutality, violence and despair?
To respond totally one must know what it means to love. That word love has been misused, so spoilt, so trodden upon; but we will have to use it and give to it a totally different kind of meaning. To answer to the whole there must be love and to understand that quality, that compassion, to have that extraordinary sense of energy which is not created by thought, we must understand suffering.
When we use the word love, understand that it is not a verbal or intellectual communication of the word, but the communication or communion that lies behind the word. Now first we must understand suffering and be able to go beyond it, otherwise we cannot possibly understand what responsibility to the whole is, which is real love. As we said the other day, we are sharing this thing together, we are partaking, not only verbally, intellectually, but going far beyond that. To share it is our responsibility. That means you must not only hear the word, listen to the meaning of the word semantically, but also share in the movement of self enquiry and go beyond it. You must take part in this whole movement, otherwise you will treat it merely verbally or intellectually or emotionally and then it is nothing.
So as we said, to understand this responsibility to the whole and therefore that strange quality of love, one must go beyond suffering. What is suffering? Why do human beings suffer? This has been one of the great problems of life for millions of years. And apparently very very few have gone beyond suffering and they have become heroes or saviours, or some kind of neurotic religious leaders and there they remain. But as ordinary human beings we never seem to go beyond suffering. We seem to be caught in it; and we are asking now, this morning, is it possible to be really free of it? There are various kinds of suffering; the physical and the various psychological movements of suffering, the ordinary organic pains through disease, old age, ill health, bad diet and so on and the enormous field of psychological suffering. Can you be aware of that field? Can you know intimately the structure, nature and function of that suffering? Can you know how it operates, what are its results, crippling the mind, enclosing it in self-centred activity, more and more? Are you aware of it? You can have a great deal of pain through a disease and not allow it to interfere with the activity of the mind; you can dissociate from the physical pain so that that pain does not create neurotic activity; it requires considerable attention to the intelligence of the body. When the body is not dictated to by taste, by the tongue, by the various forms of artificial stimulation, then the organism has its own intelligence.
Probably you will not pay the least attention to all this after you have left here, but at least during this hour do give a little attention and care. Because there is a lot to learn, a lot that you should know, though you may not act upon it, because most of us are rather lazy, indolent, easy going, accepting things as they are and carrying enormous burdens throughout our life. But at least you should know about these things, as you are good enough to be here.
So, we now consider psychological suffering, which apparently man has not been able to resolve. He has been able to escape from it, through various channels, religious, economic, social, through political and business activities, through various drugs and every form of escape but never confronting the actual fact of suffering. What is suffering? Is it possible for the mind to be completely free of the psychological activity that brings about suffering?
One of the major reasons for psychological suffering is the sense of isolation, the feeling of total loneliness, the feeling that you have nothing to depend upon, that you have no relationship with anyone, that you are totally isolated. You have had this feeling I am quite sure; you may be with your family, in a bus, or at a party or what you will and you have these moments of an extraordinary sense of isolation, an extraordinary sense of lack of total nothingness. Also, suffering, psychologically, comes through attachment. Attachment to ideas, or ideals, to opinions, to beliefs, to concepts. Please observe this in yourself. The word is the mirror in which you are looking in which to see the operations of your own mind - so look there.
Another cause of suffering, is the great sense of loss - loss of prestige, loss of power, loss of so many things. The loss of somebody whom you think you love, in death, that is the ultimate suffering. Now can the mind be free of all this? Otherwise it cannot possibly know this sense of love for the whole. If there is no love for the whole of existence - which is not only your existence but that of total man - then there is no compassion and you will never understand, do what you will, what love is. In the love of the whole the particular comes in; but when there is the particular love of the one then there is the absence of the other.
It is absolutely imperative that we understand and go beyond suffering. Is that possible? That is, is it possible for the mind to understand this sense of deep inward loneliness? When we feel lonely it is rather frightening, rather depressing and from that various kinds of moods arise; now without escaping, without rationalizing, can you observe it? - without any movement of escape? When you feel lonely, with all the implications involved in it, the escapes, the attachments, can you look at it without any movement of escape? Can you be aware of it without rationalizing, without trying to find the cause of it, just observing it. In that observation you discover that your escape is through attachment to an idea, to a concept, to a belief. Now can you be aware of that belief and how it is an escape? - when you observe it quietly, the escape and the belief disappear, without any effort. But the moment you introduce effort there is the observer and the observed and therefore the conflict. But when you are aware of all the implications of loneliness then there is no observer, there is only the fact of this feeling of being utterly isolated. This isolation takes place through your daily activity, your ambition, greed, envy, your concern with your own desire to fulfil, to become somebody, to improve yourself. You are so concerned with your little self and that is part of your loneliness. During the day, or during sleep, in all your activities you are so concerned about yourself - the' me' and `you', `we' and `they' - concerned and committed to yourself, wanting to do things for yourself in the name of your nation, in the name of your god, in the name of your family, in the name of your wife and all the nonsense that goes on.
Loneliness comes into being through the daily activities of self concern. When you become aware of all the implications of loneliness you see this. You see it, you do not theorize about it. When you look at something closely the details come out, at a tree, at a river, or the mountain, or a person, in that observation you see everything, it tells you, you do not tell it. So when you observe, when you are so greatly without any choice, aware of this loneliness, then the thing disappears altogether.
Then one of the causes of suffering is attachment. I am attached to a person, attached to an idea, attached to an opinion, attached to tradition and so on and so on. Why is the mind attached - attached to furniture, attached to a house, attached to your wife - why? It is one of the reasons for great suffering. Being attached and finding it is painful, we try to cultivate detachment, which is another horror.
Attachment is a form of occupation for the mind. If I am attached to you then I am thinking about you, I am worrying about you, I am concerned about you, in my self-centred way, because I do not want to lose you; I do not want you to be free, I do not want you to do something which disturbs my attachment, for in that attachment I feel, somewhat at least, temporarily secure. In attachment there is fear, jealousy, anxiety, suffering. Now just look at it. Do not say, `What am I to do?' - you cannot do anything. If you try to do something about your attachment then you are trying to create another form of attachment. Do you follow this? So just observe it. When you are attached to a person you dominate that person, you want to control that person, you deny freedom to that person. When you are attached you are denying freedom altogether. If I am attached to communist ideals then I bring destruction to others - which is what is happening.
