excerpts

Question: I read the Buddha because it helps me to think clearly about my own problems, and I read you and some others in the same way. You seem to suggest that such help is superficial and does not bring about a radical transformation. Is this a casual suggestion on your part, or do you mean to indicate that there is something very much deeper which cannot be discovered through reading?

Krishnamurti: Do you read in order to be helped? Do you read in order to confirm your own experience? Do you read in order to amuse yourself, to relax, to give your mind, this constantly active mind, a rest?

The questioner says he reads be cause it helps him to solve his problems. Are you really helped by reading? - it does not matter who it is.

When I go out seeking help, am I helped? I may find temporary relief, a momentary crack through which I can see the way; but surely, to find help, I must go within myself, must I not?

Books can give you in formation about how to move towards the door which will solve your problems; but you must walk, must you not? You see, that is one of our difficulties: we want to be helped. We have innumerable problems, devastating, destructive problems in which we are caught, and we want help from somebody: the psychologist, the doctor, the Buddha, whoever it is.

The very desire to be helped creates the image to which we be come a slave; so, the Buddha, or Krishnamurti, or X becomes the authority.

We say, "He helped me once, and my goodness, I am going back to him again" - which indicates the shallow mind, the mind that is seeking help.

Such a mind created its own problems and then wants somebody else to solve them, or it goes to somebody to help it to uncover the process of its own thinking.

So, unconsciously, the one who seeks help creates the authority: the authority of the book, the authority of the State, the authority of the dictator, the authority of the teacher, of the priest, you know, the whole business of it.

And can I be helped, can you be helped? I know we would like to be. Fundamentally, can you and I be helped? Surely, it is only by understanding ourselves patiently, quietly, unobtrusively, that we begin to discover, experience something which is not of our own creation; and it is that which brings about help, which begins to clear the field of our vision. But you cannot ask for that help; it must come to you darkly, uninvited.

But when we are suffering, when we are in real psychological pain, we want somebody to give us a hand; and so the church, the particular friend, the teacher, or the State, becomes all important. For that help, we are willing to become slaves.

So, we have to go into this problem of how we are caught in our own sorrows, we have to understand and clear it up for ourselves; for reality, God, or what you will, is not to be experienced through another. It must be experienced directly, it must come to you without any intermediary.

But a mind that is seeking help, that is petitioning, that is asking, begging - such a mind can never find the other, because it has not understood its own problems, it has not studied the process of its own activities. It is only when the mind is quiet that there is light. That light is not to be worshipped by the mind; the mind must be utterly silent, not asking, not hoping for experience. It must be completely still.

Only then is there a possibility of that light which will dispel our darkness.