excerpts

We seem to find it extraordinarily difficult to live with deep fullness of thought, with intense, abundant love, and most of us are not concerned with that; we are concerned with trying to become something.

If you observe, all our religions, all our leaders, political and so-called spiritual, all our organizations, the worldly as well as the religious, offer ways of becoming something, either here or in the so-called world of the spirit.

In striving, in struggling to become something, we have lost the beauty of living... [the continual] looking to tomorrow.

It is because we do not understand the eternal present that we try to find something beyond the present, tomorrow. And what is it that prevents us from understanding our life, which is so fraught with sorrow, with conflict, with ambition...

Why is it that we do not understand this whole process of living and are always looking somewhere else for truth, for life, for something which is immeasurable, beyond the limits of thought?

What is it that blocks our understanding? ... What is it that each one of us wants out of life? ... we use life as a means to something else... to get somewhere, to reach heaven, to find truth, God; and the various philosophies [as we try to] escape from our living and from the understanding of that living.

we shall find that life is not a stepping stone to something greater. There is nothing greater.

If I know how to live, then living itself is the truth.

So, is it possible to wipe away the many values, the ambitions that one has set up for oneself, and live a life without effort? Effort, which is based on the evaluations of memory is a process of degeneration, it destroys the clarity of thinking and living.

Our thinking is a process of pressure because we want to become something...

We are in sorrow because we are always trying to become something. If you watch your own mind you will see that every movement of thought is towards something or away from something, and so your life is a series of battles, conflicts and miseries.

The mind is limited, everlastingly occupied, and with that mind we try to find something which is beyond the whole process of thought. Realizing that, we say we must silence the mind, so we begin to discipline, to control, to shape the mind...

So, what is important in our daily living is not what to seek and what to find, but to stop all search, because in search there is pressure on thought.

• All search as we know it has a motive, and as long as there is a motive, an incentive in your search, what you are seeking is obviously the fulfilment of that motive; therefore it is no longer [objective] search.

Now, can the mind stop seeking? Surely, any movement of the mind in any direction has an incentive, and the incentive breeds its own result; therefore that result is not truth. Truth comes into being when the mind has no movement at all, when it is completely still.

But you see, the difficulty is that all of us have been educated wrongly, we have lost the initiative in thinking, we want to be helped, and probably most of you are here for that reason. Sirs, there is no help...

the moment you begin seeking help you have lost the initiative, and initiative is the beginning of that extraordinary thing called creativity, which is truth.

Remaining within the walls of your particular prison, the walls of your own thinking, your own conditioning, your own ambition and confusion, you want to be helped by an outside agency, and so you lose the initiative to jump over the wall.

Life is a process of discovery, and in living from day to day you have to find out for yourself its beauty, its extraordinary depth; and it is because you do not look, because you want to be helped, that you lose the confidence, the initiative which is so essential to the process of discovery.

 

'find out for yourself'

Editor’s note: In conversation with a friend about the nature of happiness and how can we find it, the opinion was, “I guess we’ll figure it out.”

My response was, depending on how we define “figure it out,” we will not be able to solve this problem by ordinary method; meaning, learning about true happiness is not like a crossword puzzle to be solved, rationality and logic will not produce the answer. For thousands of years, humankind has been trying to be happy but we haven’t succeeded. Why is that?

There’s a sense of unsatisfactoriness gnawing at our insides, and no amount of good thinking will truly root this out. We’re talking about the ego’s domain of “I am not enough” and thinking cannot expunge the poison.

Some time ago I counseled myself that when I get to Summerland, the question of happiness will be high on my list to explore. I imagined interviewing the Guides and the ancient wise, attempting to find the answer. But then I realized, none of this, as well, can root out the inner churning feeling of unsatisfactoriness. Nothing external can help us.

I now see there is only one way. We must go within, be taught directly by Spirit, by the mind of God, to access the better path. Simply be open, no hidden agenda, a humility, a willingness to be taught, allow whatever answer might come to present itself. Be very alert.

Usually, when we feel bad about something we distract ourselves with entertainment or some such, but, instead, we are to face the feeling of unsatisfactoriness head on. Allow it to overwhelm. Drift in its energies. Do no condemn it, or run and hide. Kierkegaard spoke of this as “instructed by dread.” When we do this, eventually the answer will be given to us, dropped into our heads. No thinking required; in fact, egoic thinking has been blocking the answer.

And this is what Krishnamurti is talking about when he references “the immensity” or “creativity itself,” "its beauty, its extraordinary depth," speaking to us.