So, seeing that attachment is one of the causes of sorrow, then is it possible for the mind to be free of attachments? - which does not mean that the mind becomes indifferent. If I am concerned with the whole of existence, I must respond, answer, to the whole and not just be concerned with my particular little desire to be attached to you and my wanting to get over that little anxiety or pain, my jealousy and all the rest of it. For the quality of love can only come into being when the mind is concerned with the whole and not with the particular. When it is concerned with the whole there is love and then from the whole the particular has a place.
There is the suffering of loss, of losing somebody whom you love - `love', you understand, I am using that word in quotation marks. Why do you suffer? You lose your son, your mother, your wife - why do you suffer? Is it that you are suddenly left hurt, very deeply, through the death of another? You have identified yourself with that person, he is your son, you want him, for you are yourself projected in him, you have identified yourself with him, and when he is no longer there you feel a tremendous sense of hurt because you have none other in whom to continue the sense of `me'. So you are deeply hurt; from that hurt arises self-pity. You are not really so much concerned about the other but about yourself through the other. Therefore you are hurt when the other is not; and from that hurt and self-pity arises the desire to find somebody else through whom you can survive.
There is not only your personal suffering, but the vast suffering of man; the suffering which wars have brought about to innocent people, to the killer and the killed, the mother, the husband, the children, whether in the far East, the Middle East or in the West; there is this vast human suffering, both physically and psychologically. Unless the mind understands this whole problem it will only play with the word love; you can do social work and talk about the love of god, the love of man, the love all this, but in your heart you will never know what it is - right? So is your mind, your consciousness, capable of looking at this fact, looking at it, seeing what extraordinary misery is caused, not only to another but to oneself? Seeing how you deprive the freedom of another when you are attached and in attachment depriving your own freedom; and so the battle goes on between you and me. So can the mind observe this? Because it is only with the ending of suffering that wisdom comes into being. Wisdom is not a thing that you learn from books or from another. Wisdom comes in the understanding of suffering and all its implications, not only the personal but also the vast human suffering which man has created. It is only when you go beyond it that wisdom comes into being.
Then to understand, or come upon, this thing that we call love, we must also understand beauty - one of the most difficult things to put into words. Do you know what it means to be sensitive? - not sensitive to your desires and ambitions, to your hurts and failures or successes, most of us are sensitive to our own little demands, to our little pursuits of pleasure, fear, anxiety or delight. But we are talking of being sensitive, not to something, but being sensitive, both psychologically and physically. Physically, to be sensitive, is to have a very good supple body - healthy, not overeating and indulging - a sensitive body. To be sensitive psychologically - not that we are dividing the psyche from the body, they are inter-related - you cannot be sensitive in the psychological area if there is any kind of hurt. We human beings are hurt greatly, we have deep wounds, unconscious and conscious wounds, either self inflicted or caused by others, at school, at home, in the bus, in the office, in the factory, we are hurt. That deep hurt, conscious or unconscious, makes us psychologically insensitive, dull. Watch your own hurt if you can. A gesture, a word, a look, is enough to hurt. You are hurt when you are compared with somebody else, when you are trying to imitate somebody else, when you are conforming to a pattern you are hurt, whether that pattern is set by another or by yourself. We human beings are deeply wounded and those wounds bring about neurotic activity - neurotic beliefs and ideals. Again, is it possible to understand these hurts and to be free of them, never to be hurt again under any circumstances? We are hurt from childhood, as a result of various incidents or accidents; by a word, a gesture, a slighting look, gnawed; there are these wounds, can they be wiped away without leaving a mark?
If there is a hurt, you are not sensitive and will never know what beauty is. You can go to all the museums in the world, comparing Michelangelo with Picasso, whatever you like, being experts in the study of artists and their paintings and all the rest of it, but as long as a human mind is hurt and therefore insensitive, it will never know beauty. Without knowing that quality of beauty - which is not merely in the thing, in the product which man has made, in the line which an architect has given to a building, or in the mountain, the beautiful tree and all the rest of it - there is no love.
Can your mind know it has been hurt and not react to that hurt at the conscious or at the unconscious level? Can it know these hurts, be aware of them? It is fairly easy to be aware of conscious hurts but can you know those that are unconscious? Or must you go through all the process of analysis? Analysis implies the analyser and the analysed. And who is the analyser? Is he different from the analysed? If he is different why is he different? Who created the analyser to be different from the analysed? If he is different how can he know what the analysed is? The analyser is the analysed. That is obvious. At each stage of analysis there must be not the slightest misunderstanding for at the next analysis you cannot analyses completely because of that previous misunderstanding. And analysis implies time - you can go on, endlessly for the rest of your life and you will still be analysing as you are dying.
So how is the mind to uncover the deep unconscious wounds? And there are the wounds which the race has collected. When the conqueror subjugates the victim he has hurt him; that is a racial hurt. The Imperialists, the makers of Empires, to them everybody is beneath them and they leave a deep unconscious hurt on those who have been conquered - it is there. How is the mind to uncover all these hidden hurts, deep in the recesses of its consciousness? I see the fallacy of analysis - right? Our tradition is to analyse and I have put aside the tradition of analysis. So what has happened to the mind when it has denied, put aside, or seen the falseness of something, the falseness of analysis? - it is free of that burden, therefore it has become sensitive. The mind is lighter, clearer, it can observe more sharply. By putting aside the tradition of analysis and introspection which man has accepted, the mind has become freed. By denying the tradition you have denied the content of the unconscious. The unconscious is the tradition; it is the tradition of religion, the tradition of marriage, of so many things. One of the traditions is to accept hurt and having accepted hurt then analyse to get rid of it. Now when you deny that, because it is false, you have denied the content of unconsciousness. Therefore you are free of the unconscious hurts.
The mind by observing its hurt and not using the traditional instrument to wipe away that hurt - which is analysis, which is talking it over together, you know all that goes on, group therapy and individual therapy and collective therapy - wipes it away by being aware of the tradition and in denying that tradition you deny the hurt which accepts that tradition. The mind then becomes extraordinarily sensitive - the mind being the body, heart, brain, nerves, the total thing becomes sensitive.
We said that beauty is not in the museum, it is not in the picture, it is not in the face, it is not in any response from the background of your tradition. The mind, having put all that aside, because it is sensitive and because suffering has been understood, there is passion. Passion is different from lust, obviously. Lust is the continuation of pleasure and the demand for pleasure in different forms, sexually or in the religious entertainment that goes on in churches and temples and all the rest of it. So when the mind is beyond suffering, then there is that quality of passion, a quality which is totally necessary to understand the extraordinary sense of beauty. That beauty cannot possibly exist when the `me' is constantly asserting itself. You may be accepted by the world as the greatest painter, but if you are concerned with your little self you are no longer an artist. You are only furthering through art your own selfish continuation.
