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MAN IS AN amphibian who lives simultaneously in two worlds--the
given and the home-made, the world of matter, life and consciousness
and the world of symbols. In our thinking we make use of
a great variety of symbol-systems--linguistic, mathematical,
pictorial, musical, ritualistic. Without such symbol-systems
we should have no art, no science, no law, no philosophy,
not so much as the rudiments of civilization: in other words,
we should be animals.
Symbols, then, are indispensable. But symbols--as the history
of our own and every other age makes so abundantly clear--can
also be fatal. Consider, for example, the domain of science
on the one hand, the domain of politics and religion on
the other. Thinking in terms of, and acting in response
to, one set of symbols, we have come, in some small measure,
to understand and control the elementary forces of nature.
Thinking in terms of, and acting in response to, another
set of symbols, we use these forces as instruments of mass
murder and collective suicide. In the first case the explanatory
symbols were well chosen, carefully analysed and progressively
adapted to the emergent facts of physical existence. In
the second case symbols originally ill-chosen were never
subjected to thorough-going analysis and never re-formulated
so as to harmonize with the emergent facts of human existence.
Worse still, these misleading symbols were everywhere treated
with a wholly unwarranted respect, as though, in some mysterious
way, they were more real than the realities to which they
referred. In the contexts of religion and politics, words
are not regarded as standing, rather inadequately, for things
and events; on the contrary, things and events are regarded
as particular illustrations of words.
Up to the present symbols have been used realistically
only in those fields which we do not feel to be supremely
important. In every situation involving our deeper impulses
we have insisted on using symbols, not merely unrealistically,
but idolatrously, even insanely. The result is that we have
been able to commit, in cold blood and over long periods
of time, acts of which the brutes are capable only for brief
moments and at the frantic height of rage, desire or fear.
Because they use and worship symbols, men can become idealists;
and, being idealists, they can transform the animal's intermittent
greed into the grandiose imperialisms of a Rhodes or a J.
P. Morgan; the animal's intermittent love of bullying into
Stalinism or the Spanish Inquisition; the animal's intermittent
attachment to its territory into the calculated frenzies
of nationalism. Happily, they can also transform the animal's
intermittent kindliness into the life-long charity of an
Elizabeth Fry or a Vincent de Paul; the animal's intermittent
devotion to its mate and its young into that reasoned and
persistent co-operation which, up to the present, has proved
strong enough to save the world from the consequences of
the other, the disastrous kind of idealism. Will it go on
being able to save the world? The question cannot be answered.
All we can say is that, with the idealists of nationalism
holding the A-bomb, the odds in favour of the idealists
of co-operation and charity have sharply declined.
Even the best cookery book is no substitute for even the
worst dinner. The fact seems sufficiently obvious. And yet,
throughout the ages, the most profound philosophers, the
most learned and acute theologians have constantly fallen
into the error of identifying their purely verbal constructions
with facts, or into the yet more enormous error of imagining
that symbols are somehow more real than what they stand
for. Their word-worship did not go without protest. "Only
the spirit," said St. Paul, "gives life; the letter
kills." "And why," asks Eckhart, "why
do you prate of God? Whatever you say of God is untrue."
At the other end of the world the author of one of the Mahayana
sutras affirmed that "the truth was never preached
by the Buddha, seeing that you have to realize it within
yourself". Such utterances were felt to be profoundly
subversive, and respectable people ignored them. The strange
idolatrous over-estimation of words and emblems continued
unchecked. Religions declined; but the old habit of formulating
creeds and imposing belief in dogmas persisted even among
the atheists.
In recent years logicians and semanticists have carried
out a very thorough analysis of the symbols, in terms of
which men do their thinking. Linguistics has become a science,
and one may even study a subject to which the late Benjamin
Whorf gave the name of meta- linguistics. All this is greatly
to the good; but it is not enough. Logic and semantics,
linguistics and meta-linguistics--these are purely intellectual
disciplines. They analyse the various ways, correct and
incorrect, meaningful and meaningless, in which words can
be related to things, processes and events. But they offer
no guidance, in regard to the much more fundamental problem
of the relationship of man in his psycho-physical totality,
on the one hand, and his two worlds, of data and of symbols,
on the other.