Editor’s note: The issue of directly facing one’s inner emptiness, not running away, was the topic of K’s June 23, 1956 lecture. I’ve been attempting to adopt this form of meditation, but I will say that it's not easy. The mind, one finds, wishes to do anything else than confront the “inner emptiness.” One has to continually rein in and redirect the mind’s attempt to escape this kind of scrutiny. I felt exhausted doing this after a late-night 40-minute session. I’ll share my “notes” with you. It made me feel deathly numb inside. I could hardly feel at all. I tried to bring to mind feelings of love I’ve known but could not, but for the vaguest remembrance. And I asked myself, why should there be this state of anesthetized, unfeeling-trauma? This seemed to be the answer: When we force ourselves to directly face the inner terror of “never finding happiness,” it’s as if a great cloud of gloom settles over the mind. It’s hard to think and function. We go off-line. No wonder we’ve been running away from this. But the question came to mind, is this real? Why am I so terrorized by the possibility of never finding happiness when I – especially, with my knowledge of the afterlife righting all wrongs – why am I so traumatized? But here’s what happened next. As I stayed with this “cloud of gloom,” I noticed that it began to lose its “edge” or potency, like a dull knife. I still didn’t like it, and it still made me feel bad, but I began to perceive “this isn’t real.” This feeling of gloom that besets is not being experienced by the true self but only by the egoic false self. Very gradually, and ever so slightly, I began to perceive a “space” around the “cloud of gloom”; meaning, it’s not part of me, the real me. The “gloom” is separate and something else. But I would never have known this had I not persistently “stayed with” the feelings of unsatisfactoriness. These bad feelings make their living by masquerading as one's true self. In the unenlightened state, we think they’re real and part of our essential selves, but they’re parasites. And how did I feel the next morning? I felt as if a great storm had passed through my mind but now there was an even greater calm. My senses seemed sharper. And my memories of love readily returned. But let us not take a victory march too soon. The ego and its bad feelings will be back to try again. It won’t give up that easily. But when it returns, we now have a honed skill to dispatch it with less trouble. We’re not so quickly fooled the next time. Even so, this will be a long struggle, I sense, to fully stabilize one’s mind in terms of allowing the true self to lead. Special note: During the thick of the battle, when I felt very low, drained, and despairing, I realized something: “This is how the hard-core cases in the Dark Realms feel all the time!” They have abandoned all hope of ever finding happiness and their intense malaise consumes them. They've stopped trying. Chief Blackhawk said it best, these hapless need a helping hand to get out of the “sewer pit” lest they remain there forever in their abject misery of despair. And who can help them? The best ones to help, the best travel guides are ones who've been there -- you and me, after we enter our own personal hell and fight our way through the illusion, out of it, into sanity, and the sunshine.

 

Krishnamurti: The sense of individual discovery of what is truth is destroyed, taken away from you, so you read the Gita, you turn to Shankara, Buddha, or Christ, you follow the book or the leader, and having established authorities, you are lost. That is a simple fact. You are lost because you have leaders, philosophies, disciplines. If they did not exist you would not be lost, because then you would have to find out from day to day, from moment to moment, you would have to discover for yourself.

There is a difference between self-confidence and the state of mind which is constantly inquiring without a motive.

Self-confidence breeds aggression, arrogance, its action is a self-enclosing process; but for the mind that is in a state of constant inquiry there is no accumulation of discovery, and only such a mind can find that which is truth.

The mind that is led can never discover what is truth, but only the mind that is free from society, from all conditioning, and is therefore in a state of revolution. That is why only the truly religious man is a revolutionary, not the reformer.

So it seems to me that our problem is not to seek that which you call truth or God, but to free the to mind from all conditioning as a Hindu, a Moslem, a Christian, or whatever it be, and also from the conditioning which comes about when you are ambitious, envious, all of which is within the pattern of society.

Society is based on reformation, and reformation is continuation of the past; and it is only when the mind is aware of all this and understands it that there is a possibility of the coming into being of that for which we all hunger and without which life has not much meaning, which is the real.

But for the experiencing of the real, there must be no experiencer. The experiencer is the result of the past, he is made up of many accumulations, of many memories, and as long as there is the experiencer, the thinker, there cannot be that which is truth. When the mind is free from the thinker, from the experiencer, from the `me' as accumulated memories with their evaluations - it is only then that the mind can be still.

But to listen to that which is beyond measure to that which is truth, the mind must be very quiet, and it cannot be quiet as long as it is seeking, because seeking is a form of agitation.

When the mind is really still because it is caught up in the song of its own listening, only then the immeasurable, that which is eternal, comes into being.