Now we have a mind that is freed, that has gone beyond this sense of suffering, it is free from all hurt and therefore incapable of being hurt again under any circumstance, whether it is flattered or insulted, nothing can touch it - which does not mean it has built a resistance; on the contrary, it is excellently vulnerable. Then the mind will begin to find out what love is. Obviously love is not pleasure, because you have now been through all that and put it aside - not that you cannot enjoy the mountains, trees, and the rivers and the beauty of the land, but when that beauty becomes the pursuit of pleasure it ceases to be beauty. Love is not pleasure. Love is not the pursuit or the avoidance of fear. Love is not attachment. Love has no suffering. Love means the love of the whole, which is compassion. And that love has its own order, order both within and without, an order which cannot be brought about through legislation. Now when you understand this and live it, daily - otherwise all that we have spoken about has no value at all, it is just a lot of words without any meaning, just ashes - then life has quite a different significance.
Questioner: If I am aware during the day of all my thoughts and actions, really aware, clearly, limpidly, with a quality of lightness, what takes place in sleep, what is the movement in sleep?
Krishnamurti: What goes on during sleep? There are dreams, pleasant and unpleasant, dreams which indicate something that may happen in the future, dreams that warn me of certain actions and so on dreams. Now can the mind during so-called sleep renew itself totally?
Is one really aware during the day? One says one is aware, or one thinks one is aware, which is worse. But actually is one aware of the fact, not the word but the fact? The word is never the thing, the description is never the described. So, I am aware not of the word, not of the description, but of the actual fact that I am angry, I am jealous, that I am conceited, vain, stupid, full of vanity, hurt, pride, anxiety; and I am aware of that, actually. Somebody can tell me I am hungry but that is not hunger. So in the same way am I aware actually? Or is it that I think I am aware? If
I am so aware during the day, during the waking hours then the unconscious brings its intimations; it wants to tell you something, its prejudices, its fears, its anxieties, its hurts, its extraordinary hidden demands. Being consciously, totally aware one begins to discover what the unconscious is saying. Now if one does that during the day what takes place at night? Does the same process go on? If it does, then it is a continuation in dreams of what you have done during the day.
I am aware - or rather, not fully aware but partially aware. I want to be aware because I think what you are talking about is fairly rational. I want to be aware and I try to be so; but it is a very difficult thing to be aware. So I play with it for a time, drop it, pick it up, drop it, pick it up and go on that way during the day. Then during the night the same game is going on in dreams. The mind is never at rest, it never has complete relaxation, complete quietness; it has been working, working, working during the day, it keeps on working, working at night. If during the day it does not find order, then at night it goes on trying to find it. You have watched all this I am sure.
So what takes place when during the day you are really, non-verbally, completely, conscious, aware of everything happening inside you and as much as possible around you - what takes place? In that awareness during the day you have established order, have you not? See the importance of this. You have established order; order being no contradiction, no conflict, no sense of `me' dominating, which is disorder. So during the day by becoming totally aware - if that is possible and it is possible obviously - there is order; then the mind does not have to find order during sleep. Unless you have order during the day the mind tries to find it in sleep; the brain must have order, otherwise it cannot function happily, freely, effectively - obviously, for it is like a child, it must have security. When there is order the brain does not have to struggle to create order for itself; therefore there is no neurotic action during the day, nor does it invent neurotic actions which it thinks will give it security.
When there is complete order during the day the brain does not have to struggle to create order neurotically or order according to circumstances and so on, it is orderly. In that order there is complete security for itself and dreams then become merely a physical reaction - you have eaten wrongly, or this or that - then dreams have very little meaning. So, can your mind be totally aware during the day and bring order out of disorder?
Questioner: Why is it that sometimes one understands and at other times one does not? Why is it one thinks at times that one sees very clearly, without any conflict and yet at other times everything is dark?
Krishnamurti: What is understanding ? When one says `I understand', `I understand the problem', `I understand my relationship with another', `I understand the meaning of love', what does one mean by that word understand? Does one mean a verbal understanding? - implying that the words are a means of communication and that by using certain words one says, `Yes, I have understood through the words what you mean' - therefore it is still verbal understanding. Or one understands the logic of certain things so that intellectually one understands. Now, one is asking something entirely different: is understanding something totally other? One has described what suffering is, and one says, `Yes, I have understood; has one understood the words, or seen the whole picture that the words convey and the implications of what they have conveyed and one says, `Yes, I see it, I understand the meaning, the verbal meaning, the content of what I have seen, and I have gone beyond it'. That is understanding: to grasp the whole thing instantly, which is non-verbal. When you grasp it totally you have understood completely, there is nothing more. Therefore you are outside that field. That is what I call understanding, then it has significance, it brings action. But when one merely understands intellectually, verbally or romantically or emotionally, it is just nothing at all. When you so understand something so completely you are beyond it, then the mind does not go back, there is nothing to go back to - you understand? It is not that at one moment there is all understanding and the next moment all dullness. When one understands suffering one is out of that and therefore the mind becomes extraordinarily clear.
Questioner: You talk about the transcendence of all our problems, of going beyond them. What is to stop us becoming maniacs?
Krishnamurti: When you have gone beyond suffering you will not ask that question. To go beyond suffering means intelligence. When there is that extraordinary quality of excellent intelligence - which is not personal or collective, it is just intelligence - then that intelligence operates in every field, there is no insanity; it is only when we have not that intelligence that we go insane.
Questioner: Is there any direction for the evolution of man?
Krishnamurti: So far, as one observes historically and from what one knows, the direction of man has been in the destruction of the earth, in the destruction of nature, in the destruction of all the living things around him. He is using up energy, exhausting the mineral oils and so on. There is the physical destruction first; then what is man doing psychologically? - is he progressing? psychologically is he creating order in the world?
Questioner: Society is a living system.
Krishnamurti: Society is a living system and that is such a lovely order, is it?
Questioner: It is not lovely, but it is order that did not exist before man came.
