U. G. Krishnamurti

“ Listening to other people is what you've been doing all your life — it's the cause of your unhappiness. You are unique. There is no reason for your wanting to be like another chap. You can't be like him, anyway. This wanting — wanting to listen, wanting to understand, wanting to be like such-and-such an individual — has come about because society is interested in creating a perfect man; but there is no such thing as a perfect man — this is our problem. All we can do is be ourselves, and no one can help you be that. ”

“ How badly do you want the answer to that question? A question is born out of the answers that you already know. You want to know what my state is and make it part of knowledge, your knowledge, i.e. the tradition; but knowledge must come to an end. How can you understand this simple thing? Your wanting to know only adds momentum to your knowledge. It is not possible to know what this is, because knowledge is still there and is gathering momentum. The continuity of knowledge is all you are interested in. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ You will never listen to anybody describing his state or ask any questions about understanding at all.
What you are looking for does not exist. You would rather tread an enchanted ground with beatific visions of a radical transformation of that non-existent self of yours into a state of being which is conjured up by some bewitching phrases. That takes you away from your natural state — it is a movement away from yourself. To be yourself requires extraordinary intelligence. ”

“ Even what you consider 'sacred and holy' is a contamination in that consciousness. It is not through any volition of yours; when once the frontiers are broken — not through any effort of yours, not through any volition of yours — then the floodgates are open and everything goes out. In that process of flushing out, you have all these visions. It's not a vision outside there or inside of you; suddenly you yourself, the whole consciousness, takes the shape of Buddha, Jesus, Mahavira, Mohammed, Socrates — only those people who have come into this state ”

“ There is nothing you can say about that time of being 'conked out' — that can never become part of your conscious existence or conscious thinking.
You don't know what brings you back from death. If you had any will at that moment, you could decide not to come back. When the 'conking out' is over, the stream of thought picks up exactly where it left off. Dullness is over; clarity is back. The body feels very stiff — slowly it begins to move of its own accord, limbering itself up. ”

“ You become yourself. You see, the shock that your dependence on the entire heritage of mankind has been wrong — the realization that dawns on you hits you like lightning — that your dependence on this culture, be it oriental or occidental, has been responsible for this situation in you. That applies to the whole as well, because the nation is the extension of the individual, and the world is the extension of the different nations. So you are freed from the burden of the past and become, for the first time, an individual. ”

“ You have a feeling that there is a 'cameraman' who is directing the eyes. But left to themselves — when there is no 'cameraman' — the eyes do not linger, but are moving all the time. They are drawn by the things outside. Movement attracts them, or brightness or a color which stands out from whatever is around it. There is no 'I' looking; mountains, flowers, trees, cows, all look at me. The consciousness is like a mirror, reflecting whatever is there outside. ”

“ The question has to burn itself out, and the question cannot burn itself out so long as you are waiting for an answer either from within or from without. When the question burns itself out, what is there begins to express itself. It is your answer, not anybody else's answer. You don't even have to find the answer, because the answer is already there and will somehow express itself. You don't have to be a scholar, you don't have to read books, you don't have to do anything; what is there begins to express itself. ”

“ Such a man cannot guide or lead you anywhere. It is not that I am against gurus — not at all. He knows — even your books say it — that it is not the guru that can help you. It doesn't mean some sort of mysterious thing. The hymns say "Whomever it chooses, to him it happens." That does not mean that there is any power outside of you. That potential is there in you already — it has the capacity to explode. If through some strange chance, if through some luck, thought remains by itself without splitting itself into two, something has to happen to that. ”

“ What makes you unhappy is the search for a thing that does not exist. Happiness does not exist at all. Similarly, there is no such thing as enlightenment. You may say that every teacher and all the saints and saviours of mankind have been asserting for centuries upon centuries that there is enlightenment and that they are enlightened. Throw them all in one bunch into the river! I don't care. To realize that there is no enlightenment at all is enlightenment. (Laughter)
Thought doesn't stop. Thoughts will always be there, because thought and life are not two different things. ”

“ But this flushing out of everything good and bad, holy and unholy, sacred and profane has got to happen, otherwise your consciousness is still contaminated, still impure. During that time it goes on and on and on — there are hundreds and thousands of them — then, you see, you are put back into that primeval, primordial state of consciousness. Once it has become pure, of and by itself, then nothing can touch it, nothing can contaminate that any more. ”

“ Why are you still looking for the meaning of life, the purpose of life? Everybody has talked of the meaning of life and the purpose of life — everybody. Answers have been given by the saviours, saints and sages of mankind — you have thousands of them in India — and yet today you are still asking the same question, "Has life any purpose or meaning?" ”

“ No Power Outside of Man
(An Interview by Professor HSK, Mysore, India, 1980)
What is necessary for man is to free himself from the entire past of mankind, not only his individual past. That is to say, you have to free yourself from what every man before you has thought, felt and experienced — then only is it possible for you to be yourself. The whole purpose of my talking to people is to point out the uniqueness of every individual. Culture or civilization or whatever you might call it has always tried to fit us into a framework. Man is not man at all ”

