U. G. Krishnamurti

“ I do not know if you see the utter helplessness of the situation and how, if anyone thinks he can help you, he will inevitably mislead you. And the less phony he is, the more powerful he is. The more enlightened he is, the more misery and mischief he will create for you.
Life as such has no beginning and no end. It is a beginningless and endless movement and you are only an expression of it. You are conscious of yourself through thought, by which I mean not just conscious thought but that conditioning which transforms the life that passes through you into feelings, into pleasure and pain. ”

“ You are always operating in and through your dead memory. Memory is nothing more than the same old nonsense repeating itself, that's all. All you know or can ever know is memory, and memory is thought. Your ceaseless thinking is only giving you continuity. Why do you have to do that all the time? It is not worth it. You are wearing yourself out. When there is a need for it one can understand.
You are mulling over the future or the past all the time, oblivious to the present. There is no future in relation to your problem. Any solution you think of is in the future and is therefore useless. ”

“ The so-called highest goal is like the horizon. The further you move towards it the further it recedes. The goal, like the horizon, is not really there. It is a projection of your own fear and it moves away from you as you pursue it. How can you keep up with it? There is nothing that you can do. Still, it is desire that keeps you moving. No matter in which direction you move, it is the same.
What you experience through your separative consciousness is an illusion. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ You can't say that falling bombs are an illusion. It is not an illusion. Only your experience of it is an illusion. The reality of the world that you are experiencing now is an illusion. That is all I am trying to say.
There is no such thing as absolute. It is thought and thought alone that has created the absolute. Absolute zero, absolute power, absolute perfection, these have been invented by the holy men and experts. They kidded themselves and others. Down the centuries, the saints, saviors and prophets of mankind have kidded themselves and everybody else. ”

“ The peace there is not this inane dead silence you experience. It's like a volcano erupting all the time. That is 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 sound of the beat of your heart is something. You create some funny experience called the experience of the silent mind which is ridiculous, absurd. ”

“ For this reason, society may feel threatened by this individual. This society, structured the way it is, can make no use of such a person.
When once the organism has freed itself from the stranglehold of thought, anything you do to try to bring about peace and harmony there only creates disharmony and violence. It is like using war to create peace in a peaceful world. When the search itself comes to an end it comes to an end with a big bang, as it were. Then peace is something that cannot be practiced or taught. ”

“ To talk of living from moment to moment by creating a thought-induced state of mind has no meaning to me except in terms of the physical functioning of the body.
When thought is not there all the time, what is there is living from moment to moment. It's all frames, millions of frames, to put it in the language of film. There is no continuity there. There is no movement there. Thought can never capture the movement. It is only when you invest a thought with motion you try to capture the movement, but actually thought can never capture any movement that is there around you. ”

“ 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. All the destruction has come out of them, one who talks of love and one who talks about non-violence. All the destructive forces originated in the thinking of that man.
We are all the inheritors of that culture. We cannot do anything but that. You are freed from the burden of this, the falseness of the whole culture, that's all that I am saying. Individually, you are freed from the totality of all the absurdities that have been imposed upon us. ”

“ Why are you killing people, thousands of people, for no fault of theirs? Why are you limiting something which is natural but are not condemning the nations that are dropping bombs on helpless people? Do you call them sane? Both of them have sprung from the same source. As long as you do anything to control your anger you will indulge in such atrocious things and justify them because that is the only way to protect your way of life and your way of thinking. ”

“ Free yourself from that social structure that is operating in you without becoming antisocial, 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. ”

“ Anything you do is part of the mechanism of thought. Your search for happiness is prolonging your unhappiness. What is there inside you is only the movement of knowledge wanting to know more and more. The you, the separative structure, can continue only as long as there is a demand to know.
The demand for freedom, whether outwardly or inwardly, has been with us for a long while. We have been told that this demand is a sacred, noble thing. Have we again been misled? The demand to be free is the cause of your problems. You want to see yourself as free. ”

“ Even assuming for a moment that you are an enlightened man, you have no way of knowing anything about it. It can never become a part of your knowledge. This has understood that it is not possible to experience anything any more. I don't know if I quite make myself clear. The individuality, the isolation, the separation or whatever you want to call it is not there anymore. What separates you, what isolates you, is thought. It creates frontiers, boundaries. Once that is not there you are boundless, limitless; not that you can experience that boundlessness and limitlessness of your consciousness. ”

“ The only way the past can survive and maintain its continuity is through the constant demand to experience the same thing over and over. That is why life has become a bore. Life has become boring because we have made of it a repetitive thing. So what we mistakenly call the present is really the repetitive past projecting a fictitious future. Your goals, your search, your aspirations, are cast in that mold.
From your knowledge out of the past you ask questions and the very motive of your asking is only to gain more knowledge from someone else so that your knowledge structure can continue. ”

“ There is only a certain gathering of knowledge, which is thought, but no individuality there. The knowledge you have of things is all that you are capable of experiencing. Without knowledge, no experience of any kind is possible. You cannot separate experience and knowledge. The self is nothing sacred. It is the totality of your knowledge and you are, unfortunately, stuck with it. Why are you interested in separating the knowledge you have about yourself, whatever you call yourself? Knowledge is all that is there. Where is the self? It is an illusion. ”

“ Wanting has to go. Wanting to be free from something that is not there is what you call sorrow. Sorrow is there for you as long as you think. There is actually no sorrow there to be free from. Thinking about and struggling against sorrow is sorrow. Since you can't stop thinking, and thinking is sorrow, you will always suffer. There is no way out, no escape.
Suppose I say that this meaninglessness is all there is for you, all there can ever be for you. What will you do? The false and absurd goal you have before you is responsible for that dissatisfaction and meaninglessness in you. ”