Krishnamurti: It is disorder this society we live in - injustice, violence, throwing bombs. Are we any different from previous generations? Have we progressed? Do you know what that word progress means? Originally I believe it meant to enter into the enemy's country fully armed! And we are doing that very beautifully. There is overpopulation, millions are starving, millions are being destroyed and also millions are being cured medically, there is division between races, classes, division between religions and millions of people being destroyed for ideologies; do you call all this progress? Is all this order? And seeing all this one is concerned, really concerned, about the transformation of the mind of man; that is what one is committed to and talking about - the transformation, the change, the revolution, of the mind of man; not in any particular direction for if you have a particular direction then that direction is set by thought, which is old and therefore it is part of the same machinery going on. One is concerned with human beings, human beings that have created this disorder, human beings that are populating the earth incredibly, human beings which have destroyed species of animals, human beings which breed wars, hatred, antagonism. And one is saying there can be no change out there unless there is a change in here.
J. Krishnamurti Talks in Saanen 1974 6th Public Talk 25th July 1974
We have been going into the many problems and the many different forms of conflict in which we live - human problems which are common to the whole world. They are not only our personal problems for when you go to India, Asia, America you see the same issues, same miseries, confusions and sorrows. We have talked about love, the various forms of pursuit of pleasure and the great unsolved problem of fear and sorrow.
This morning we ought to talk-about a rather different issue - it seems rather morbid but it is not - and that is: what is living and what it is to die. We ought to see whether we can really - not intellectually or romantically, or taking comfort in a belief, however rational, however logical and somewhat provable - consider the extraordinary problem of what the human mind has always avoided, this question of death, of why the human mind has never been able to solve it, of why the human mind has invented speculative, comforting theories, satisfying beliefs and so on. To go into that issue - that we all must face one day - to go into it very, very deeply, we must also understand what it is to live and if living is different from dying? We must look at what we call living, actual living, not the theoretical idea of how we should live, or the ideological concept of a good life, but the life that one leads every day. Unless we understand that, its whole significance, the whole area of existence in which is included death, then we shall not be able to penetrate into that thing that we don't know, called death. We have to look quite objectively, non-personally, non-ideationally, at what we are actually doing, which we call living and unless we understand the problem of security, in all its varieties, at various depths, we shall not be able to understand if there is a security when the whole organism comes to an end.
As we have said several times before and it is worth repeating, we are serious people - at least the speaker is - and to go into this you must be very, very serious. It is not a thing for the immature mind. It is not something that you just look at then go away, pass it by; it is your life from the moment you are born till the moment you die. It is your life and we are examining that life, which we call living. As we also explained before: understanding is not merely an intellectual or verbal comprehension. One can say: I have understood verbally, intellectually what you have said. But that understanding is very superficial and therefore does not bring about an action. It remains at a certain level. Understanding implies understanding not only the word, intellectual understanding, but understanding as a whole which is therefore productive of action. If there is no action following understanding, there is no understanding, obviously.
We must look first at our life, the daily, monotonous, boring life of every human being on this unfortunate earth. When you observe it in yourself, you see that the eternal pursuit is for security - security in pleasure, security in a relationship, security in an ideal, in a concept, in a formula. We seek security in possessions, property, money and we have built a society where that has become all important. We have created that society. All human beings, throughout the world, have put together a society that is based on security, not only personal but communal security, national security. And the structure of this necessity to be physically secure, predominates all our thinking. We need to have physical security - food, clothes and shelter - that is an absolute necessity. But that necessity is becoming more and more impossible of attainment because of ideologies, nationalities, class divisions, economic and national divisions, the concept of a superior and inferior. The mind can only survive physically when it is assured of food, clothes and shelter - that we see is an absolute necessity, not only for the Western world, but for the whole of mankind. And this physical security is denied because we have built a conceptual world, a world based on idea, on philosophies which are essentially material. Thought is essentially material because it is the response of memory: memory is experience and knowledge that is held in the brain cells, in the tissues of the brain, which are material. We have built a world on a concept, on the idea of self-importance, self-survival at any price, of identification with the nation, with a religious group.
The world is becoming more and more overpopulated, security, physical security, is becoming more and more difficult of attainment. And a man who feels totally responsible for all human beings, is made by this flame of responsibility, non-ideological, non-national; he does not belong to any religion in the accepted form of that word; he is neither Christian, nor Hindu, nor Buddhist, nor Moslem; he sees that they are factors dividing people and therefore bringing about insecurity.
The mind itself must have security, otherwise it cannot function. Which means that the brain, with which one thinks, must have security - just like a child it must have security. And when there is no security, in the real deep sense of that word, it creates a `security', in a formula, in a concept, in a belief which becomes a neurotic activity of the mind. If one has such concepts and is acting according to them one is acting neurotically, because in a concept there is no security. Yet the brain, the mind and the physical body need security. One wants security, not only for oneself but for the whole of humanity: that is love, that is compassion. But that compassion and love is totally denied when one seeks security in a neurotic concept, a thing formulated by thought, a thing formulated by a materialistic attitude. When an action is based on a concept, which is itself totally material, then division must inevitably take place - battles, quarrels, agony. That is one side of it; but one must ask: is there security at all? Mind has sought security in physical things - in name, in property and has sought it in concepts, ideals, formulas, systems, yet when one looks at all that very closely, objectively, non-sentimentally, non-personally and sees that this whole set-up brings insecurity for everybody, one asks: is there this thing called security at all?
One sees the truth of the necessity of physical security and how that is totally denied by conceptual attitude, for the mind is always pursuing in different forms, security, something permanent - permanent relationship, a permanent house, a permanent idea. Now, is there such a thing as permanency? One may want it, because one sees everything around fading away, withering, in a flux, but the mind insists that there must be security, permanency. But there is no permanency in an idea, in a concept, there is no permanency in things; there is no permanency in one's relationships - in one's wife, in one's children and so on. When you want permanency in relationship the whole problem of attachment arises and from that fear of loss, suspicion, hate, jealousy, anxiety, fear - all that enters into the desire to have permanent relationship. One has found there is no permanency in a concept, though the Catholics, the Protestants and the Communists have all indoctrinated the mind, and the mind has accepted those beliefs, those philosophies as permanent. But as one can see they are disappearing, fading away, everything is being questioned. So one asks: is there anything permanent? It is a very serious question to ask and it is a very difficult thing to find out what happens to a mind that has found the truth that there is nothing permanent. Will it go off, become insane? Will it take drugs, commit suicide? Will it again fall into the trap of another ideology, another desire which projects a permanent thing?
