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Krishnamurti

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Again, you see, there is a real revolution only if we approach this problem rightly. The right approach to the problem gives an extraordinary confidence which I assure you moves mountains of one's own prejudices, conditionings. Being aware of a shallow mind, do not try to become deep. A shallow mind can never know great depths. It can have plenty of knowledge, information, it can repeat words—you know the whole paraphernalia of a superficial mind that is active. But if you know that you are superficial, shallow, if you are aware of the shallowness and observe all its activities without judging, without condemnation, then you will soon see that the shallow thing has disappeared entirely, without your action upon it. That requires patience, watchfulness, not an eager desire for a result, for achievement. It is only a shallow mind that wants an achievement, a result.

The more you are aware of this whole process, the more you will discover the activities of the mind but you must observe them without trying to put an end to them, because the moment you seek an end, you are again caught in the duality of the 'me' and the 'not-me'—which continues the problem.

Qustion: With what should the mind be occupied ?

Krishnamurti: Here is a very good example of how conflict is brought into being: the conflict between what should be and what is. First we establish what should be, the ideal, and then try to live according to that pattern. We say that the mind should be occupied with noble things, with unselfishness, with generosity, with kindliness, with love; that is the pattern, the belief, the should be, the must, and we try to live accordingly. So there is a conflict set going, between the projection of what should be and the actuality, the what is, and through that conflict we hope to be transformed. So long as we are struggling with the should be, we feel virtuous, we feel good, but which is important: the should be or what is? With what are our minds occupied—actually, not ideologically? With trivialities, are they not? With how one looks, with ambition, with greed, with envy, with gossip, with cruelty. The mind lives in a world of trivialities and a trivial mind creating a noble pattern is still trivial, is it not? The question is not with what should the mind be occupied but can the mind free itself from trivialities? If we are at all aware, if we are at all inquiring, we know our own particular trivialities: incessant talk, the everlasting chattering of the mind, worry over this and that, curiosity as to what people are doing or not doing, trying to achieve a result, groping after one's own aggrandizement and so on. With that we are occupied and we know it very well. Can that be transformed? That is the problem, is it not? To ask with what the mind should be occupied is mere immaturity.

Now, being aware that my mind is trivial and occupied with trivialities, can it free itself from this condition? Is not

the mind, by its very nature, trivial ? What is the mind but the result of memory? Memory of what ? Of how to survive, not only physically but also psychologically through the development of certain qualities, virtues, the storing up of experiences, the establishing of itself in its own activities. Is that not trivial? The mind, being the result of memory, of time, is trivial in itself; what can it do to free itself from its own triviality? Can it do anything? Please see the importance of this. Can the mind, which is self-centred activity, free itself from that activity? Obviously, it cannot; whatever it does, it is still trivial. It can speculate about God, it can devise political systems, it can invent beliefs; but it is still within the field of time, its change is still from memory to memory, it is still bound by its own limitation.. Can the mind break down that limitation? Or does that limitation break down when the mind is quiet, when it is not active, when it recognizes its own trivialities, however great it may have imagined them to be? When the mind, having seen its trivialities, is fully aware of them and so becomes really quiet—only then is there a possibility of these trivialities dropping away. So long as you are inquiring with what the mind should be occupied, it will be occupied with trivialities, whether it builds a church, whether it prays or whether it goes to a shrine. The mind itself is petty, small, and by merely saying it is petty you haven't dissolved its pettiness, You have to understand it, the mind has to recognize its own activities, and in the process of that recognition, in the awareness of the trivialities which it has consciously and unconsciously built, the mind becomes quiet, In that quietness there is a creative state and this is the factor which brings about a transformation.

Question:Why do you speak of the stillness of the mind, and what is this stillness ?

Krishnamurti: Is it not necessary, if we would understand anything, that the mind should be still? If we have a problem, we worry over it, don't we? We go into it, we analyse it, we tear it to pieces, in the hope of understanding it. Now, do we understand through effort, through analysis, through comparison, through any form of mental struggle? Surely, understanding comes only when the mind is very quiet. We say that the more we struggle with the question of starvation, of war, or any other human problem, the more we come into conflict with it, the better we shall understand it. Now, is that true? Wars have been going on for centuries, the conflict between individuals, between societies; war, inward and outward, is constantly there. Do we resolve that war, that conflict, by further conflict, by further struggle, by cunning endeavour? Or do we understand the problem only when we are directly in front of it, when we are faced with the fact? We can face the fact only when there is no interfering agitation between the mind and the fact, so is it not important, if we are to understand, that the mind be quiet?