In every region and at every period of history, the problem
has been repeatedly solved by individual men and women.
Even when they spoke or wrote, these individuals created
no systems--for they knew that every system is a standing
temptation to take symbols too seriously, to pay more attention
to words than to the realities for which the words are supposed
to stand. Their aim was never to offer ready-made explanations
and panaceas; it was to induce people to diagnose and cure
their own ills, to get them to go to the place where man's
problem and its solution present themselves directly to
experience.
In this volume of selections from the writings and recorded
talks of Krishnamurti, the reader will find a clear contemporary
statement of the fundamental human problem, together with
an invitation to solve it in the only way in which it can
be solved--for and by himself. The collective solutions,
to which so many so desperately pin their faith, are never
adequate. "To understand the misery and confusion that
exist within ourselves, and so in the world, we must first
find clarity within ourselves, and that clarity comes about
through right thinking. This clarity is not to be organized,
for it cannot be exchanged with another. Organized group
thought is merely repetitive. Clarity is not the result
of verbal assertion, but of intense self-awareness and right
thinking. Right thinking is not the outcome of or mere cultivation
of the intellect, nor is it conformity to pattern, however
worthy and noble. Right thinking comes with self-knowledge.
Without understanding yourself, you have no basis for thought;
without self- knowledge, what you think is not true."
This fundamental theme is developed by Krishnamurti in
passage after passage. "There is hope in men, not in
society, not in systems, organized religious systems, but
in you and in me." Organized religions, with their
mediators, their sacred books, their dogmas, their hierarchies
and rituals, offer only a false solution to the basic problem.
"When you quote the Bhagavad Gita, or the Bible, or
some Chinese Sacred Book, surely you are merely repeating,
are you not? And what you are repeating is not the truth.
It is a lie: for truth cannot be repeated." A lie can
be extended, propounded and repeated, but not truth; and
when you repeat truth, it ceases to be truth, and therefore
sacred books are unimportant. It is through self-knowledge,
not through belief in somebody else's symbols, that a man
comes to the eternal reality, in which his being is grounded.
Belief in the complete adequacy and superlative value of
any given symbol-system leads not to liberation, but to
history, to more of the same old disasters. "Belief
inevitably separates. If you have a belief, or when you
seek security in your particular belief, you become separated
from those who seek security in some other form of belief.
All organized beliefs are based on separation, though they
may preach brotherhood." The man who has successfully
solved the problem of his relations with the two worlds
of data and symbols, is a man who has no beliefs. With regard
to the problems of practical life he entertains a series
of working hypotheses, which serve his purposes, but are
taken no more seriously than any other kind of tool or instrument.
With regard to his fellow beings and to the reality in which
they are grounded, he has the direct experiences of love
and insight. It is to protect himself from beliefs that
Krishnamurti has "not read any sacred literature, neither
the Bhagavad Gita nor the Upanishads". The rest of
us do not even read sacred literature; we read our favourite
newspapers, magazines and detective stories. This means
that we approach the crisis of our times, not with love
and insight, but "with formulas, with systems"--and
pretty poor formulas and systems at that. But "men
of good will should not have formulas"; for formulas
lead, inevitably, only to "blind thinking". Addiction
to formulas is almost universal. Inevitably so; for "our
system of up-bringing is based upon what to think, not on
how to think". We are brought up as believing and practising
members of some organization--the Communist or the Christian,
the Moslem, the Hindu, the Buddhist, the Freudian. Consequently
"you respond to the challenge, which is always new,
according to an old pattern; and therefore your response
has no corresponding validity, newness, freshness. If you
respond as a Catholic or a Communist, you are responding--are
you not?--according to a patterned thought. Therefore your
response has no significance. And has not the Hindu the
Mussulman, the Buddhist, the Christian created this problem?
