home | what's new | other sites | contact | about

Word Gems

self-knowledge, authentic living, full humanity, continual awakening

Jiddu Krishnamurti
1895 - 1986

return to contents page 

Public Talk 8, Madras - 27 Jan 1952

Question: Although you have used the word `Truth' often, I do not recall that you have ever defined it. What do you mean by it?

Krishnamurti: You and I as two individuals are going to find this out, not tomorrow but perhaps this evening. If you are very quiet, let us discover it. Definitions are not valuable. Definitions have no meaning to a man who is seeking Truth. The word is not the thing; the word `tree' is not the tree; but we are satisfied with words. please follow this closely.

To us, definitions, explanations are very satisfactory because we can live within them. We can pursue words, and words have certain effects on us physically and psychologically. The word `God' awakens all kinds of neurological and psychological reactions, and we are satisfied.

So to us, definition is very important. Is that not so? Definition we call knowledge, and knowledge we think is Truth. The more we read about it, the nearer we think we are to it. But the explanation of the word is not the thing.

So we have to realize, to understand; we must not be caught by definitions by words. Therefore, we must put aside the word. And how difficult it is, is it not?, because the word is the process of thought! There is no thinking without verbalizing, without using words, images, concepts, formulas. Please follow all this, meditate with me now, to find this out.

When the mind perceives that it is caught in words, that the very process of its thinking is word, which is memory, how can such a mind - which is memory, which is time, which is caught in definitions and conclusions - , understand what is Truth, what is unknowable.

If I would know the unknowable, the mind must be completely silent, must it not? That is, all verbalization, all imagination, all projection must cease. You all know how difficult it is for the mind to be still, not compelled, not disciplined to be still; which means, the mind is no longer verbalizing, no longer recognizing, no longer the centre of recognition of any experience.

When the mind recognizes the experience, that experience is projected. When I experience the Master, Truth, God, that experience is self-projected, because I recognize. There is the centre of me which recognizes that experience; that recognition is the process of memory. Then I say `I have seen the Master, I know He exists, I know there is God.' That is, the mind is the centre of recognition, and recognition is the process of memory. When I experience something as God, as Truth, it is my projection, it is recognition, it is not Truth, it is not God.

The mind is quite still only when it is incapable of experiencing, that is, when there is no centre of recognition. But that does not come about through any form of action of will. That does not come about through discipline. That comes about when the mind observes its own activities, which I hope you are doing now. And when you observe, you will see how, every minute, there is the process of recognition going on, and how when you recognize, there is nothing new.

Truth is something that is timeless, that is not measurable by words. Since truth is measureless, timeless, mind cannot recognize it. Therefore, for Truth to be, it is imperative that the mind should be in a state of non-experiencing.

Truth must come to you, the mind, you cannot go to it. If you go to it, you will experience it. You cannot invite Truth. When you invite, when you experience, you are in the position of recognizing it; when you recognize it, it is not Truth; it is only your own process of memory, of thought that says `It is so, I have read, I have experienced'.

Therefore, knowledge is not the way to Truth. Knowledge must be understood and put away for Truth to be.

If your mind is quiet, not asleep, not drugged by words, but actually pursuing, observing the process of the mind, then you will see that quietness comes into being darkly, mysteriously; and in that state of stillness, you will see that which is eternal, immeasurable.

Question: There is an urge in every one of us to see God, Reality, Truth. Is not the search for beauty the same as the search for reality? Is ugliness evil?

Krishnamurti: Sirs, do realize you cannot seek God. You cannot seek Truth. Because, if you seek, what you will find is not Truth.

Your search is the desire to find that which you want. How can you seek something of which you do not know? You seek something of which you have read, which you call Truth; or you are seeking something which inwardly you have a feeling for. Therefore, you must understand the motive of your search, which is far more important than the search for Truth.

Why are you seeking, and what are you seeking? You would not seek if you are happy, if there was joy in your heart. Because we are empty we are seeking. We are frustrated, miserable, violent, full of antagonism; that is why we want to go away from that and seek some thing which would be more. Do watch yourselves and realize what I am saying to you, not merely listening to words.

In order to escape from your present psychological conflicts, miseries, antagonisms, you say `I am seeking Truth'. You will not find Truth because Truth does not come when you are escaping from reality, from that which is.

You have to understand that. To understand that, you must not go to seek the answer outside. So you cannot seek Truth. It must come to you. You cannot beckon God, you cannot go to Him. Your worship, devotion, is utterly valueless because you want something, you put up the begging bowl for Him to fill. So, you are seeking someone to fill your emptiness.

And you are interested more in the word than in the thing. But if you are content with that extraordinary state of loneliness without any deviation or distraction, then only that which is eternal comes into being.

Most of us are so conditioned, so trained, that we want to escape; and the thing to which we escape, we call beauty. We are seeking beauty through something - through dance, through rituals, through prayer, through discipline, through various forms of formulations, through painting, through sensation. Are we not?

So as long as we are seeking beauty through something, through man, woman or child, through some sensation, we shall never have beauty because the thing through which we seek, becomes all important.