One has discovered by just observing one's everyday life, that mind seeks security in all these things. And thought says, `there is no security, there is nothing permanent' and it begins to seek something more permanent in another area, in another consciousness. But thought itself is impermanent; it has never questioned that it itself is impermanent. So, when the mind says there is nothing permanent it must include its own thought. Can the mind be sane, healthy, whole and therefore act totally, when it realizes there is nothing permanent? Or will it become insane? When one is confronted with this fact, that there is nothing permanent, including the structure of thought, can one stand it? Can one see the significance of saying there is nothing permanent? - including yourself! For it is thought which has built that structure which is `me'. That `me' is also impermanent.
To understand the immense question of death we have to understand the question of time. Time means movement - from here to there, physically. To cover that distance from here to there you need time, time by the watch, time by the sun, time by day or time by year. And what is the relationship of time - which is distance, movement - to thought? The whole Western world is essentially based on measurement - physically, technologically - and spiritually there is the hierarchy, the bishop, the archbishop, the pope, all based on measurement. The saint is the supreme measure, accepted by the church or by the religion. So the whole moral and intellectual structure of our civilization is based on that - time, measurement, thought. Thought is measurement: thought is time - time being yesterday, what I did then modifies the present and this modification continues in a different form in the future. That is time, the movement from the past through the present to the future; that is time which is measurable.
There must be time in which to go from here to there and time is needed to learn a language, or any technique. But does the mind need time to transform itself? The moment the mind admits time, in order to transform itself, it is still within the field of measurement, thought. That area has been created by thought in order to change itself, to bring about a different mind, but as it is functioning within that field, then there is no change at all. Put it this way: I am greedy and I know that greed is comparative. I have this feeling of greed, which arises when I see something more that I have, which is a measure. And I ask myself if, to transform that feeling, that measurement, time is necessary. If time is a necessity, then I remain within the field of measure; therefore I have not changed greed at all. So, is there a change which is not based on causality, on time, a change which is instantaneous?
To change violence, to transform it, so that the mind is never violent, does it need time? If one admits that it needs time, then violence takes another form, but it is still within the same area.
The desire for permanency is the cause that brings about the structure of time. We look at our daily life: we may have discarded the intellectual permanencies, the theories, state-worship, church and so on, we have discarded them; yet we say there must be permanent relation- ship, that is the only thing we have, but in that too we find there is no permanency. Can the mind, face this absolute truth, that there is no permanency? Having seen this truth, then the mind can look at this immense problem, which man has never been able to solve, this question of death - because it is related.
When you go to India you see dead bodies being carried to the river side, to be burned: in the Western world you see the hearse, the black thing with flowers on it, and the long queue of mourners - and those who say, thank God he is dead! There are the people who cry, because they have lost, and the people who inherit the wealth, who are delighted. You see this physical phenomenon, what is your response? Do you see yourself in the hearse being... you follow the whole process? What is your relationship to death, which is there? This is not a morbid question, not something to make you sad or evoke any romantic nonsense; but actually, when you face this thing, when you see it all about you, in all its crudeness, in all its decorated corruption, what is your relationship to it? Is it an intellectual relationship? You say; `Yes we are all going to die one day, that is inevitable and I accept that inevitability, with a rational mind'. Or is it a romantic relationship? Or is it a total relationship? We are all going to die one day, that is inevitable - through diseases, because we have not taken care when we were young, or we have grown to maturity too quickly, you understand?
Have you noticed how the young people in the modern world are astonishingly mature, physically, so quickly; they have sexual experience when they are twelve and thirteen, they smoke, drink and take drugs; at the age of twelve, thirteen, fifteen, they are already grown up - that is to say, they are already gone, you follow? Because of the pressure of society, all the industry of entertainment, the schools and colleges, everything making you mature, physically, at an astonishing speed, you are already old when you are thirty - gone! You follow? And as you grow older the body begins to decay more quickly - for which the doctors have their medicines, their pills. Do you not see the sadness of all this? If you have children it is a very sad thing to see them growing so quickly, never having a childhood, never a boyhood, always caught in the trap of civilization; it is a dreadful thing to see this happening to human minds, which should grow slowly, mature quietly, so that the mind at the end of its life is completely alive, whole, healthy.
So we die, through disease, accident and old age, in misery, in conflict, in pain, in sorrow. Then there is the sorrow that comes through attachment to things that we are leaving behind - your friend, your wife, your book, your name, your experience, your fame, your notoriety, the character that you are supposed to have built up. All that you are leaving behind and you are frightened, enormously. Notice this now, when you are living before the organism fades, decays and dies. But thought says to itself: `All right, the body goes, but I go on, I go on in my books, I go on in my children, I go on in the work that I have done which I have left to somebody else'. That is called also, immortality - of a certain kind. But the book, the business, the name, the form, they also decay - somebody else takes it all over. And thought says: `All right, I know that too, but I will be born again next life' - the whole of the East believes that. So thought, not seeing its own impermanency, not seeing the structure which it has built around itself as the `me', and its impermanency, says: ` I am the cause and that cause must go on'. And that cause is time and it says: `I will go on; I will go on improving myself - `God is there, I cannot reach him now, but I will go on, slowly, until I have ultimately perfected myself, reaching what it has projected as God.
There is the thought of human beings as a great stream - everybody wants to go on - and in that stream the thought of you remains. And when the medium calls upon you, you manifest, out of that stream, because you are still there, still there in your daily life, because you are still pursuing the same thing that every human being is pursuing - security, permanency, `me' and `not me', `we' and `they', this constant concern with yourself in that stream in which all human beings are caught. When you die your thought of yourself goes on in that stream as it is going on now - as a Christian, Buddhist, whatever you please - greedy, envious, ambitious, frightened, pursuing pleasure - that is this human stream in which you are caught. Unless you step out of it now you will go on in that stream - obviously. Can the mind step out of that and face complete impermanency, now? If you have understood, that is death, is it not?
The ancient Hindus, they thought that man cannot let go of everything instantly, it is impossible. Therefore the `me', as you hold to it, must go on, but must evolve, slowly; through various lives he must evolve till he reaches the highest excellence, which is Brahman, God, what you like to call it. They had that idea; the Christians have it in a different way, not so mathematically, so cleverly worked out and the implications are not so subtle. For the Hindus it is implied that the next life becomes very important - therefore how you behave now, in this life, is important; if you behaved rightly, you will be rewarded next life. They all believe in it, but nobody behaves now, so they carry on this game.
So can the mind, seeing this phenomenon, this vast area in which the mind has sought security, in which mind has created time, as thought, as measurement, in which it has a movement trying to find permanency, as the me, an enormous area, very complex and extraordinarily subtle, can the mind see the truth that there is absolutely no permanence - which is really death?
