U.G. Krishnamurti
U.G. Krishnamurti
Mind as a Myth
http://intuition.org/txt/krishna.htm
Wikipedia: U. G. Krishnamurti
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U._G._Krishnamurti
Wikiquote: U. G. Krishnamurti
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/U._G._Krishnamurti
The Essential U.G.
Videos of U.G. Krishnamurti
https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=u.+g.+krishnamurti&qpvt=u.g.+krishnamurti&FORM=VDRE
Nature is busy creating absolutely unique individuals, whereas culture has invented a single mold to which all must conform. It is grotesque.
Don't follow me, I'm lost.
The plain fact is that if you don't have a problem, you create one. If you don't have a problem you don't feel that you are living.
Thought can never capture the movement of life, it is much too slow.
My interest is to point out to you that you can walk, and please throw away all those crutches. If you are really handicapped, I wouldn’t advise you to do any such thing. But you are made to feel by other people that you are handicapped so that they could sell you those crutches. Throw them away and you can walk. That’s all that I can say. ‘If I fall …’ – that is your fear. Put the crutches away, and you are not going to fall.
We are not created for any grander purpose than the ants that are there or the flies that are hovering around us or the mosquitoes that are sucking our blood.
You can have the courage to climb the mountain, swim the lakes, go on a raft to the other side of the Atlantic or Pacific. That any fool can do, but the courage to be on your own, to stand on your two solid feet, is something which cannot be given by somebody.
*Only if you reject all the other paths can you discover your own path.
Society has put before you the ideal of a 'perfect man'. No matter in which culture you were born, you have scriptural doctrines and traditions handed down to you to tell you how to behave. You are told that through due practice you can even eventually come into the state attained by the sages, saints and saviors of mankind. And so you try to control your behavior, to control your thoughts, to be something unnatural.
The body is a fortuitous concourse of atoms. There is no death for the body, only an exchange of atoms. Their changing places and taking different forms is what we call 'death.' It's a process which restores the energy level in nature that has gone down. In reality, nothing is born and nothing is dead.
The fact is that we don't want to be free. What is responsible for our problems is the fear of losing what we have and what we know.
To be yourself requires extraordinary intelligence. You are blessed with that intelligence; nobody need give it to you; nobody can take it away from you. He who lets that express itself in its own way is a Natural Man.
Q.= WHO AM I? WHO ARE YOU?
U.G = You are what you are doing RIGHT NOW!
I discovered for myself and by myself that there is no self to realize – that's the realization I am talking about. It comes as a shattering blow. It hits you like a thunderbolt. You have invested everything in one basket, self-realization, and, in the end, suddenly you discover that there is no self to discover, no self to realize – and you say to yourself What the hell have I been doing all my life?! That blasts you.
What is morality? It is not the following of enjoined rules of conduct. It is not a question of standing above temptations, or of conquering hate, anger, greed, lust and violence.
Questioning your actions before and after creates the moral problem. What is responsible for this situation is the faculty of distinguishing between right and wrong and influencing your actions accordingly. Life is action. Unquestioned action is morality. Questioning your actions is destroying the expression of life. A person who lets life act in its own way without the protective movement of thought has no self to defend. What need will he have to lie or cheat or pretend or to commit any other act which his society considers immoral?
I am not out to liberate anybody. You have to liberate yourself, and you are unable to do that. What I have to say will not do it. I am only interested in describing this state, in clearing away the occultation and mystification in which those people in the 'holy business' have shrouded the whole thing. Maybe I can convince you not to waste a lot of time and energy, looking for a state which does not exist except in your imagination.
Life has to be described in pure and simple physical and physiological terms. It must be demystified and depsychologised
Yes! is the thing that blows the whole structure apart.
If you have the courage to touch life for the first time, you will never know what hit you. Everything man has thought, felt and experienced is gone, and nothing is put in its place.
A messiah is the one who leaves a mess behind him in this world.
It is fear that makes you believe that you are living and that you will be dead. What we do not want is the fear to come to an end. That is why we have invented all these new minds, new sciences, new talks, therapies, choiceless awareness and various other gimmicks.