Not beauty, but the object through which we seek it, becomes all important, and then we cling to that. Beauty is not found through something; that would be merely a sensation which is exploited by the cunning. Beauty comes into being through inward regeneration, when there is complete, radical transformation of the mind. For that, you require an extraordinary state of sensitivity.

Ugliness is an evil only when there is no sensitivity. If you are sensitive to the beautiful, denying the ugly, then you are not sensitive to the beautiful.

What is important is not ugliness or beauty, but that there should be sensitivity which sees, which reacts to the so-called ugly as well as to the beautiful. But if you are only aware of the beautiful and deny the ugly, then it is like cutting off one arm; then your whole existence is unbalanced.

Don't you shut out the evil, deny it, call it ugly, fight it, be violent about it? You are only concerned with the beautiful, you want it. In that process, you lose the sensitivity.

The man that is sensitive to both the ugly and the beautiful, goes beyond, far away from the things through which he seeks Truth. But, we are not sensitive to either beauty or ugliness; we are so enclosed by our own thoughts, by our own prejudices, by our own ambitions, greeds, envies.

How can a mind be sensitive, that is ambitious spiritually or in any other direction? There can be sensitivity only when the whole process of desire is completely understood; for, desire is a self-enclosing process, and through enclosing, you cannot see the horizon.

The mind then is stifled by its own `becoming'. Such a mind can only appreciate beauty through something. Such a mind is not a beautiful mind. Such a mind is not a good mind, it is an ugly mind which is enclosed and is seeking its own perpetuation.

Such a mind can never find beauty. Only when the mind ceases to enclose itself by its own ideals and pursuits and ambitions, such a mind is beautiful.

Editor's comments:

Mixed feelings is my reaction to Krishnamurti’s lecture here on “the truth.” Some of what he says could be helpful to a newcomer to this subject, but much of it adds to our confusion.

Let me preface my comments by asserting, there are no experts in this field. Mapping the “inner cosmos” of sacred being is an ultra-gargantuan task that will never be fully accomplished, and a million years from now we will still consider ourselves novices to the task. I still recall, during my fundamentalist days, a sermon in which it was stated, “no one pastor or teacher can tell you everything you need to know about the kingdom of God.” Good advice. We will never have the mind of God all tagged-and-flagged, all GPS surveyed.

In this vein, K is often reluctant to put forward any word that could be construed as method, formula or structured way to finding the truth. This has merit, as it’s not possible to package and sell ultimate reality for “$49.95, with operators standing by to take your order.” However, I think K takes this concept too far. Because if there is no such thing, in any sense, as pointing the way, best practice or general guideline, then what is the point of inviting people to his lectures?

Sometimes I’ve stated that, where K is good he’s very good, but where he’s not he’s not. K is very good not only at introducing and defining issues to be explored but, over the years in his continuing lectures, rephrasing, reformulating, these same ideas with fresh perspective. But, he’s sometimes given to unwarranted blanket-statements.

It seems to me that the process of finding “the truth” has to be something fairly easy, something anyone could do, or how could the mass of humanity ever come to it? If truth could be accessed only with the twelve labors of Hercules, or meditating all night barefoot in the snow, or fasting for 40 days in a damp cave, then the truth will ever remain out of reach. But I don’t think it’s like that.

For example, in K’s present lecture, he says that the requisite “sensitivity” for finding truth and beauty will be ours “only when the whole process of desire is completely understood.” Really? The whole process? And completely understood? Has anyone in the history of the world ever reached this Everest summit?

Or this: one must be “content with that extraordinary state of loneliness without any deviation or distraction, then only that which is eternal comes into being.” No “deviation” or “distraction”? Approach God in a perfect way? And we must not bring the “beggar’s bowl” to God, he says, like a ragamuffin child in a Dickens’ novel asking for more.

Well, I’m being unfair here, because K actually is making a good point: We cannot seek for God as if s/he were a genie in a bottle at our command to grant three wishes.

And yet there’s something wrong here with K’s absolutism. We do not have to be “good enough” to quest for God or the truth. I’m reminded, once again, of church-going days, with certain pastors refusing to baptize until new converts had stopped smoking or drinking or exhibited some other moral excellence. But, back then, we had (errantly) thought that baptism was the agency that might unleash the power of God to effect personal change. There is something very wrong with any notion of requirement to be “good enough” to enter God’s presence.

Or how about this? “Sirs, do realize you cannot seek God. You cannot seek Truth.” But, if so in a strict sense, once again, what are all these people doing at your lecture? And why are you wasting our time even by speaking if no good can come from it?

Aren’t we all, to various degrees, to seek for God and the truth? But K does have a point: we cannot “seek” as in huffing-and-puffing, trying very hard, because will-power is not primary to the process. While all this is true, K is too glib with absolutist statements. Of course, we can seek God, the truth and, in our heart of hearts, must desire to do so  – we just have to do it the right way.

Or not.