You will inevitably ask, "How can the mind be made still ?" That is the immediate response, is it not? You say, "My mind is agitated and how can I keep it quiet ?" Can any system make the mind quiet ? Can a formula, a discipline, make the mind still ? It can; but when the mind is made still, is that quietness, is that stillness? Or is the mind only enclosed within an idea, within a formula, within a phrase ? Such a mind is a dead mind, is it not? That is why most people who try to be spiritual, so-called spiritual, are dead— because they have trained their minds to be quiet, they have enclosed themselves within a formula for being quiet. Obviously, such a mind is never quiet; it is only suppressed, held down.

The mind is quiet when it sees the truth that understanding comes only when it is quiet; that if I would understand you, I must be quiet, I cannot have reactions against you, I must not be prejudiced, I must put away all my conclusions, my experiences and meet you face to face. Only then, when the mind is free from my conditioning, do I understand. When I see the truth of that, then the mind is quiet—and then there is no question of how to make the mind quiet. Only the truth can liberate the mind from its own ideation; to see the truth, the mind must realize the fact that so long as it is agitated it can have no understanding. Quietness of mind, tranquillity of mind, is not a thing to be produced by will-power, by any action of desire; if i! is, then such a mind is enclosed, isolated, it is a dead mind and therefore incapable of adaptability, of pliability, of swiftness. Such a mind is not creative.

Our question, then, is not how to make the mind still but to see the truth of every problem as it presents itself to us. It is like the pool that becomes quiet when the wind stops. Our mind is agitated because we have problems; and to avoid the problems, we make the mind still. Now the mind has projected these problems and there are no problems apart from the mind; and so long as the mind projects any conception of sensitivity, practises any form of stillness, it can never be still. When the mind realizes that only by being still is there understanding—then it becomes very quiet. That quietness is not imposed, not disciplined, it is a quietness that cannot be understood by an agitated mind.

Many who seek quietness of mind withdraw from active life to a village, to a monastery, to the mountains, or they withdraw into ideas, enclose themselves in a belief or avoid people who give them trouble. Such isolation is not stillness of mind. The enclosure of the mind in an idea or the avoidance of people who make life complicated does not bring about stillness of mind. Stillness of mind comes only when there is no process of isolation through accumulation but complete understanding of the whole process of relationship. Accumulation makes the mind old; only when the mind is new, when the mind is fresh, without the process of accumulation—only then is there a possibility of having tranquillity of mind. Such a mind is not dead, it is most active. The still mind is the most active mind but if you will experiment with it, go into it deeply, you will see that in stillness there is no projection of thought. Thought, at all levels, is obviously the reaction of memory and thought can never be in a state of creation. It may express creativeness but thought in itself can never be creative. When there is silence, that tranquillity of mind which is not a result, then we shall see that in that quietness there is extraordinary activity, an extraordinary action which a mind agitated by thought can never know. In that stillness, there is no formulation, there is no idea, there is no memory; that stillness is a state of creation that can be experienced only when there is complete understanding of the whole process of the 'me'. Otherwise, stillness has no meaning. Only in that stillness, which is not a result, is the eternal discovered, which is beyond time.

36. ON THE MEANING OF LIFE

Qustion: We live but we do not know why. To so many of us, life seems to have no meaning. Can you tell us the meaning and purpose of our living ?

Krishnamurti: Now why do you ask this question? Why are you asking me to tell you the meaning of life, the purpose of life? What do we mean by life? Does life have a meaning, a purpose? Is not living in itself its own purpose, its own meaning? Why do we want more? Because we are so dissatisfied with our life, our life is so empty, so tawdry, so monotonous, doing the same thing over and over again, we want something more, something beyond that which we are doing. Since our everyday life is so empty, so dull, so meaningless, so boring, so intolerably stupid, we say life must have a fuller meaning and that is why you ask this question. Surely a man who is living richly, a man who sees things as they are and is content with what he has, is not confused; he is clear, therefore he does not ask what is the purpose of life. For him the very living is the beginning and the end. Our diffculty is that, since our life is empty, we want to find a purpose to life and strive for it. Such a purpose of life can only be mere intellection, without any reality; when the purpose of life is pursued by a stupid, dull mind, by an empty heart, that purpose will also be empty. Therefore our purpose is how to make our life rich, not with. money and all the rest of it but inwardly rich—which is not something cryptic. When you say that the purpose of life is to be happy, the purpose of life is to find God, surely that desire to find God is an escape from life and your God is merely a thing that is known. You can only make your way towards an object which you know; if you build a staircase to the thing that you call God, surely that is not God. Reality can be understood only in living, not in escape. When you seek a purpose of life, you are really escaping and not understanding what life is. Life is relationship, life is action in relationship; when I do not understand relationship, or when relationship is confused, then I seek a fuller meaning. Why are our lives so empty? Why are we so lonely, frustrated ? Because we have never looked into ourselves and understood ourselves. We never admit to ourselves that this life is all we know and that it should therefore be understood fully and completely. We prefer to run away from ourselves and that is why we seek the purpose of life away from relationship, If we begin to understand action, which is our relationship with people, with property, with beliefs and ideas, then we will find that relationship itself brings its own reward. You do not have to seek. It is like seeking love. Can you find love by seeking it? Love cannot be cultivated. You will find love only in relationship, not outside relationship, and it is because we have no love that we want a purpose of life. When there is love, which is its own eternity, then there is no search for God, because love is God.