As the new religion is the worship of the State, so the
old religion was the worship of an idea." If you respond
to a challenge according to the old conditioning, your response
will not enable you to understand the new challenge. Therefore
what "one has to do, in order to meet the new challenge,
is to strip oneself completely, denude oneself entirely
of the background and meet the challenge anew". In
other words symbols should never be raised to the rank of
dogmas, nor should any system be regarded as more than a
provisional convenience. Belief in formulas and action in
accordance with these beliefs cannot bring us to a solution
of our problem. "It is only through creative understanding
of ourselves that there can be a creative world, a happy
world, a world in which ideas do not exist." A world
in which ideas do not exist would be a happy world, because
it would be a world without the powerful conditioning forces
which compel men to undertake inappropriate action, a world
without the hallowed dogmas in terms of which the worst
crimes are justified, the greatest follies elaborately rationalized.
An education that teaches us not how but what to think
is an education that calls for a governing class of pastors
and masters. But "the very idea of leading somebody
is anti-social and anti-spiritual". To the man who
exercises it, leadership brings gratification of the craving
for power; to those who are led, it brings the gratification
of the desire for certainty and security. The guru provides
a kind of dope. But, it may be asked, "What are you
doing? Are you not acting as our guru?" "Surely,"
Krishnamurti answers, "I am not acting as your guru,
because, first of all, I am not giving you any gratification.
I am not telling you what you should do from moment to moment,
or from day to day, but I am just pointing out something
to you; you can take it or leave it, depending on you, not
on me. I do not demand a thing from you, neither your worship,
nor your flattery, nor your insults, nor your gods. I say,
This is a fact; take it or leave it. And most of you will
leave it, for the obvious reason that you do not find gratification
in it."
What is it precisely that Krishnamurti offers? What is
it that we can take if we wish, but in all probability shall
prefer to leave? It is not, as we have seen, a system of
beliefs, a catalogue of dogmas, a set of ready-made notions
and ideals. It is not leadership, not mediation, not spiritual
direction, not even example. It is not ritual, not a church,
not a code, not uplift or any form of inspirational twaddle.
Is it, perhaps, self-discipline? No; for self-discipline
is not, as a matter of brute fact, the way in which our
problem can be solved. In order to find the solution, the
mind must open itself to reality, must confront the givenness
of the outer and inner worlds without preconceptions or
restrictions. (God's service is perfect freedom. Conversely,
perfect freedom is the service of God.) In becoming disciplined,
the mind undergoes no radical change; it is the old self,
but "tethered, held in control".
Self-discipline joins the list of things which Krishnamurti
does not offer. Can it be, then, that what he offers is
prayer? Again, the reply is in the negative. "Prayer
may bring you the answer you seek; but that answer may come
from your unconscious, or from the general reservoir, the
store-house of all your demands. The answer is not the still
voice of God." Consider, Krishnamurti goes on, "what
happens when you pray. By constant repetition of certain
phrases, and by controlling your thoughts, the mind becomes
quiet, doesn't it? At least, the conscious mind becomes
quiet. You kneel as the Christians do, or you sit as the
Hindus do, and you repeat and repeat, and through that repetition
the mind becomes quiet. In that quietness there is the intimation
of something. That intimation of something, for which you
have prayed, may be from the unconscious, or it may be the
response of your memories. But, surely, it is not the voice
of reality; for the voice of reality must come to you; it
cannot be appealed to, you cannot pray to it. You cannot
entice it into your little cage by doing puja, bhajan and
all the rest of it, by offering it flowers, by placating
it, by suppressing yourself or emulating others. Once you
have learned the trick of quieting the mind, through the
repetition of words, and of receiving hints in that quietness,
the danger is--unless you are fully alert as to whence those
hints come--that you will be caught, and then prayer becomes
a substitute for the search for Truth. That which you ask
for you get; but it is not the truth. If you want, and if
you petition, you will receive, but you will pay for it
in the end."