Can you see the truth of this - not accepting it from another, for then it is not truth, it is mere propaganda, a lie? Can you, for yourself, after all this explanation, see the truth of it - not as a verbal truth, not as an intellectual concept, saying: yes, I have understood it'. That is not truth. The truth acts, so you see that there is no permanency; then you are no longer attached, no longer attached to an idea, a religious belief, a dogma, a saviour. When you see the truth of that, there is freedom and freedom means total intelligence - not the intelligence of cunning thought, but that supreme intelligence which has seen the truth and is therefore free of the things that thought has created. That quality of intelligence - which is supreme and excellent in its essence - can operate and in that there is security - not in the things that thought has created. Then you can live in this world with possessions, or with nothing. That intelligence is immortal, it is neither yours, nor mine; it does not belong to any church, to any group, to anyone. That is the highest, in that there is a complete and total security. That intelligence takes place when you see the truth of the obvious; when you see the false as the false and mind is no longer caught in the network of thought. That intelligence can operate in our daily life; from there, there is permanency.
Questioner: Have you achieved the state of freedom? If you are free, then I might have a chance.
Krishnamurti: As I have said from the beginning, the speaker would not talk about this thing unless he has it, unless he is involved in it. But that is not important - whether he has it, or does not have it. But what is important is, have you? If you say: he has got it, therefore there is a chance for me', then you are depending on him. Then he becomes your little guru and you will become the follower: and followers always destroy truth. Invariably the follower corrupts truth and it does not exist any more. But if you - you as a human being - have understood this, understood it in the sense of act, then it is yours and nobody can take it away. Then you do not compare; for when you say, `I also have a chance', you are really comparing. When you compare you are competitive, you are measuring, your thought, not your intelligence, is operating. Do not look to another: be your own light.
Questioner: You talk of deconditioning oneself immediately, with- out time. I do not have that experience, I have deconditioned myself but it takes time.
Krishnamurti: I have explained what time is. One is conditioned; wherever one lives, in the Communist world, the Socialist world, Capitalist world, Catholic world, the Hindu world, one is conditioned, from childhood. By the culture in which one lives, by one's parents who themselves are conditioned, by the school, the college, the whole structure conditions one. And being conditioned, invariably, one lives in a very small field. Does it take time for the mind to free itself from its conditioning?
Time is measurement. Time is movement, the movement from here to there including the movement from being conditioned to being non-conditioned. Time is thought, of course, because thought which has created this conditioning is also creating the idea of the unconditioned state, which it wants to achieve. So it is moving from the conditioned mind, to the non-conditioned mind. See what thought has done: created the conditioning and created the non-conditioned state which is another form of conditioning, because it is a product of thought; it is moving from the known to the known, a movement in time. Now, is it possible to look at that conditioning without this movement? I am conditioned, born in India, and so on and so on and I see that it will be good to have an unconditioned mind, because there, there is freedom, a sense of wholeness; no conflict. I see that; so I would like to get there; I would like to have a mind which is really unconditioned. So I need time for that; it is the tradition, is it not? Tradition also means betrayal; betraying the fact that your mind is conditioned. So can one look at the conditioning without the movement of time; without wanting to uncondition? The desire to uncondition is the movement in time to that state when the mind is unconditioned, knowing nothing about an unconditioned mind, it is something one has invented. Can one look at one's conditioning without the movement of its opposite? Can one look at one's greed, envy, lying, vanity, without its opposite? - if there is an opposite - obviously one cannot. When the mind moves towards an opposite, it is betraying the fact of what is and it is caught in the movement of time. Therefore there is no answer out of it. Therefore one has only one thing left. Can the mind observe the fact - the lie, the greed, the vanity, the neuroticism and so on and so on - can it just look? To look it must give its whole attention, for when there is no attention then there is the opposite. When it sees the falseness of the opposite, then it has this complete attention. Then you will see, attention burns away all conditioning. 25th July 1974
J. Krishnamurti Talks in Saanen 1974 7th Public Talk 28th July 1974
For the last two weeks we have met here talking about human problems; our chief concern and commitment - if we have been at all serious - has been the transformation, the radical change, of the human mind. The human mind includes the brain, the heart, the organism as a whole, the mind that has created this world around us, the world of corruption, violence, brutality, vanity and all the structure which brings about war. We have been concerned with the change of the content of consciousness because the content makes consciousness. Unless that radical revolution, that psychological change, comes about, there will be no end to conflict, no end to suffering and all the violence that is going on throughout the world. This change cannot possibly be brought about without knowing oneself, which is self knowledge; not knowledge of the higher self or the knowledge of some supreme consciousness, for they are still within the field of thought. Unless one understands oneself, the self of every day, what it thinks, what it does, its devotions, its deceptions, its ambitions, all its self-centred activities, its identification with something noble or ignoble, the state or some ideal, one is still within the field of the `me'. Unless one understands that narrowing field, of which one is so little aware, the field in which there is the unconscious as well as the conscious, which is concerned with the individual ego, its individual ambitions and reactions which are essentially a part of the whole, part of the community, part of the culture in which it lives, whether it is the Christian culture or the Hindu, the Moslem, the Buddhist, the Jewish, and so on, unless we understand that radically, the content of consciousness cannot possibly be transformed. `Understanding' is not an intellectual, an emotional or a passing thing, it is something that comes with action; therefore it is a complete understanding and not a partial understanding. So in understanding oneself, one's consciousness and its content - for there is no consciousness without content - one sees there are two principle factors, pleasure and fear. They cannot be separated. Where there is the pursuit, the insistence and the demand for pleasure, there must be in its wake, fear. In understanding fear one must not disregard the fact of pleasure. Thought is the measure of fear. Thought is the response of memory, which is experience and knowledge stored up in the brain cells and tissues.
Thought is matter. The whole world is constructed, is based, in its very nature and substance and activity, on thought. One has to find out whether it is thought that has bred fear; not how to be free of fear. freedom from fear will inevitably come about when one understands the structure, the nature, and the functioning of thought.
