U. G. Krishnamurti

“ Free yourself from that social structure that is operating in you without becoming anti-social, without becoming a reformer, without becoming anti-this, anti-that. You can throw the whole thing out of your system and free yourself from the burden of this culture, for yourself and by yourself. Whether it has any usefulness for society or not is not your concern. If there is one individual who walks free, you don't have any more the choking feeling of what this horrible culture has done to you. ”

“ 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 is no inner and outer. What I am trying to say is that there is a feeling, there is a demand, that there is something more interesting that you can do with yourself, more meaningful, more purposeful than your existence is today. That is the demand, you see. That is why there is this restlessness. You become restless because of this drive in you, which is put in there by the society or culture, that makes you feel that there is something more interesting, more meaningful, more purposeful that your life can be than what it is today. ”

“ Society is interested in the status quo, it doesn't want to change. The only way it can maintain the status quo or the continuity is through this demand, the demand that everybody should fit into this structure. Whereas every individual is unique, physically speaking.
Nature is creating something unique all the time. It is not interested in a perfect man; it is not interested in a religious man.
We have placed before man the goal or the ideal of a perfect man, a truly religious man. So anything you do to reach that goal of perfection is destroying the sensitivity of this body. ”

“ There's no question at all. There can't be any question without knowledge. All questions are born out of the answers you already have. So, that is the reason why a question of that kind, whether it is posed by yourself or somebody else, does not want an answer. The answer for any question is the end of the question. The end of the question means the end of the answer that you already have. Not only your answer, but the answers that have been accumulating for centuries must not be there. ”

“ How can you bring about a change in consciousness which has no limits, which has no boundaries, which has no frontiers? They can spend millions and millions and millions of dollars and do every kind of research to find the seat of human consciousness, but there is no such thing as the seat of human consciousness at all. They can try -- and they are going to spend billions of dollars to try to find out -- but the chances of their succeeding in that are slim. There is no such thing as a seat, located in any particular individual. What there is is thought. ”

“ You owe allegiance to your flag and they owe allegiance to their flag, and you are at the same time talking of peace in this world? How can there be any peace in this world when you are waving your flag here, and they are waving their flag? Whoever has better weapons will have the day for himself. ”

“ It's like a volcano erupting all the time. That is the silence, that is peace. The blood is flowing through your veins like a river. If you tried to magnify the sound of the flow of your blood you will be surprised -- it's like the roar of the ocean. ”

“ The body cannot take those high and low tides of energy that is there in your body. So you are wanting to suppress it for some spiritual or social reasons. You are not going to succeed.
Anger is energy, a tremendous outburst of energy. And by destroying that energy through any means, you are destroying the very expression of life itself. It becomes a problem only when you try to do something with that energy. When it is absorbed by the system, you will not do the things that you think you will do if the anger is left alone. You are actually not dealing with the anger, but the frustration. ”

“ Thought is not something mysterious, it is what the culture has put in there, which is, of course, society. They are not different -- culture and society. Society is interested in its continuity and permanence. It is interested in the status quo. It is always maintaining that status quo. That is where thought is helpful for the society. Society says, "If you don't act that way, if you don't think that way, you will become anti-social, because all your actions will become thoughtless, impulsive actions." ”

“ All your life you are trying to become that ideal man and what you are left with is the misery, the suffering, and the hope to be that. "One day, you will see." That's the hope. We will die with that hope. ”

“ All the solutions that we have been offered, and the solutions which we have been adopting for centuries, have not done any good except to give us a little bit of comfort, a palliative to help you bear the pain. Yet we are not free from that pain at all because of the hope that somehow the instrument which is turning all these things into problems can be solved through the same instrument. The only thing that this mechanism of thinking can do is to create a problem. ”

“ If there is no life there you become a corpse. A dead corpse is still responding, but in a different way. That is why you call this life. Life, in other words, is nothing but the pulse and the beat and the breath of life. ”

“ Whenever a thought takes its birth there, you have created an entity or a point, and in reference to that point you are experiencing things. So, when the thought is not there, is it possible for you to experience anything or relate anything to a non-existing thing here?
Every time a thought is born, you are born. Thought in its very nature is shortlived, and once it is gone, that's the end of it. ”

“ When the cave man used the jawbone of an ass to kill his neighbor, there were chances of survival for others. The same cave man today who lives there in the Kremlin and in the Whitehouse, and in the Parliament House there in India -- they are the ones who will set in motion, who will let loose forces of destruction that will completely wipe out every form of life on this planet.
And man will take with him every species that exists today on this planet. It has all come out of that thinking of the man who taught religion to men, who wanted to establish love on the face of this earth. ”

“ The problem is not really the boredom. You are not conscious of the existence of boredom either on the conscious level of your thinking or on the conscious level of your existence.
The attractiveness of those things [which you use] to free yourself from the non-existing boredom has really created the boredom. And those things really cannot fill this boredom (created by that) . So it goes on and on and on and on -- the newer and still newer techniques and methods. Every year we have a new guru coming from India with a new gimmick, with a new technique or some new therapy, you know. ”

“ As long as you are doing something to be selfless, you will be a self-centered individual. When this movement in the direction of wanting to be a selfless man is not there, then there is no self and there is no self-centered activity. So it is the very techniques, the systems and methods which you are using to reach your goal of selflessness, which are self-centered activities.
Unfortunately, society has placed that goal before us as the ideal goal, because a selfless man will be a great asset to the society, and the society is interested only in continuity -- the status quo. ”

“ Why do you feel unhappy, first of all? Why do feel this feeling of unkindness in you? Because of the goal. It is that which creates the opposite. You can see for yourself, I don't have to tell you. You are always thinking, "I should be like that, I ought to be that, I must be like that, and I am not that." It is that thought that has created the opposite of it. If that is gone, this also is gone. This man cannot be a career man. This man cannot be a sensitive man, not sensitive within the framework of your cultural mores.
But this is a different kind of sensitivity. ”

“ But it can never, never, solve the problem.
If thought is not the instrument to solve the problems, is there any other instrument? I say no. It can only create the problems. It cannot solve the problems. When this understanding dawns on you, then you will realize that the energy that is there in the body, which is the manifestation of life or expression of life, handles everything in a tremendously easier way than the frictional thinking which you are generating through your ideas of how to handle these problems. ”

“ There are so many things happening in nature which cannot be attributed to any particular cause. So, your interest in studying the lives or the biography of some of those people whom you think were enlightened, or god men or some such thing, is to find a clue as to how it happened to them, so that you can use whatever technique they used and make the same thing happen to you. That is your interest. Those people are giving you some techniques, some system, some methods which don't work at all. They create the hope that somehow, through some miracle, one day it is going to happen to you. ”

“ You are not in conflict with the society any more. You will not be any use to the society. On the other hand, if you become a threat to the society, the society will liquidate you.
You are a neurotic because you want two things at the same time. It is that which has created this problem for you. Wanting two things at the same time. You want to bring about a change in yourself. The change is the demand of the society, so that you can become a part of that and maintain the continuity of the social structure without any change. ”

“ You cannot separate yourself from the thought and say "these are my thoughts." That is the illusion you have, and you cannot be without any illusion. You always replace one illusion with another illusion. ”

“ So this culture, your values, religious or otherwise, haven't touched a bit there.
If man is freed from this moral dilemma, which has been the basis of the whole thinking of man, then he will live like a human being. Not a spiritual man, not a religious man. A religious man is no good for the society. A kind man is a menace to the society, one who is practicing kindness as a fine art. ”