It is because our minds are full of technicalities and superstitious mutterings that our lives are so empty and that is why we seek a purpose beyond ourselves. To find life's purpose we must go through the door of ourselves; consciously or unconsciously we avoid facing things as they are in themselves and so we want God to open for us a door which is beyond. This question about the purpose of life is put only by those who do not love. Love can be found only in action, which is relationship.

Question:I have listened to all your talks and I have read all your books. Most earnestly I ask you, what can be the purpose of my life if, as you say, all thought has to cease, all knowledge to be suppressed, all memory lost? How do you relate that state of being, whatever it may be according to you, to the world in which we live? What relation has such a being to our sad and painful existence ?

Krishnamurti: We want to know what this state is which can only be when all knowledge, when the recognizer, is not; we want to know what relationship this state has to our world of daily activity, daily pursuits. We know what our life is now—sad, painful, constantly fearful, nothing permanent; we know that very well. We want to know what relationship this other state has to that—and if we put aside knowledge, become free from our memories and so on, what is the purpose of existence.

What is the purpose of existence as we know it now not theoretically but actually? What is the purpose of our everyday existence? Just to survive, isn't it ?—with all its misery, with all its sorrow and confusion, wars, destruction and so on. We can invent theories, we can say: "This should not be, but something else should be." But those are all theories, they are not facts. What we know is confusion, pain, suffering, endless antagonisms, We know also, if we are at all aware, how these come about. The purpose of life, from moment to moment, every day, is to destroy each other, to exploit each other, either as individuals or as collective human beings. In our loneliness, in our misery, we try to use others, we try to escape from ourselves—through

amusements, through gods, through knowledge, through every form of belief, through identification. That is our purpose, conscious or unconscious, as we now live. Is there a deeper, wider purpose beyond, a purpose that is not of confusion, of acquisition? Has that effortless any relation to our daily life ?

Certainly that has no relation at all to our life. How can it have ? If my mind is confused, agonized, lonely, how can that be related to something which is not of itself? How can truth be related to falsehood, to illusion ? We do not want to admit that, because our hope, our confusion, makes us believe in something greater, nobler, which we say is related to us. In our despair we seek truth, hoping that in the discovery of it our despair will disappear.

So we can see that a confused mind, a mind ridden with sorrow, a mind that is aware of its own emptiness, loneliness, can never find that which is beyond itself. That which is beyond the mind can only come into being when the causes of confusion, misery, are dispelled or understood. All that I have been saying, talking about, is how to understand ourselves, for without self-knowledge the other is not, the other is only an illusion. If we can understand the total process of ourselves, from moment to moment, then we shall

see that in clearing up our own confusion, the other comes into being. Then experiencing that will have a relation to this. But this will never have a relation to that. Being this side of the curtain, being in darkness, how can one have experience of light, of freedom? But when once there is the experience of truth, then you can relate it to this world in which we live.If we have never known what love is, but only constant wrangles, misery, conflicts, how can we experience that love which is not of all this ? But when once we have experienced that, then we do not have to bother to find out the relationship. Then love, intelligence, functions. But to experience that state, all knowledge, accumulated memories, selfidentified activities, must cease, so that the mind is incapable

of any projected sensations. Then, experiencing that, there is action in this world.

Surely that is the purpose of existence—to go beyond the self-centred activity of the mind. Having experienced that state, which is not measurable by the mind, then the very experiencing of that brings about an inward revolution. Then, if there is love, there is no social problem. There is no problem of any kind when there is love. Because we do not know how to love we have social problems and systems of philosophy on how to deal with our problems. I say these problems can never be solved by any system, either of the left or of the right or of the middle. They can be •solved— our confusion, our misery, our self-destruction—only when we can experience that state which is not self-projected.  Question: What do you mean by transformation ?