Wanting has to go. Wanting to be free from something that is not there is what you call sorrow. Wanting to be free from sorrow is sorrow. There is no other sorrow. You don't want to be free from sorrow. You just think about sorrow, without acting. Your thinking endlessly about being free from sorrow is only more material for sorrow. Thinking does not put an end to sorrow. Sorrow is there for you as long as you think. There is actually no sorrow there to be free from. Thinking about and struggling against sorrow is sorrow. Since you can't stop thinking, and thinking is sorrow, you will always suffer. There is no way out, no escape.
Human thinking is born out of this neurological defect in the human species. Anything that is born out of human thinking is destructive. Thought is destructive. Thought is a protective mechanism. It draws frontiers around itself, and it wants to protect itself. It is for the same reason that we also draw lines on this planet and extend them as far as we can.
What you know can never be the beyond. Whatever you experience is not the beyond. If there is any beyond, this movement of 'you' is absent. The absence of this movement probably is the beyond, but the beyond can never be experienced by you; it is when the 'you' is not there. Why are you trying to experience a thing that cannot be experienced?
Freedom exists not in finding answers, but in the dissolution of all questions.
As long as you are not at peace with yourself, it is not possible for you to be at peace with others.
The very motivation, the drive behind our demand to understand the laws of nature is to use them for the purpose of continuing the human species at the expense of every other form of life on this planet.
When you're no longer identified with roles and labels and conventional definition of person
Each cell of a living organism cooperates with the cell next to it. It does not need any sentiment or declarations of undying love to do so. Each cell is wise enough to know that if its neighbour goes, it also goes. The cells stick together not out of brotherhood, love and that kind of thing, but out of the urgent drive to survive. It is the same with us, but only in a larger scale. Soon we will all come to know one simple thing: if I try to destroy you, I will also be destroyed.
Sometimes we are so involved with our activity that we lose ourselves in it, and in that sense we are living in the moment.
The demand to be prepared for all future actions and all situations is the cause of our problems. Every situation is so different; and our attempt to be prepared for all those situations is the one that is responsible for our not being able to deal with situations as they arise.
Understanding is the absence of the demand for understanding – now or tomorrow.
Those who are marching into the battlefield and are ready to be killed today in the name of democracy, in the name of freedom, in the name of communism, are no different from those who threw themselves to the lions in the arenas. The Romans watched that fun with great joy. How are we different from them? Not a bit. We love it. To kill and to be killed is the foundation of our culture.
You say that I am living in illusion. But poverty, work, war, they are not illusions. Are they? In what sense am I being deluded? What you experience through your separative consciousness is an illusion. You can't say that falling bombs are an illusion. It is not an illusion, only your experience of it is an illusion. The reality of the world that you are experiencing now is an illusion. That is all I am trying to say. If you say that.
Nature is interested in only two things—to survive and to reproduce one like itself. Anything you superimpose on that, all the cultural input, is responsible for the boredom of man. So we have varieties of religious experience. You are not satisfied with your own religious teachings or games; so you bring in others from India, Asia or China. They become interesting because they are something new. You pick up a new language and try to speak it and use it to feel more important. But basically, it is the same thing.
The body is not interested in your perceptions. It is not interested in learning anything from you or knowing anything from you. All the intelligence that is necessary for this living organism is already there. Our attempts to teach this body, or make it function differently from the way it is programmed by nature, are what are responsible for the battle that is going on. There is a battle between what is put in by culture and what is inherent there in the body.
The fear of extinction will probably bring us together, not 'love' or feeling of brotherhood.
The problem is this: nature has assembled all these species on this planet. The human species is no more important than any other species on this planet. For some reason, man accorded himself a superior place in this scheme of things. He thinks that he is created for some grander purpose than, if I could give a crude example, the mosquito that is sucking his blood. What is responsible for this is the value system that we have created. And the value system has come out of the religious thinking of man. Man has created religion because it gives him a cover. This demand to fulfill himself, to seek something out there was made imperative because of this self-consciousness in you which occurred somewhere along the line of the evolutionary process. Man separated himself from the totality of nature.
The body cannot be afraid of death. The movement that is created by society or culture is what does not want to come to an end … What you are afraid of is not death. In fact, you don't want to be free from fear … It is the fear that makes you believe that you are living and that you will be dead. What we do not want is the fear to come to an end. That is why we have invented all these new minds, new science, new talk, therapies, choiceless awareness and various other gimmicks. Fear is the very thing that you do not want to be free from. What you call yourself is fear. The you is born out of fear; it lives in fear, functions in fear and dies in fear.
