Jiddu Krishnamurti : Be aware of your conflict, of how you deny, justify, compare, or identify
Questioner: I feel I cannot reach the other shore without help, without the grace of God. If I can say, ``Thy will be done,'' and dissolve myself in it, do I not dissolve my limitations? If I can relinquish myself unconditionally, is there not grace to help me bridge the gulf which separates God and me?
Jiddu Krishnamurti : This abandonment of the self is not an act of will; this crossing over to the other shore is not an activity of purpose or of gain. Reality comes in the fullness of silence and wisdom. You may not invite reality, it must come to you; you may not choose reality, it must choose you.
We must understand effort, unconditional stillness, self-abandonment, for through right awareness alone comes meditative tranquillity. What is right effort? There is an understanding of right effort when there is an awareness of the process of becoming. Just as long as effort is made to become, so long will duality exist - the thinker separating himself from his thought. This conflict of opposites is considered inevitable and necessary for freedom and growth.
When one who is greedy makes an effort to become nongreedy, this effort we consider righteous and spiritual. But is it right effort? Is effort spent in overcoming the opposite productive of understanding? Is one not still greedy in trying to become nongreedy? He may take on a new, gratifying, verbal garb, but the maker of the effort is still the same, he is still greedy. The effort made to become not only creates the conflict of opposites but also is directed along wrong channels, for, to become is still to be in conflict and sorrow; so there is no freedom for experiencing truth in the long corridor of opposites.
Our effort is spent in denying or accepting, and thus thought-feeling is made blunt in this endless conflict. This surely is wrong effort for it is not productive of creative understanding. Right endeavor consists in being choicelessly aware of this conflict, in being silently observant without identification. It is this silent, choiceless awareness of conflict that brings freedom. In this passive awareness that is tranquil, reality comes into being.
Be aware of your conflict, of how you deny, justify, compare, or identify; of how you try to become; be aware of the deep, full significance of the pain of the opposites. Then will come the experience of the inseparability of the thinker and his thought, the stillness of understanding through which alone there can be radical transformation, the crossing over to the other shore without the action of will.
There is a vast difference between becoming still and being still. We must die each day to all experiences and accumulations, fears and hopes, and we can only do this by actively being aware of our conflicts, and then being passively still. We must live each day the four seasons, the spring, summer, autumn, and winter of passivity. As in winter the fields lie fallow, open to the heavens to revitalize themselves, so the mind-heart must allow itself to be open, creatively empty. Then only can there be the breath of reality.
This creative emptiness, this ardent passivity, is not brought about through an act of will. It is extremely difficult for those who are slaves to distraction, who are incessantly active, who are ever striving to become, to be alertly passive. If you would understand, the mind-heart must be still; there must be heightened sensitivity to receive, and there can be tranquillity only in understanding. This silent awareness is not an act of determination, but it comes into being when thought-feeling is not caught in the net of becoming. You never say to a child become still, but be still. We say to ourselves we will become, and for this becoming we have various excuses and interminable reasons, and so we are never still. The becoming still can never be the being still; only with the death of becoming is there being.
In moments of great creativity, in moments of great beauty, there is utter tranquillity; in these moments there is complete absence of the self with all its conflicts; it is this negation, the highest form of thinking-feeling, that is essential for creative being. But these moments are rare with most of us, the moments when the thinker and his thought are transcended; these occasions happen unexpectedly, but the self soon returns.
Having once experienced this living stillness, thought-feeling clings to its memory, thus preventing the further experience of reality. This cultivation of memory is effort directed along wrong channels, resulting in the strengthening of the self with its conflict and pain; but if we are deeply aware of our problems and conflicts, and understand them, then this very cultivation of self-knowledge brings about alert passivity and tranquillity. In this living silence is reality. Only in utter simplicity, when all craving has ceased, is the bliss of reality.
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Labels: Jiddu Krishnamurti on Truth Awakening
Jiddu Krishnamurti : Why are there many paths to Truth?
Questioner: Why are there many paths to truth? Is this idea an illusion, cleverly conceived to explain and justify differences?
Jiddu Krishnamurti : To clear thinking can there be many paths? Can any system lead to creative intelligence? There is only creative intelligence, not systems to awaken it. There is only truth, not paths leading to truth. It is only ignorance which divides itself into many paths and systems. Each religion maintains that it alone has the truth and that through it alone God can be realized; various organizations assert or imply that through their special methods truth can be known; each sect maintains that it has the special message, that it is the special vehicle of truth.
Individual prophets and spiritual messengers offer their panaceas as direct revelations of God. Why do they claim such authority, such efficacy for their assertions? Is it not obvious? Vested interests, in the present or in the hereafter. They have to maintain their delusions of prestige and power, or else what will happen to all the creations of their terrestrial glory?