When one observes the whole process of thought, which has created the world with all its religions, with all its gods, with its saviours, Christ, the Buddhas, Krishnas, which has created the materialistic world in which we live, one sees that as long as we function there and remain there, fear must continue. fear is the cause of loneliness, of deprivation, both physical and psychological, the cause of attachment to property, to people, ideas, concepts, nationalities, families. As long as there is this functioning of thought within the material world - and it has to function in that world - fear must remain. What else has one if one lives in that world, for there one must seek security, physical or psychological. As long as the mind seeks material security, as long as the mind asserts a permanency, there must be fear. Yet the brain can only function effectively, objectively, rationally, if it has complete security - that is obvious. When it has not security, it finds security in the belief in gods, in symbols, in ideologies, in nationalities, which leads to neurotic action. As long as I call myself a nationalist of a particular country, I am behaving neurotically, I bring about conflict and division between people - that is one of the causes of fear. When you realize that, when you are aware of its whole nature, are you still a nationalist? If you are, there must be the continuance of pleasure and of fear.
If the mind lives totally in the material world, then nothing exists but matter, matter, which is manoeuvrable, which is thought, consciousness and will; if the mind lives there, fear will go on, because there, there is nothing else but the demand for material security and permanency. Where there is that demand, there must be fear.
There are all the various fears concealed in the very recesses of one's consciousness, racial, collective - the fear of famine - and so on. There is the whole of tradition which is essentially based on thought which is not only handing over from the past to the present, but also betrayal. Traditionalists are the betrayers, are treacherous people, whether in the religious, the political or in the scientific field.(The speaker is not being dogmatic. The speaker feels the responsibility to answer to the whole of human beings, not to the particular little self. Your little self is the rest of the world, so you are the world and the speaker feels utterly, totally, responsible for that. Therefore he speaks rather passionately; which is not put on for your amusement, or for your emotional reactions; he is not interested in that, that is neither here nor there.) So there are these hidden fears and the extraordinarily subtle forms of pleasure. Can they all be exposed - without analysis? We explained the futility of analysis, how the analyser and the analysed are the same. The process of analysis must be total, complete; for if there is any disproportionate or inaccurate analysis, that inaccuracy is taken over to the next analysis. So altogether analysis is paralysis; it takes time, you can go on analysing for the rest of your life and die analysing yourself. So, what is a mind to do when it realizes the absurdity, the falseness, of analysis or introspective examination - what is it to do? There is fear, both conscious and unconscious; the fear of death, of loneliness, of losing a job, the fear of what people will say, the fear of your own attachments and of their loss, the fears of not succeeding, not becoming great, and all the rest; when you realize all this and there is no analysis, what is the mind to do? Is this question clear?
To understand what the mind is to do, we must go into the question of meditation. When we use the word meditation, do not take up postures; do not sit suddenly straight - that is one of the things that has been brought over from India - hear it as though you have never heard the word before, or the meaning of that word, or anything about it. But unfortunately you cannot do that because you have a lot of gurus, sannyasis, swamis, and all the rest, that come to this country or to America, to teach you how to meditate, how to sit properly, how to breathe, how to concentrate and so on. So what is meditation? - not how to meditate; that is irrelevant, because the moment you understand what meditation is, it happens naturally, like breathing, you breathe naturally. To find out what meditation is, the real meaning, can you learn from another? Volumes have been written about it, people have meditated according to a particular system, Zen or the Hindu systems with their many, many varieties and methods; they all imply an end to be achieved, through control. Control implies a controller. And is the controller different from the controlled? They - the meditative groups with their systems and their philosophies, their breathing - they say control your thought; thought wanders about and that wandering about is a wastage of energy.
Therefore they say thought must be absolutely held, disciplined, subjugated in the pursuit of that thing - enlightenment, God, truth, what you will, the nameless! That implies a controller, obviously. And who is the controller? Is he different in quality, in nature, from that which he says he is going to control? This is very important to understand. The speaker wants to point out that one can give completely, in daily life, without any control, against all the traditions, against all your education, your social and moral behaviour. To live a life absolutely without any controls, means you have to understand very, very deeply, who is the controller and what is the controlled, for this is part of meditation. Is the controller different from that which he is controlling, which is thought? Some say the controller is different: he is the higher self, he is part of the higher consciousness, he is the essence of understanding or the essence of the past which has accumulated so much knowledge. But the controller is still within the field of thought; and however much that thought may be elevated, it is still within the area of time and measure. Do see the truth of this, not the verbal acceptance of it, or the intellectual comprehension of it, but the truth of the matter, that all the gods, Christian or Hindu, all of them, are the invention of thought. Thought can project itself into all kinds of states, into all kinds of illusions and when thought says, there is the higher self, it is still within the field of thought, and therefore that higher self is still matter.
When you see that the controller is the controlled, the whole aspect of meditation changes. Meditation means the emptying of consciousness of its content. Then only can the mind and the brain be absolutely quiet. That absolute - not relative - that absolute quietness is necessary to observe - not to experience. Experience we have had of every kind and thought desires more experience, the experience of another state, of another dimension. We are fed up with this world and its experiences - they are boring, they are limited, confined, narrow and we want an experience which is totally different. Now, to `experience' involves recognition. If I do not recognize, is there an experience? I have had the experience of looking at a mountain, the beauty of it, the shadow, the lovely deep blue of an early morning, the whole sense of something extraordinary and magnificent. That experience cannot exist if there is no relationship to the past. And so experience implies recognition from the past. And the mind wants to experience something supreme; to recognize it, it must have already had it. Therefore it is not the supreme; it is still the projection of thought. So meditation is that in which there is no experience. In that there is no element of time, which implies movement and direction - direction implies will. Can the mind empty itself of time, direction and movement, which implies the ending of thought? That is the whole problem.
We need knowledge to function; to speak any language, we need knowledge; to drive a car we need knowledge; to do anything we need knowledge. What place has knowledge in meditation - or has it no place at all? It has no place because knowledge is merely a continuation of the past, it is still the movement of time, of the past. So, can the mind empty itself of the past and come upon that area of itself which is not touched by thought? You see, we have only operated, so far, within the area of thought, as knowledge. Right? Is there any other part, any other area of the mind, which includes the brain, which is not touched by human struggle, pain, anxiety, fear and all the violence, all the things that man has made through thought? The discovery of that area is meditation. That implies the discovery as to whether thought can come to an end, but yet for thought to operate when necessary, in the field of knowledge? We need knowledge, otherwise we cannot function, we would not be able to speak, nor be able to write, and so on. Knowledge is necessary to function and its functioning becomes neurotic when status becomes all important, which is the entering of thought as the `me', as status. So knowledge is necessary and yet meditation is to discover, or come upon, or to observe, an area in which there is no movement of thought. Can the two live together, harmoniously, daily? That is the problem, not breathing - you understand - not sitting straight, not repeating mantras, paying a hundred dollars, or whatever you pay, to learn some ugly little word, and repeating that until you think you are in heaven - which is transcendental nonsense! That is the whole problem of yoga; the practising of yoga, proficiency in yoga, standing on your head and all the rest of it. The word yoga, means `to join', to join the higher and the lower; that is what we now have. But it must have had quite a different meaning. Who is it that divided the two and who is it that joins them together? It is still thought.