“ Thought is a self-perpetuating mechanism. It controls, molds, shapes our ideas and actions. Idea and action, they are one and the same. All our actions are born out of ideas. Our ideas are thoughts passed on to us from generation to generation. Thought is not the instrument to help us to live in harmony with the life around us. That is why you create all these ecological problems, problems of pollution and the problem of possibly destroying ourselves with the most destructive weapons that we have invented. ”

“ That is why each individual is unique. Because of this input of culture it has become impossible for this organism to show uniqueness. We have destroyed the possibility of what nature can do. You only use this paradise that nature has created including not only mankind but all the species that exist on this planet. We are solely and fully responsible for the chaos that mankind has created and there seems to be no way out of it.
Every time a so-called savior comes along he says that he is an avatar and that he is the answer to all our problems. ”

“ All are trips in the wrong direction. They are all within the field of time. Timeless can never be experienced, grasped, contained, much less given expression to, by any man. That beaten track will lead you nowhere. There is no oasis situated yonder. You are stuck with the mirage.
This state is a physical condition of your being. It is not some kind of psychological mutation. It is not a state of mind into which you can fall one day and out of the next. You can't imagine the extent to which, as you are now, thought pervades and interferes with the functioning of every cell in your body. ”

“ So I think there is little point in my doing anything in society. It has its own momentum. Anything you try to do will engulf you and add to that momentum. Who has given the mandate to all these people to save mankind?
If the entire collective knowledge and experience of man is thrown out, what is left is a primordial and primeval state, without the primitiveness. That kind of individual is of no use to society at all. Like a shady tree, this individual may provide shade but can never be conscious of his doing so. ”

“ To attempt to be free from memory is withdrawal, and withdrawal is death.
The greatest ideal, the most imposing, perfect and powerful, is, of course, God. It is an invention of frightened minds. The human mind has many destructive inventions to its credit. The most destructive one, and the one that has corrupted you, is the invention of God. The history of human thinking has produced saints, teachers, gurus, but God is the most corrupt of them all. Man has already messed up his life and religion has made it worse. It is religion that really made a mess of man's life. ”

“ There is not going to be any paradise. It is the idea of a paradise, the idea of creating a heaven on earth that has turned this beautiful paradise that we already have on this planet into a hell. We are solely responsible for what is happening and the answers for our problems cannot come from the past and its glory or from the great religious teachers of mankind. Those teachers will naturally claim that you all have failed and that they have the answers for the problems that we are confronted with today. ”

“ The separative structure of thought which was introduced into the consciousness of man long ago has created the violent world and will probably push man and the rest of life on this planet to the brink of extinction. But biologically, each cell has the wisdom to avoid models and promises and simply, out of sheer survival motives, cooperates with the cell next to it. Out of the terror of annihilation, man, like the cells of his body, will learn to cooperate, but not out of love or compassion. ”

“ I am only interested in what is actually happening now, not tomorrow or yesterday.
I have no particular message for mankind nor do I have any of the missionary zeal in me. I am not a savior of mankind or any such thing. People come here out of their own free will and volition because they have heard of me or out of sheer curiosity, it doesn't matter. A person may come here out of any one of a number of reasons. He finds me somehow different, a rare bird, and cannot figure me out or fit me into any framework he knows. ”

“ 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 person that pushes you. Anything teaches you just the same if only you let it.
You will never know what life is. Nobody can say anything about life. You can give definitions but those definitions have no meaning. You can theorize about life but that is a thing which is not of any value to you. ”

“ You will never be without thought. Being able to think is necessary to survive but in this state thought stops choking you. It falls into its natural rhythm.
This is the crux of the whole problem. The one that is looking at what you call the self is the self. It is creating an illusory division of itself into subject and object, and through this division it is continuing. This is the divisive nature that is operating in you, in your consciousness. Continuity of its existence is all that interests it. ”

“ If the goal goes, if you brush aside the goal, you replace one with another. You can't be without illusion. You replace one illusion with another. If illusion goes, you go. If you accept the goal it is alright with me but I say that the goal itself is false. I maintain that there is nothing to be achieved, nothing to be accomplished, nothing to be attained. So all that you are doing to achieve your goal is meaningless. The earlier it dawns on you the better for you. If those things produce some experiences it will be very difficult for you to transcend your own experience. ”

“ I have discovered, for myself and by myself, that what we have been told about freedom, enlightenment and God is false. No power in the world can touch this. This does not make me superior, nothing of the sort. To feel superior or inferior you must separate yourself from the world. I do not look upon the world as a separate thing, as you do. The knowledge I have about the world, whether within or without, comes into operation only when there is a demand for it. ”

“ Forget about the ideal society and the ideal human being. Just look at the way you are functioning, that is the important thing. What has prevented the organism from fully flowering into its own uniqueness is culture. It has placed the wrong thing, the ideal person, before man. The whole thing is born out of the divisive consciousness of mankind. It has brought us nothing but violence. That is why no two gurus or saviors ever agree. Each is intent upon preaching his own nonsense. ”

“ Since you are determined to bring about change, a notion put into you by your culture, you remain discontent and want the world to be different. When your inner demand to be something different from what in fact you are comes to an end then the neurotic demand to change your society ceases. Then you cannot be in conflict with society. You are in perfect harmony with society, including its brutalities and miseries. All your attempts to change this brutal society only add momentum to it.
This is not to say that the free individual is indifferent to society, on the contrary. ”