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.