“ This is such a backward nation. You see, we just talk of peace. Why shouldn't India explode the H-bomb? — that is my question. Whether you will be in a position to deliver those weapons or not is a different matter. China is growing stronger and stronger — they will not listen to all this talk. India — nobody cares for India — that is the situation.
This illusion that we have, that all those gurus who are going from India are changing the world, is really a fantasy. Actually, the impact of all this is zero. ”

“ Why be like this man? Handing over the torch from one person to another and maintaining the hierarchical structure — what for? Following another is an animal quality. Man cannot become man so long as he follows somebody. What is responsible for man remaining an animal is that culture — the top dog, following somebody — that has not helped you at all. You want to be a cheap imitation of Sankara or Buddha; you don't want to be yourself. What for? I tell you, you are far more unique and extraordinary than all those saints and saviours of mankind put together. ”

“ As I see it, there is no preparation for it, no sadhana, no meditation. You can stand on your head for forty years; nothing is going to happen; probably you will experience what you can experience, anything you want. Thought is something extraordinary: you can create something, a solid object, and put it out there, touch it, feel it, experience it and talk to it — you think it is something extraordinary. ”

“ What you call the 'I' or the 'self' or the 'center' is illusory. I can say it is illusory, because it the knowledge you have about the self that creates the self when you look at the self. So all the talk of 'self-knowledge' or 'self- knowing' has no meaning to me. It is within the framework of knowledge. It is playing tricks with itself.
So, this continuity comes to an end, and thought falls into its natural rhythm. Then it can't link up. The linking gets broken, and once it is broken it is finished. Then it is not once that thought explodes; every time that a thought arises, it explodes. ”

“ You have invested everything in one basket, self-realization, and, in the end, suddenly you discover that there is no self to discover, no self to realize — and you say to yourself "What the hell have I been doing all my life?!" ”

“ Of course now I have my memory back — I lost it at first, but now I have it back — but my memory is in the background and only comes into play when it's needed, automatically. When it's not needed, there is no mind here, there is no thought, there is only life. ”

“ What separates you, what isolates you, is your thought — it creates the frontiers, it creates the boundaries. And once the boundaries are not there, it is boundless, limitless. Not that you can experience that boundlessness and limitlessness of your consciousness; the content of your consciousness is so immense that you can't say anything about it. ”

“ It is not that something new is seen, or that there is a total attention; there has been a sudden change in the light itself. There is no recognition of that as beauty. Clarity is there, which probably wasn't there before the light changed. Then this consciousness suddenly expands to the size of the object in front of the body, and the lungs take a deep breath. ”

“ If you really come to the point that no outside agency can be of any help, automatically your total helplessness also goes. These are the obverse and reverse of the same coin. You still have some hope — the fact that you are here means you have not given up hope. Or, if you don't come here, you will go to see somebody else in India — the avatar himself, the god himself walking on the Earth. ”

“ Man has survived for centuries, and now we are all of a sudden talking about 'values' and all that kind of stuff. What for? It has not helped us to live in harmony and peace. We have created this moral problem, you see. Plants and animals don't have a religious problem; man has created this religious problem.
You see, this has absolutely no social content at all, and I can't think of any collective action. So this individual is just like something thrown out by Nature, and whether anybody recognizes him or not is of no importance. This man cannot be of any use to this society. ”

“ It's not that I am interpreting or understanding Nature's ways, the purpose of evolution, or any such thing; there may not be any such thing as evolution at all. If it had not been for the culture, Nature would have thrown up many more flowers — so this has become a stumbling block to man's freeing himself in his own way. What is responsible for his difficulty is this thing, you see, the culture.
So, that flower — what value has that flower to mankind? ”

“ You want to be free from something. What are you to meditate on? All right, thought is a noise, sound. What is sound? You look at this and you say "This is a tape-recorder," so thought is sound. There is a continuous flow of thoughts, and you are linking up all these thoughts all the time, and this is the noise you can't stand. Why can't you stand that noise? So, by repeating mantras, you create a louder noise, and you submerge the noise of thought, and then you are at peace with yourself. You think that something marvelous is happening to you. But all meditation is a self- centered activity. ”

“ So, each individual has now the responsibility; not any particular nation — India or America or Russia. You see, the individual has to find out his answers for the questions. That is why every individual is the savior of mankind — not collectively. If he can find out an answer for his question, or a solution for his problems, maybe there is some kind of a hope for mankind as a whole — because we all are brought together: whatever is happening in America is affecting us ”

“ You cannot experience anything which you can call your own. Whatever you experience, however profound that experience may be, is the result of the knowledge that is part of your consciousness. Somebody must have, somewhere along the line, experienced the bliss, beatitude — call it 'ecstasy', call it by whatever name you like, but somebody somewhere along the line — not necessarily you — must have experienced that, and that experience is part of your consciousness. ”

“ You cannot be aware; you and awareness cannot co-exist. If you could be in a state of awareness for one second by the clock, once in your life, the continuity would be snapped, the illusion of the experiencing structure, the 'you', would collapse, and everything would fall into the natural rhythm. In this state you do not know what you are looking at — that is awareness. If you recognize what you are looking at, you are there, again experiencing the old, what you know.
What makes one person come into his natural state, and not another person, I don't know. ”