Others, because they have impoverished themselves by denial and sacrifice, imagine themselves grown in grandeur and so assume the spiritual right of guiding the worldly. It is one of the facile explanations of spiritual interests to say that there are many paths to truth, thus justifying their own organized activities and attempting at the same time to be tolerant to those who maintain similar systems.
Also, we are so entrenched in prejudice, in tradition with its special beliefs and dogmas, that we repeat dogmatically, readily, that there are many paths to truth. To bring about tolerance between the many divisions of antagonistic and conditioned thought, the leaders of organized interests try to cover up, in weighty phrases, the inherent brutality of division.
The very assertion of paths to truth is the denial of truth. How can anyone point out a way to truth - which has no abode, which is not to be measured, or sought after? That which is fixed is dead, and to that there may be paths. Ignorance creates the illusion of many ways and methods.
Through your own conditioned thought, through your own desire for certainty, finality, through your own fears which are constantly creating safety, you fabricate mechanical, artificial conceptions of truth, of perfection.
And having invented these, you seek ways and means to maintain them. Each organization, group, sect, knowing that divisions deny friendship, tries to bring about artificial unity and brotherhood. Each says, ``You follow your religion and I will follow mine; you have your truth and I will have mine; but let us cultivate tolerance.'' Such tolerance will only lead to illusion and confusion.
A mind that is conditioned by ignorance, fear, cannot comprehend truth, for out of its own limitation it creates for itself further limitations. Truth is not to be invited. Mind cannot create it. If you comprehend this fully, then you will discern the utter futility of systems, practices, and disciplines.
Now you are so much a part of the intellectual and mechanical process of living that you cannot perceive its artificiality; or you refuse to see it, for perception would mean action, hence the poverty of your own being. When you begin to be aware of the process of thought and become conscious that it is creating for itself its own emptiness and frustration, then that very awareness will dispel fear. Then there is love, completeness of life.
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Labels: Jiddu Krishnamurti on Truth Awakening
Friday, February 27, 2009
Jiddu Krishnamurti: Can one be free instantly
Questioner: Can one be free instantly and live without conflicts or does it take time?
Jiddu Krishnamurti: Can one live without the past immediately or does getting rid of the past take time? Does it take time to get rid of the past, and does this prevent one from living immediately? That is the question. The past is like a hidden cave, like a cellar where you keep your wine - if you have wine. Does it take time to be free of it? What is involved in taking time? - which is what we are used to. I say to myself, `I'll take time, virtue is a thing to be acquired, to be practiced day after day, I'll get rid of my hate, my violence, gradually, slowly; that is what we are used to, that is our conditioning.
And so we ask ourselves whether it is possible to throw away all the past gradually - which involves time. That is, being violent, I say, `I'll gradually get rid of this.' What does that mean - `gradually,' `step by step'? In the meantime I am being violent. The idea of getting rid of violence gradually is a form of hypocrisy. Obviously, if I am violent I can't get rid of it gradually, I must end it immediately.
Can I end psychological things immediately? I cannot, if I accept the idea of gradually freeing myself from the past. But what matters is to see the fact as it is now, without any distortion. If I am jealous and envious, I must see this completely by total, not partial, observation. I look at my jealousy - why am I jealous? Because I am lonely, the person I depended upon left me and I am suddenly faced with my emptiness, with my isolation and I am afraid of that, therefore I depend on you. And if you turn away I am angry, jealous.
The fact is I am lonely, I need companionship, I need somebody not only to cook for me, to give me comfort, sexual pleasure and all the rest of it, but because basically I am alone. And that is why I am jealous. Can I understand this loneliness immediately? I can understand it only if I observe it, if I do not run away from it - if I can look at it, observe it critically, with awakened intelligence, not find excuses, try to fill the void or try to find a new companion.
To look at this there must be freedom and when there is freedom to look I am free of jealousy. So the perception, the total observation of jealousy and the freedom from it, is not a matter of time, but of giving complete attention, critical awareness, observing choicelessly, instantly, all things as they arise. Then there is freedom - not in the future but now - from that which we call jealousy.
This applies equally to violence, anger or any other habit, whether you smoke, drink or have sexual habits. If we observe them very attentively, completely with our heart and mind, we are intelligently aware of their whole content; then there is freedom. Once this awareness is functioning, then whatever arises - anger, jealousy, violence. brutality, shades of double meaning, enmity, all these things can be observed instantly, completely.
In that there is freedom, and the thing that was there ceases to be. So the past is not to be wiped away through time. Time is not the way to freedom. Is not this idea of gradualness a form of indolence, of incapacity to deal with the past instantly as it arises? When you have that astonishing capacity to observe clearly as it arises and when you give your mind and heart completely to observe it, then the past ceases.
So time and thought do not end the past, for time and thought are the past.
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