excerpts

Question: When I listen to you, it appears to create and intensify my perplexity. Eight days ago I was without a problem, and now I am swamped by confusion. What is the reason for this?

Krishnamurti: It may be very simple. Perhaps you have been asleep, and now you are beginning to think.

Coming and sitting here casually, perhaps you have been pushed, cornered, stimulated, therefore you are confused; but if you are merely stimulated, when you leave here you will fall back into the same old condition.

Stimulation makes the mind dull, it does not awaken the mind; it may awaken it for a minute or a second, but the mind will fall back into its habitual dullness. Depending on these meetings as a means of stimulation is like taking a drink: in the end it will make the mind dull.

If you depend on a person to stimulate you to think, you become his disciple, his follower, his slave, with all the nonsense of it; and so you are bound to lie dull. Whereas, if you realize that you have problems - they may be dormant for the moment, but they are there - and begin directly to confront them, then you won't have to be stimulated by me, or by anyone else. Then you won't have to seek out the problems, for you will see them in yourself, and in everything about you as you go down the street: tears, disease, poverty, death.

So the question is, how to tackle, how to approach the problem. If you approach any problem with the intention of finding an answer, then the answer will create more problems - which is so obvious. What is important is to go into the problem, and begin to understand it; and you can do that only when you don't condemn, resist, or push it away. The mind cannot solve a problem as long as it is condemning, justifying, or comparing.

The difficulty is not in the problem, but in the mind that approaches the problem with an attitude of condemnation, justification, or comparison. So first you have to understand how your mind is conditioned by society, by the innumerable influences that exist about you.

You call yourself a Hindu, a Christian, a Moslem, or what you will, which means that your mind is conditioned; and it is the conditioned mind that creates the problem. When a conditioned mind seeks an answer to a problem, it is going around in circles, its search has no meaning; and your mind is conditioned, because you are envious, because you compare, judge, evaluate, because you are tethered to beliefs, dogmas. That conditioning is what creates the problem.

Question: Now can I be active politically without being contaminated by such action?

Krishnamurti: Sir, what do we mean by political action? What is politics? Surely, it is one segment, one part of a vast complex, is it not? Life consists of many parts, political, social, religious; and if you pursue one part, which you call political action, irrespective of the whole - that is, without considering the totality of life - , then, whatever you do, your action will be contaminating. I think that is so obvious. Only the mind that is seeking, groping, that does not think in compartments, either political, social, or religious, can understand the totality of life. A man who is thinking as a Maharashtrian, or a Gujarathi, cannot perceive the significance of that totality, he does not see that this earth is ours. He can only think in terms of Poona or Bombay, which is so silly; and his separative thinking must eventually lead to mischief and murder, as it has already done.

The mind is always setting itself apart as an Indian, a Hindu, a Moslem, a communist, a Christian, this or that, and holding on to its separation, its provincialism, thereby creating ever increasing misery. Whereas, the man who does not feel himself to be an Indian, a Christian, or a Hindu, but only a human being, and who thinks in terms of the totality of life - it is such a man whose action will not be contaminating. But this is very difficult for most of us, because we are always thinking in segments, and we hope by putting these segments together to make the whole. That can never happen. One must have a feeling for the totality of life, and then one can work differently.

Unfortunately, the politically-minded want to cling to their politics, and introduce religion into it; but that is an impossibility, because religion is something entirely different. Religion is not dogma, it is not ritual, it is not knowledge of the Gita, of the Bible, or of any other book. Religion is an experience, on the instant, of that state of mind which is without the continuity of time. It is a single second of being free from time; and that state cannot act politically, or in terms of social reform. But when a man has that feeling which is without the continuity of time, his action, whatever it be, will have quite a different meaning.

Through the part, you cannot come to the whole, and you don't realize this. To truth there is no path, neither Hindu, Christian, Buddhist, nor Moslem. Truth has no path, it must be discovered from moment to moment; and you can discover it only when the mind is free, unburdened with the continuity of experiences.

Question: We listen to all that you say to the point of surfeit. Can there be such a thing as listening too much to you? Don't we become dull by excess of stimulation?

Krishnamurti: Is there such a thing as too much listening? What do we mean by listening? If I listen in order to store up, and from that stored-up knowledge to act, then listening can become too much, because it is merely a stimulation to further action.

That is what most of us do. We listen in order to learn, to acquire; we retain in the mind what we have learnt, and from there proceed to act.

As long as listening is a process of accumulation, naturally there can be too much, a surfeit; but if I am listening without any sense of acquisition, without storing up, then listening has quite a different significance. Listening is learning; but if I am storing up what I learn, then learning becomes impossible.

What I learn is then contaminated by what I have stored up, therefore it is no longer learning.

It is in the process of accumulation that listening becomes wearisome, excessive, and like any other stimulant, it soon makes the mind dull; you know that what is going to be said, has already been said, and you are at the end of the sentence before I finish it. That is not listening.

Listening is an art; it is to hear the totality of a thing, not just the words; and of such listening there can never be too much.

Question: Is God a reality to you? If so, tell us about God.

Krishnamurti: It is the indolent mind that asks this question, is it not? It is like a man sitting comfortably in the valley and wanting a description of what lies beyond the mountains. That is what we are all doing. The words we read in the so-called sacred books satisfy the mind. The descriptions of the experiences of others gratify us, and we think we have understood; but we never bestir ourselves, we never move out of the valley, climb the steep hills, and find out for ourselves.

That is why it is very important to start anew, to put aside all the books, all the guides, all the teachers, and take the journey by oneself. God, the unknown, is a thing to be discovered, not to be told about or speculated upon. What is speculated upon is the outcome of the known; and a mind that is crippled, burdened, occupied with the known, can never find the unknown.

You may practise virtue, sit meditating by the hour, but you will never know the unknown, because the unknown comes into being only through self-knowledge.

The mind must free itself from the sense of its own continuity, which is the known - and then you will never ask if God is a reality.

The man who says he knows what God is, does not know. It is only the mind that frees itself from the experience it had a second ago, that can know the unknown.

God or truth has no abiding place, and that is the beauty of it; it cannot be made into a shelter for the petty little mind. It is a living, dynamic thing, like the moving waters of a river.

It is only a mind that is not tethered to any organized religion, to any dogma or belief, that is not burdened with the known - it is only such a mind that can discover if there is, or there is not God. To state that there is, or there is not, cripples all discovery.