From prayer we pass to yoga, and yoga, we find, is another
of the things which Krishnamurti does not offer. For yoga
is concentration, and concentration is exclusion. "You
build a wall of resistance by concentration on a thought
which you have chosen, and you try to ward off all the others."
What is commonly called meditation is merely "the cultivation
of resistance, of exclusive concentration on an idea of
our choice". But what makes you choose? "What
makes you say this is good, true, noble, and the rest is
not? Obviously the choice is based on pleasure, reward or
achievement; or it is merely a reaction of one's conditioning
or tradition. Why do you choose at all? Why not examine
every thought? When you are interested in the many, why
choose one? Why not examine every interest? Instead of creating
resistance, why not go into each interest as it arises,
and not merely concentrate on one idea, one interest? After
all, you are made up of many interests, you have many masks,
consciously and unconsciously. Why choose one and discard
all the others, in combating which you spend all your energies,
thereby creating resistance, conflict and friction. Whereas
if you consider every thought as it arises--every thought,
not just a few thoughts--then there is no exclusion. But
it is an arduous thing to examine every thought. Because,
as you are looking at one thought, another slips in. But
if you are aware without domination or justification, you
will see that, by merely looking at that thought, no other
thought intrudes. It is only when you condemn, compare,
approximate, that other thoughts enter in."
"Judge not that ye be not judged." The gospel
precept applies to our dealings with ourselves no less than
to our dealings with others. Where there is judgement, where
there is comparison and condemnation, openness of mind is
absent; there can be no freedom from the tyranny of symbols
and systems, no escape from the past and the environment.
Introspection with a predetermined purpose, self-examination
within the framework of some traditional code, some set
of hallowed postulates-- these do not, these cannot help
us. There is a transcendent spontaneity of life, a `creative
Reality', as Krishnamurti calls it, which reveals itself
as immanent only when the perceiver's mind is in a state
of `alert passivity', of `choiceless awareness'. Judgement
and comparison commit us irrevocably to duality. Only choiceless
awareness can lead to non-duality, to the reconciliation
of opposites in a total understanding and a total love.
Ama et fac quod vis. If you love, you may do what you will.
But if you start by doing what you will, or by doing what
you don't will in obedience to some traditional system or
notions, ideals and prohibitions, you will never love. The
liberating process must begin with choiceless awareness
of what you will and of your reactions to the symbol-system
which tells you that you ought, or ought not, to will it.
Through this choiceless awareness, as it penetrates the
successive layers of the ego and its associated sub- conscious,
will come love and understanding, but of another order that
that with which we are ordinarily familiar. This choiceless
awareness--at every moment and in all the circumstances
of life--is the only effective meditation. All other forms
of yoga lead either to the blind thinking which results
from self-discipline, or to some kind of self-induced rapture,
some form of false samadhi. The true liberation is "an
inner freedom of creative Reality". This "is not
a gift; it is to be discovered and experienced. It is not
an acquisition to be gathered to yourself to glorify yourself.
It is a state of being, as silence, in which there is no
becoming, in which there is completeness. This creativeness
may not necessarily seek expression; it is not a talent
that demands outward manifestation. You need not be a great
artist or have an audience; if you seek these, you will
miss the inward Reality. It is neither a gift, nor is it
the outcome of talent; it is to be found, this imperishable
treasure, where thought frees itself from lust, ill-will
and ignorance, where thought frees itself from worldliness
and personal craving to be. It is to be experienced through
right thinking and meditation." Choiceless self-awareness
will bring us to the creative Reality which underlies all
our destructive make-believes, to the tranquil wisdom which
is always there, in spite of ignorance, in spite of the
knowledge which is merely ignorance in another form. Knowledge
is an affair of symbols and is, all too often, a hindrance
to wisdom, to the uncovering of the self from moment to
moment. A mind that has come to the stillness of wisdom
"shall know being, shall know what it is to love. Love
is neither personal nor impersonal. Love is love, not to
be defined or described by the mind as exclusive or inclusive.
Love is its own eternity; it is the real, the supreme, the
immeasurable."
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