Yoga exercises are excellent; the speaker does them every day, for an hour or more; but that is merely physical exercise, to keep the body healthy, and so on. But through them you can never come upon the other - never! Because if you give them all importance, you are not giving importance to the understanding of yourself - which is to be watchful, to be aware, to give attention to what you are doing, every day of your life; which is to give attention to how you speak and what you say, to what you think, how you behave, whether you are attached, whether you are frightened, whether you are pursuing pleasure and so on. To be aware of the whole movement of thought; for if you are and you are really serious about it, then you will have established right relationship, obviously. Relationship becomes extraordinarily important when all things about are chaotic - when the world is going to pieces, as it is. But when there is this establishment of total relationship, whole relationship, not between you and me, but human relationship with the whole of the world, then you have the basis. From there you can go on to behaviour - how you behave. If your behaviour is based on pleasure or on reward, it is not behaviour. It is merely the pursuit of pleasure from which fear arises. Relationship, behaviour and order, these are absolutely essential if you want to go into the question of meditation. If you have not laid this foundation, then do what you like - stand on your head, breathe in for the next ten thousand years and repeat words, words - there will be no meditation. Even go to India if you have the money - I do not know why you go to India - you will find no enlightenment there. Enlightenment is where you are. And where you are, you have to understand yourself. Having established that, laid the foundation there, order - not mechanical order - order which is virtue, from moment to moment, which is not following a pattern, not the order of the establishment, the order or the virtue of society, which is immoral, then you can go into the question of finding out what meditation is.
Meditation implies a quality of mind that is absolutely silent - not made silent, not a contrived act brought about through will, but a silence that comes naturally when you have established order, relationship and behaviour. Silence is necessary. If my mind is chattering - as most minds are - in that chatter there may be a period of silence - between two chatterings there may be a period of silence - but that is not silence. Silence is not the absence of noise; it is not the absence of conflict. Silence comes only when the content of consciousness has been completely understood and gone beyond; which means the observer and the observed are one and there is no controller. When there is no controller - which does not mean that you live a life of indiscipline - when there is no controller, no observer, then action is instantaneous and it brings a great deal of energy.
Meditation means the emptying of consciousness of its content and that happens only when you observe your consciousness and its content without the observer. Can you look at your wife, your husband, your girl, your boy, or the mountain, without the observer? The observer is the past. As long as there is the observer, he will inevitably translate everything he observes in terms of the past; therefore he is the maker of time. He divides the observed and the observer; in that there is conflict. When there is observation without the observer, there is no conflict, no past, there is only the fact and you have the energy to go beyond it. Do it and you will find out.
Meditation implies a gathering of all energy; you have established order, relationship, behaviour, therefore you are not dissipating energy in that field. That energy is necessary to look without the observer and you have the energy to go beyond. With that energy, which has not been dissipated, the mind sees that there is an area which is not touched by thought. But all this requires tremendous attention and discipline. It is not just a plaything for immature people.
Meditation requires tremendous discipline. The word discipline in the dictionary means to learn; not that we must control, we must subjugate, imitate and conform. Discipline means, to learn. From the word discipline comes disciple; one who is willing to learn from the master - learn. But here there is neither a disciple nor a master but only the act of learning, all the time. And that requires a great deal of attention, a great deal of energy, so that you are watching and thus you create no illusions. It is so easy to create illusions; they come when you are pursuing, demanding, wanting, an experience. Desire creates illusions.
All this implies a mind that is very, very serious and a heart that is of love, that has never been hurt. We human beings from childhood on are hurt; our parents hurt us, and in the business world we are hurt. We are hurt in every direction, and when we are hurt we cannot possibly love. So is it possible for a mind that has been hurt, to be free of all that hurt, which is part of consciousness? And you will find, when you look at it, that it is utterly and irrevocably possible to empty all hurts and therefore to love, to have compassion. To have compassion means to have passion for all things, not just between two people, but for all human beings, for all things of the earth, the animals, the trees - everything the earth contains. When we have such comparison we will not despoil the earth as we are doing now and we will have no wars.
To a mind that is serious, totally dedicated, concerned, meditation means something extraordinary, something so immense. In meditation mind discovers space. This tent contains space. There is this tent; space is held within it and there is space outside it. Thought as the ` me' creates the narrow space in which it acts; it has created through hurt, through all kinds of reasons, a wall within which it lives. There is that narrow space and the space which thought has created outside of itself. Is there a space which has no frontiers, which has no boundaries and therefore, no centre? This is meditation, to find out.
As long as there is a centre, the `me' or the idea of the' me', with all its attachments, that very centre creates a space round itself. Where there is a centre there must be a border. The border may be extended, but it is still limited by the space which the centre has created. Meditation means to come upon that space in which there is no centre, therefore no direction, therefore no time. Without meditation and the coming upon that thing which is not experiencable, which is not to be put into words, which has no time, which has no continuity, life has very little meaning. You may have a lot of money, or no money; you may be attached to your property, to your wife, to your friend, or you may worship your particular little god which thought has invented; but as long as you live there, there will be suffering, pain, anxiety, and violence. And that has no meaning in itself - obviously. So unless you come upon this - not invent it, not project it, not bring it about through any system - then only does life have an extraordinary sense of beauty and meaning.
Questioner: From what you have described about meditation, it appears to me you are entering a kind of vacuum. Is that so?
Krishnamurti: It is not you entering, nor I entering, into a vacuum. Are we proceeding, or enquiring verbally, intellectually and theoretically, or are we living so as to bring order out of this chaos, order in our daily life~ We live in disorder and by observing that disorder without the observer, there is order. Order is not a vacuum. Order implies no conflict; no division, outwardly or inwardly. This division as the `me', and not the `me', is disorder. To have order does not mean I am living in a vacuum on the contrary. It is the most extraordinary and intelligent action to have relationship not based on image. That is not a vacuum. To behave without a motive is love; love is not a vacuum.
So what we are talking about is not creating a vacuum. On the contrary, it is bringing about supreme, excellent intelligence. Intelligence is not a vacuum. 28th July, 1974
