Selection from a Krishnamurti dialogue

QUESTION: In spite of your warning that the practice of a technique of meditation makes the mind dull and mechanical, it appears to me that your teaching of listening and seeing and learning also involves struggle in the mind to drop its activities.

KRISHNAMURTI: Don't ask me, just look at the question itself. Sir, apart from meditation, what does practice do? What is practice? I'll tell you, sir: you go to the office every day from nine to five - I don't know why you do it, but you do. No, no, don't laugh, that's part of your life. And that's a routine, isn't it? Get up in the morning, shave, rush off to have breakfast, rush off to the office, and there you sit at a desk and write, write, whatever you do, or work in a factory. So that becomes a routine, doesn't it? That becomes mechanical, that becomes a practice, a habit. You accept that as the normal way of life, and somebody comes along and says: any system, any practice in meditation will also become mechanical, repetitive, makes the mind dull. Here you accept it and it is also making your mind dull in the office, in the factory. Right? If I am the carpenter, and I all day look at the wood, feel the wood, the right instruments, my mind obviously becomes wooden. A scientist who spends all day long in research inventing, accumulating knowledge - any specialization must inevitably make the mind dull. Obviously. No?

Sir, this is fairly simple, isn't it? If you are all the time accumulating knowledge and theorizing about knowledge you are specializing. You understand, sir? Don't you know this? If I sing, nothing but sing all day, however marvellously, I have specialized in that, my voice becomes marvellous but I may know nothing about life, because my specialization keeps me in a narrow groove.

Now if this is so, which appears to be so, and the questioner says also, listening, seeing, learning also involves struggle in the mind to drop its activities. Sir, we have made life into a marvellous machine of struggle. Right? We are struggling for everything: for god, for meditation, for love, struggle, struggle, struggle. Right? And you say, listening, seeing, learning is also a struggle. I say, no. Why do we make life into a struggle? Sir, answer these questions, put it to yourself: whether you can live without any conflict in life. Don't say, no. We are used to conflict. Right? To reach god, enlightenment, nirvana, or self-blah, blah, you must struggle.

We are asking: is there a way of living which is not lazy, which is not comforting, which is not merely routine, is there a way of living daily life without a single shadow of conflict?

Have you ever even asked, enquired to find out if it is possible to live a life, a daily life, without a single sense of conflict, without a single sense of a problem, without this terrible sense of 'I must control'? Go on, sir, enquire. The speaker says, not theoretically, don't accept it, the speaker says, yes it is possible - not escape, not go off into the Himalayas, or become a hermit, but living here on this earth, meeting people, married, if you are, and doing everything that one has to, to live without conflict. Find out, sirs.

Why is there conflict in our life? Is it not because we are all trying to become something? Right? If I am not good, I will be good. This idea of perpetual movement of becoming something, ultimately becoming enlightened, which is nonsense.

So what is it that is becoming? You understand my question? Who is it that is becoming? The 'me'? And what is the 'me'? My name, my form, my memory, my education, my attachments, my bank account, if I have one, and so on and so on. Right? Why can't we face all this? Why can't we look at it instead of imagining all kinds of things. So as long as there is a desire to become there must be conflict. Right? Then you will say, "If I don't become, what will happen? If I don't succeed in the office, what will happen to me?" Go on, sir, answer it yourself, I don't have to answer it. If you don't become something in the office, you won't have more money, better cars and so on. Right? And if you don't become something inwardly you will never reach whatever you want to reach. So this struggle is going on all the time, for the rich man and for the poor man.