Krishnamurti: Obviously, there must be a radical revolution. The world crisis demands it. Our lives demand it. Our everyday incidents, pursuits, anxieties, demand it. Our problems demand it. There must be a fundamental, radical revolution, because everything about us has collapsed. Though seemingly there is order, in fact there is slow decay, destruction: the wave of destruction is constantly overtaking the wave of life.

So there must be a revolution—but not a revolution based on an idea. Such a revolution is merely the continuation of the idea, not a radical transformation. A revolution based on an idea brings bloodshed, disruption, chaos. Out of chaos you cannot create order; you cannot deliberately bring about chaos and hope to create order out of that chaos. You are not the God-chosen who are to create order out of confusion That is such a false way of thinking on the part of those people who wish to create more and more confusion in order to bring about order. Because for the moment they have power, they assume they know all the ways of producing order. Seeing the whole of this catastrophe—the constant repetition of wars, the ceaseless conflict between classes, between peoples, the awful economic and social inequality, the inequality of capacity and gifts, the gulf between those who are extraordinarily happy, unrumed, and those who are caught in hate, conflict, and misery—seeing all this, there must be a revolution, there must be complete transformation, must there not?Is this transformation, is this radical revolution, an

ultimate thing or is it from moment to moment? I know we should like it to be the ultimate thing, because it is so much easier to think in terms of far away. Ultimately we shall be transformed, ultimately we shall be happy, ultimately we shall find truth; in the meantime, let us carry on. Surely such a mind, thinking in terms of the future, is incapable of acting in the present; therefore such a mind is not seeking transformation, it is merely avoiding transformation. What do we mean by transformation ?Transformation is not in the future, can never be in the future. It can only be now, from moment to moment. So what do we mean by transformation? Surely it is very simple: seeing the false as the false and the true as the true. Seeing the truth in the false and seeing the false in that which has been accepted as the truth. Seeing the false as the false and the true as the true is transformation, because when you see something very clearly as the truth, that truth liberates. When you see that something is false, that false thing drops away. When you see that ceremonies are mere vain repetitions, when you see the truth of it and do not justify it, there is transformation, is there not?, because another bondage is gone. When you see that class distinction is false, that it creates conflict, creates misery, division between people— when you see the truth of it, that very truth liberates. The very perception of that truth is transformation, is it not? As we are surrounded by so much that is false, perceiving the falseness from moment to moment is transformation, Truth is not cumulative. It is from moment to moment. That which is cumulative, accumulated, is memory, and through memory you can never find truth, for memory is of time— time being the past, the present and the future. Time, which is continuity, can never find that which is eternal; eternity is not continuity. That which endures is not eternal. Eternity is in the moment. Eternity is in the now. The now is not the reflection of the past nor the continuance of the past through the present to the future.A mind which is desirous of a future transformation or looks to transformation as an ultimate end, can never find truth, for truth is a thing that must come from moment to moment, must be discovered anew; there can be no discovery through accumulation. How can you discover the new if you have the burden of the old ? It is only with the cessation of that burden that you discover the new. To discover the new, the eternal, in the present, from moment to moment, one needs an extraordinarily alert mind, a mind that is not seeking a result, a mind that is not becoming. A mind that is becoming can never know the full bliss of contentment; not the contentment of smug satisfaction; not the contentment of an achieved result, but the contentment that comes when the mind sees the truth in what is and the false in what is. The perception of that truth is from moment to moment; and that perception is delayed through verbalization of the moment.Transformation is not an end, a result. Transformation is not a result. Result implies residue, a cause and an effect. Where there is causation, there is bound to be effect. The effect is merely the result of your desire to be transformed. When you desire to be transformed, you are still thinking in terms of becoming; that which is becohing can never know that which is being. Truth is being from moment to moment and happiness that continues is not happiness. Happiness is that state of being which is timeless. That timeless state can come only when there is a tremendous discontent— not the discontent that has found a channel through which it escapes but the discontent that has no outlet, that has no escape, that is no longer seeking fulfilment. Only then, in that state of supreme discontent, can reality come into being. That reality is not to be bought, to be sold, to be repeated; it cannot be caught in books. It has to be found from moment to moment, in the smile, in the tear, under the dead leaf, in the vagrant thoughts, in the fullness of love.Love is not different from truth. Love is that state in which the thought process, as time, has completely ceased.Where love is, there is transformation. Without love, revolution has no meaning, fov then revolution is merely destruction, decay, a greater and greater ever-mounting misery. Where there is love, there is revolution, because love is transformation from moment to moment.