U. G. Krishnamurti

“ The basis of all relationships is the same: "What will I get?"....
It was January of 1972. The mere thought of that time sends chills through my heart even now. It was the time when India had scored a victory over Pakistan and was puffed up with the pride of that victory. There were celebrations everywhere. But there was only chaos in my heart. The torment, the torture U.G. deliberately subjected me to, the battles I waged within myself, my God -- I felt that I wouldn't want them to happen even to my enemies. U.G. and Valentine arrived in Bangalore in January. ”

“ All you know is separateness and duration, space and time, which is the frame superimposed by the mind over the flow of life. But anything that happens in space and time is limiting the energy of life. What life is I don't know nor will I ever. You can say that life is this, that or the other and give hundreds of definitions but the definitions do not capture life. It's like a flowing river. It is only your fear of something coming to an end that is the problem. The ending of fear is the ending of you as you know yourself. ”

“ Spirituality is the invention of the mind, and the MIND IS A MYTH. Your traditions are choking you. But, unfortunately, you don't do anything. You actually love being choked. You love the burden of the cultural garbage-sack, the dead refuse of the past. It has to drop away naturally. It just drops. You don't depend upon knowledge anymore, except as a useful tool to function sanely in this world. Wanting has to go. Wanting to be free from something that is not there is what you call "sorrow". Wanting to be free from sorrow is sorrow. ”

“ We are not ready to accept the fact that thought can only create problems. That instrument cannot be of any help to us.
The talk of intuition and insight is another illusion. Every insight you have is born out of your thinking. The insights strengthen and fortify the very thing you are trying to be free from. All insights, however extraordinary they may be, are worthless. You can create a tremendous structure of thought from your own discovery, which you call insight. But that insight is nothing but the result of your own thinking, the permutations and combinations of thought. ”

“ Love, compassion, ahimsa, understanding, bliss, all these things which religion and psychology have placed before man, are only adding to the strain of the body. All cultures, whether of the Orient or of the Occident, have created this lopsided situation for mankind and turned man into a neurotic individual. Instead of being what you are—unkind—you pursue the fictitious opposite put before you—kindness. To emphasize what we SHOULD be only causes strain, giving momentum to what we already in fact are. In nature we find the animals at one time violent and brutal, at others kind and generous. ”

“ If you question the solutions that have been offered to us by all those people who are marketing these goodies in the name of holiness, enlightenment, transformation, you will find they are really not the solutions. If they were the solutions, they should produce the results and free you from the problem. They do not.
You don't question the solutions because the sentiment creeps in there. "That fellow who is selling this in the marketplace cannot be a fraud, cannot be a fake." You take him to be an enlightened man or a god walking on the face the earth. ”

“ There's no question of your going back. there's no question of a 'fall' for this man at all. Irreversible: an alchemy of some sort.
It is like a nuclear explosion, you see — it shatters the whole body. It is not an easy thing; it is the end of the man — such a shattering thing that it blasts every cell, every nerve in your body. I went through terrible physical torture at that moment. Not that you experience the 'explosion'; you can't experience the 'explosion' — but it's after-effects, the 'fall-out', is the thing that changes the whole chemistry of your body. ”

“ Nature attempts to create unique entities. Nature does not use models. A unique individual like Leonardo da Vinci was of no use to nature and was thrown off the evolutionary process, and this specimen is unable to reproduce itself. By using the models of Jesus, Buddha, Rama or Krishna we have destroyed the possibility of nature throwing out unique individuals. Those that recommend these people forget nature's uniqueness and put everyone on the wrong track. It's like the blind leading the blind. Society is interested in maintaining the status quo and has provided models for us to follow. ”

“ In U.G.'s account, all forms of destruction, disorder, and suffering flow from the division between the self and the world or nature. This divisive movement of thought came into operation with the birth of self-consciousness somewhere in the process of the evolution of mankind and marks the beginning of the end of this species. "The instrument that we think places us at the pinnacle of creation is the very thing that will lead to the destruction of not only the human species but all forms of life on this planet," declares U.G. He is thus no starry-eyed utopian or millenarian. ”

“ Wherever there is division there can't be love. We are trying to bridge this gap, which is horrible for us, which has no meaning, which is demanding something from us, with this fancy idea that there must be love between these two individuals. Obviously, our relationships are not so loving. So we want to somehow make them into loving affairs, loving relationships.
What an amount of energy we are putting into making our relationship into a loving thing! It is a battle, a war. It is like preparing yourself all the time for war hoping that there will be peace, eternal peace, or this or that. ”

“ The future is created by hope, that is the only future that exists. The hope of achieving your goal, the hope of attaining enlightenment, the hope of somehow getting off the merry-go-round—that is the future. The point from which you project yourself into the future appears to you to be the present, the now. But this is mistaken. There is only the past in operation, and that movement creates the illusion of present and future. ”

“ When Bulbul was crying loudly because she couldn't contain the pain of her memories, we too cried with her silently.
If a person who first didn't want to marry at all, melted like snow as soon as he saw Kusuma and decided that if he ever married it would be only to her, we need not be surprised. Her personality, beauty and nature were of that sort. Why did such a person move away from U.G. in her final days? U.G. had told her that she could leave the U.S. and return to India. ”

“ Probably this unlimited consciousness pushes you, I don't know. Not me; I have nothing to do with it. It is like the water finding its own level, that's all — that is its nature. That is what is happening in you: life is trying to destroy the enclosing thing, that dead structure of thought and experience, which is not of its nature. It's trying to come out, to break open. You don't want that. As soon as you see some cracks there, you bring some plaster and fill them in and block it again. It doesn't have to be a so-called self-realized man or spiritual man or God-realized man that pushes you ”

“ You can't see things as they are. You never leave any experience or feeling you have alone. You have to capture and interpret that feeling within the framework of the known. You are happy or unhappy only as you have knowledge about and experience of happiness and unhappiness. So everything has to be brought within the framework of the known before you can experience it. The movement of the known is gathering momentum within you. Its only interest is to continue. There is no entity, nothing there to give itself continuity. It is just the movement of thought, the self-perpetuating separation. ”

“ It feels at first as if you have been given an anaesthetic: the senses become increasingly dull, the heartbeat slows, the feet and hands become ice cold, and the whole body becomes stiff like a corpse. Energy flows from all over the body towards some point. It happens differently every time. The whole process takes forty-eight or forty-nine minutes. During this time the stream of thoughts continues, but there is no reading of the thoughts. At the end of this period you 'conk out': the stream of thought is cut. There is no way of knowing how long that cut lasts — it is not an experience. ”

“ Humanity has polluted, destroyed and killed off everything, all on account of his wanting to be at the center of the universe, of all creation.
You are interested in the self, not I. Whatever it is, it is the most important thing for man as long as he is alive. If you don't think it never occurs to you that you are alive or dead. The very birth of thought creates fear and it is out of fear that all experience springs. Both inner and outer worlds proceed from a point of thought. Everything you experience is born out of thought.
So everything you experience or can experience is an illusion. ”

“ I don't want to live the life of a false person. I am greedy, and non-greed is what they are talking about. There is something wrong somewhere. This greed is something real, something natural to me; what they are talking about is unnatural. So, something is wrong somewhere. But I am not ready to change myself, to falsify myself, for the sake of being in a state of non-greed; my greed is a reality to me. ”