As a human body it is an extraordinary piece of creation. But as a human being he is rotten because of the culture.
I may sound very cynical, but a cynic is really a realist.
Life is simply a process of stimulus and response; and stimulus and response are one unitary movement.
If that idea of the meaningful is dropped, then you will see meaning in whatever you are doing in daily life.
But we have turned that, what you call sexual activity, which is biological in its nature, into a pleasure movement. There must be two, you know. I love somebody and somebody else loves me. Wherever there is division, there can’t be love. We are trying to bridge this gap, which is horrible for us, which has no meaning, which is demanding something from us, with this fancy idea that there must be love between these two individuals.
When once we are freed from the goal [of solving problems], the question of whether it is a positive approach or a negative approach does not even arise.
You will be peaceful when all your ideas about awareness are dropped and you begin to function like a computer. You must be a machine, function automatically in this world, never questioning your actions before, during, or after they occur.
What I am emphasizing is that we are trying to solve our basic human problems through a psychological framework, when actually the problem is neurological. The body is involved. Take desire. As long as there is a living body, there will be desire. It is natural. Thought has interfered and trying to suppress, control, and moralize about desire, to the detriment of mankind. We are trying to solve the ‘problem’ of desire through thought. It is thinking that has created the problem.
The framing of what there is by the mind is what you call beauty.
I still maintain that it is not love, compassion, humanism, or brotherly sentiments that will save mankind. No, not at all. It is the sheer terror of extinction that can save us, if anything can.
Sorrow is there for you as long as you think. There is actually no sorrow there to be free from. Thinking about and struggling against sorrow is sorrow. Since you can't stop thinking, and thinking is sorrow, you will always suffer. There is no way out, no escape.
Someone asked me, What do you have to say about Rajneesh after his death? I said that the world has never seen such a pimp nor will it ever see one in the future. He combined Western therapies, the Tantric system, and everything that you could find in the books. He made a big business out of it. He took money from the boys; he took money from girls, and kept it for himself. He is dead and so we don't say anything. Nil nisi bonum (Of the dead speak not unless it be good).
The demand for permanence in every area of our existence is the cause of human misery. There's no such thing as permanence at all.
But thought is a very protective mechanism and is interested in its own survival. At the same time thought is opposed fundamentally to the functioning of this living organism. We are made to believe that there is such a thing as mind. But there is no such thing as your mind or my mind. Society or culture, or whatever you want to call it, has created us solely and wholly for the purpose of maintaining its own continuity and status quo. At the same time, it has also created the idea that there is such a thing as individual. But actually, there is a conflict between the two – the idea of the individual and the impossibility of functioning as an individual separate and distinct from the totality of man’s thoughts and experiences.
I am like a puppet sitting here. It's not just I; all of us are puppets. Nature is pulling the strings, but we believe we are acting. If you function that way (as puppets), then the problems are simple. But we have superimposed on that (the idea of) a person who is pulling those strings.
Somewhere along the line in human consciousness, there occurred self-consciousness. (When I use the word self I don't mean that there is a self or a center there.) That consciousness separated man from the totality of things. Man, in the beginning, was a frightened being. He turned everything that was uncontrollable into something divine or cosmic. and worshiped it. It was in that frame of mind that he created, quote and unquote, God. So culture, is responsible for whatever you are. I maintain that all the political institutions and ideologies we have today are the outgrowth of the same religious thinking of man. The spiritual teachers are in a way responsible for the tragedy of mankind.
Your own death, or the death of your near and dear ones, is not something you can experience. What you actually experience is the void created by the disappearance of another individual and the unsatisfied demand to maintain the continuity of your relationship with that person for a nonexistent eternity. The arena for the continuation of all these permanent relationships is the tomorrow, heaven, next life, and so on. These things are the inventions of a mind interested only in it's undisturbed, permanent continuity in a self-generated, fictitious future. The basic method of maintaining the continuity is the repetition of the question, How? How? How? How am I to live? How can I be happy? How can I be sure I will be happy tomorrow? This has made life an insoluble dilemma for us. We want to know, and through that knowledge we hope to continue on with our miserable existences forever.