What do I mean by this impertinence? Though there is benefit in availing oneself of a guide’s pointing the way or best practices or general guidelines, it’s also correct to say that God or the truth, at the right time, will seek for us, whether we like it or not. Sometimes divinity will barge right in, uninvited to one’s life, overturn the “money changers’ tables” of the mind, and it won’t ask permission. This is what happened to me 30 years ago.

And so, if I take exception to certain statements made by K, I do so not because I read it in a book. When he phrases things a certain way, I know where he’s giving the straight story and where he’s going off track. I know this because I’ve been there and back.

And I also know where he’s fudging and blinding himself. He has his “good reason” for doing so, but behind that there’s his “real reason.” K was living a double life, had “secret sins,” and some of his lecture content served as indirect defense of himself. He didn’t like the idea of future accountability. His trepidation of such emerges in a subtle way. Here’s an example from the lecture under review:

When the mind recognizes the experience, that experience is projected. When I experience the Master, Truth, God, that experience is self-projected, because I recognize. There is the centre of me which recognizes that experience; that recognition is the process of memory. Then I say `I have seen the Master, I know He exists, I know there is God.' That is, the mind is the centre of recognition, and recognition is the process of memory. When I experience something as God, as Truth, it is my projection, it is recognition, it is not Truth, it is not God.

What is he getting at here? It’s all very murky, a mixture of truth and error. He’s trying to say that any time you “recognize” something, this automatically means it’s a product of memory and therefore social conditioning. He makes a point of this in order to discredit personal experiences of God, which, he would have us believe, are just superstitious projections of one’s formative instruction. For many people, K’s assertion is true, but it doesn’t have to be.

Now, especially to the newcomer, this is extremely muddy because, in the main, the thoughts of our head, memory, definitions of words, actually are mere ghosts of cultural programming and, what Herodotus called, local "nomos." However, K wants to insert “all” where “some” would be more appropriate. Not every sense of recognition is based on social conditioning and conventions of the tribe.

There is a deeper part of us, linked to Universal Consciousness / God / Creator Source, which naturally resonates with or, if you will, recognizes “the truth”. And this recognition has nothing to do with content of the mind or one’s upbringing. But K wants none of this larger vista, and insists that all recognition is just a hobgoblin of the socially conditioned viewpoint.

Why would K “cook the books” of better spiritual view this way? K’s fear of accountability caused “the ego,” as David Bohm used the phrase, “to distort reality” in order to protect itself. K didn’t want to accept the existence of a higher power, and in his public lectures he insists that the “God hypothesis” is faulty. He became his own dutiful true believer, he propagandized himself.

And so, what do we need to learn here?

Allow me to take a step back to caution all of us – and, as I said, we’re all newcomers to this subject because it’s too vast to conquer, too scintillating, throbbing with vitality, shifting and darting from moment to moment, you can't pin it down – let us caution ourselves to realize that none of this will seem real until we’ve experienced it for ourselves.

It’s like trying to appreciate the Grand Canyon from a photograph. Can we know its awesome depth and majesty from a one-dimensional representation?

Our trouble is heightened by the fact that we cannot simply go out and, with a "can do" attitude, seek for this experience. In the WG writings I’ve quoted Chief Blackhawk on the other side who instructs, we cannot work on this like a merit badge or striving to earn an A on a test. K would agree and was correct to state that authentic knowledge of God and the truth -- not just a culturally etched thought-form in the head -- must come upon us “darkly,” which is to say, indirectly or in a non-programmed way.

Why should it be so? Why should the success-minded person not make a plan, work hard, and get out there to strive for what he or she wants? The problem is, as per K, “truth is a living thing” -- we cannot corner or capture it like trapping a wild stallion.

Truth, or reality, the ultimate essence of things, is best viewed, I think, as “the mind of God.” And good luck to us trying to trap or attain to it by human effort alone. We can’t even invite it, that is, not as part of a method or formula. The energies of God will do as they please, and not according to our bidding.

Then how are we to approach this? The best we can do is to open our spirits in a receptive, humble way. Universal Intelligence knows what is best for us, and when. When insights finally come, the instruction will be a private tutoring. Different for each of us. It does no good to say, this worked for her and so it will work for me. This is error, merely more method-formula thinking.

If we “live in surrender” to the energies of God (and sometimes even when we don't), at the right time, insights will come to us “darkly.” There will be no strict causal efficacy; there is no effort or practice that will guarantee receipt of mystical insights; there will be no straight-line cause and effect.

Our powerlessness here can seem very daunting, and even discouraging. But here’s what we have going for us. “God is light.” This means that it's God’s nature and purpose to reveal things unknown. We weren't put here to be toyed with by unseen forces.

Clear vision will happen at the best time for us. But if we think of God as some kind of vending machine – put your dollar in and get your cheetos, do your mediation, sit lotus-like, and now you’ll automatically gain an insight – then we will fail.

God will not be manipulated or directed. Human effort is not key here. And yet it is God’s purpose to lead us into all truth.

For more discussion on this greatest of all adventures – the discovery of God and the truth – see the “surrender and acceptance” writing, and especially the “simply notice” sub-articles therein.