Gems from U.G. Krishnamurti

- We are not created for any grander purpose than the ants that are there or
the flies that are hovering around us or the mosquitoes that are sucking our
blood.
- There is no such thing as your mind or my mind. May be there is such a
thing as the "world mind" where all the cumulative knowledge and
the experiences thereof are accumulated and passed on from generation to
generation.
- To be yourself is very easy, you don't have to do a thing. No effort is
necessary. You don't have to exercise your will, you don't have to do
anything to be yourself. But to be something other than what you are, you
have to do a lot of things.
- Life has to be described in pure and simple physical and physiological
terms. It must be demystified and depsychologised.
- What I am trying to point out is simply that your spiritual and religious
activities are basically selfish.
- The Natural State is a state of great sensitivity--but this is a physical
sensitivity of the senses, not some kind of emotional compassion or
tenderness for others. There is compassion only in the sense that there are
no 'others' for me, and so there is no separation
- The plain fact is that if you don't have a problem, you create one. If you
don't have a problem you don't feel that you are living.
- The appreciation of music, poetry and language is all culturally
determined and is the product of thought. It is acquired taste that tells
you that Beethoven's Ninth Symphony is more beautiful than a chorus of cats
screaming; both produce equally valid sensations.
- The peak of sex experience is the one thing in life you have that comes
close to being a first-hand experience; all the rest of your experiences are
second-hand, somebody else's.
- To be yourself requires extraordinary intelligence. You are blessed with
that intelligence; nobody need give it to you, nobody can take it away from
you. He who lets that express itself in its own way is a natural man.
- All gurus are welfare organizations providing petty experiences to their
followers. The guru game is a profitable industry; try and make two million
dollars a year any other way.
- Physical fear is totally different from the fear of losing what you have,
the fear of not getting what you want. You call this psychological fear.
- Nature is interested in only two things--to survive and to reproduce one
like itself. Anything you superimpose on that, all the cultural input, is
responsible for the boredom of man.
- What you call 'yourself' is fear. The 'you' is born out of fear; it lives
in fear, functions in fear and dies in fear.
Traveling destroys many illusions and creates new
illusions for us. I have discovered, to my dismay, if I may put it that way,
that human nature is exactly the same whether a person is a Russian, or an
American, or someone from somewhere else.
We think that thoughts are there inside of us. We think that they are
self-generated and spontaneous. What is actually there is what I call a
thought-sphere. The thought-sphere is the totality of man's experiences,
thoughts, and feelings passed on to us from generation to generation.
I may sound very cynical, but a cynic is really a realist. Cynicism will
help you to have a healthy look at the way things are going on in the world.
We don't want to be free from fear. All that we want to do is to play
games with it and talk about freeing ourselves from fear.
Boredom is a bottomless pit. As long as you think that there is something
more interesting, more purposeful, more meaningful to do than what you are
actually doing, you have no way of freeing yourself from boredom.
The whole purpose of a conversation or dialogue is only to convert the
other man to your point of view. If you have no point of view, there is no
way he can convince or convert you to his point of view.
It would be more interesting to learn from children, than try to teach
them how to behave, how to live and how to function.
Only if you reject all the other paths can you discover your own path.
All experiences, however extraordinary they may be, are in the area of
sensuality.
I am not in conflict with the society. I am not interested in changing it. The demand to bring about a change in myself isn't there
anymore. So, the
demand to change the world at large is not there. I suffer with the suffering
man and am happy with the happy man...
I don't have any thoughts which I can call my own--not one thought, not one
word, not one experience.
'Be selfish and stay selfish' is my message. Wanting enlightenment is
selfishness. Charity is selfishness.
Food, clothing and shelter- these are the basic needs. Beyond that, if you
want anything, it is the beginning of self-deception.
The fact is that we don't want to be free. What is responsible for our
problems is the fear of losing what we have and what we know. All these
therapies, all these techniques, religious or otherwise, are only perpetuating
the agony of man.
These pages were last updated on 08 November, 2000
© Brian Sexton, Limerick, Ireland.