So can you find out for yourself whether it is possible to live happily on this earth without all this monstrous divisions and mess? Sir, meditation is something immense, it cannot come through struggle. Right? Through practise, through a system, because your mind then becomes routine, mechanical, by listening, seeing, learning you can also make that mechanical. Anything you can make mechanical. But to see for oneself, aware of one's brain, mind, how it is becoming mechanical. The very perception of the danger ends the danger. That is, when you stand on a precipice the very danger demands that you act. Right? When you see a cobra near you, you act. But we don't see the danger of this mechanical process of living. Right? Why don't you see the danger? Why don't you see the danger of having a leader, religious leaders? Look at you all! Because you want somebody to tell you what to do - in meditation, how to lead a spiritual life, what to do in politics, what to do in business - you follow? Told, educated, go to Harvard to become a business manager. You understand? You are all being told what to do. And the speaker refuses to tell you what to do so you think he is evading. Whereas he is saying something: look at the facts, just look. And when you look very carefully, observe without any prejudice, then the story is told by that which you are observing. Then as the story ends the observation ends.

QUESTION: You urge people to look inward and ask fundamental questions, don't you think yoga, meditation and so on prepares one's mind to look within?

KRISHNAMURTI: First of all, sirs and ladies, I am not persuading you, or urging you to do anything - nothing. All that he is saying is: look! Look in the mirror as you do when you shave or comb your hair, look at yourself as you are: look. Look at the world, look at the society which we have made, look at all the politicians, what they are doing: just look first. But we don't look; we have prejudices, you follow, all our conditionings which prevents us from looking, therefore looking is not important but why you are asking the question, why you are conditioned. You follow? Then naturally you discover what you are, you don't have to look inward, it is all there. But to look at the outer, which will give you a criteria, and from that criteria look at yourself so that there is no illusion about yourself. I wonder if you understand all this?

Now the questioner says: doesn't meditation, yoga and so on help you to prepare yourself to look inward? You have had it for ten thousand years, haven't you, you have been preparing. And you are still preparing, and where are you at the end of it, in spite of your robes, in spite of your meditation, in spite of your real gods? Why don't you ask those questions, sir? Sir, illumination or enlightenment doesn't demand preparation. Take that! Because preparation involves time, many lives, or many years. Right? That's your tradition. You accept it so you say, well, I must life after life, life after life struggle to achieve ultimately this enlightenment which will give me complete happiness.

Sir, please do listen to this seriously, if you are interested, I am not persuading you to listen, if you don't want to listen, don't listen. Our minds are conditioned to time, our brains themselves have evolved through time. It's not your brain, or my brain, it is the brain - evolved through time and so it sees everything in terms of time: I am not, but I will be, I am violent but I will not be violent. So by its very conditioning it thinks in terms of time as a process, preparation for enlightenment, preparation as when you want to have a good job you prepare through examinations and so on and so on.

So our whole way of thinking, looking at life is to prepare for something. I question this preparation. Is enlightenment, the ultimate comprehension of that extraordinary thing called truth, is that to be approached through preparation? Which means what? Preparing yourself for what? Preparing yourself not to be greedy, not to have desires, not to have sex. You are preparing, which means what? You want to reach truth and you are preparing for it, which means truth is a fixed point. Right? And you are preparing to go towards the fixed point which means you don't begin with freedom, you begin with preparing, struggling, controlling. But you also know unconsciously or consciously that freedom is essential for truth. So why don't you ask yourself, begin yourself by being free now, not ultimately - free from attachment, free from your fears. You follow, sir, why don't you begin there, freedom first? Because it is only when you are completely free the other is.

So preparation, according to K, is not necessary at all. What is necessary is to begin with freedom, and that freedom goes with intelligence, not to do what you like. That freedom is responsibility, integrity.

Rajghat 1st Public Question & Answer Meeting 28th November 1981

New KFA Trustee

With deep appreciation, we welcome Rabindra Singh as a new KFA trustee. Rabindra has been a core member of Friedrich Grohe's Krishnamurti Link International (see their website as well as The Link magazine) and has travelled the world meeting with people interested in Krishnamurti, helping to put them in touch with each other, as well as providing material support. He plans to be in Ojai for at least three of the six annual trustee meetings and attend the rest by speakerphone.