U.G. says…

Everyday Thoughts from U.G. Krishnamurti

Selected by Arun Babani

Thought is your enemy.

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Not knowing is your natural state.

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Flush out your past from your system.

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Be in unfrightened self-abandonment.

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Be in uncomplaining self-reliance.

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Give up. Simply stop. Stop searching.

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De-psychologize and de-spiritualize yourself.

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Have the courage to stand alone.

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Life is a movement without direction, a passion that burns without purpose.

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As long as you use your thoughts to understand anything, you are not in touch with anything living.

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Life is a unitary process.

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Things and thoughts are disjointed in each moment.

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Every time a thought is born, you are born.

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Thoughts arise from wants.

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Happiness without unhappiness is unnatural.

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Anyone who wants more than the basic needs of food, clothing and shelter is basically neurotic.

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Maya means to measure everything from one's own point of view.

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Intelligence means knowing your limitations.

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Fortunately you can get nothing from life.

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You are always suffering because you want to be other than what you are.

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The so called self-realisation is the discovery for yourself and by yourself that there is no self to discover.

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The fundamental attributes of life are survival and reproduction.

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Nature is busy creating absolutely unique individuals, whereas culture has created a single mould to which all must conform. It is grotesque.

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Consciousness is so pure that whatever you are doing in the direction of purifying that consciousness is adding impurity to it.

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The messy thing called ‘mind’ has created many destructive things. By far the most destructive of them all is God.

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Only if you reject all the other paths, can you discover your own.

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When you know nothing, you say a lot. When you know something, what is there to say?

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The only way for anyone interested in finding out what this is all about is to watch how this separation is occurring, how you are separating yourself from the things that are happening around you and inside you.

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It is the most difficult thing to be an ordinary person.

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The peak of sex experience is the one thing in life you have that comes close to being a firsthand experience. All the rest of your experiences are secondhand, somebody else's.

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Anything you do to escape from the reality of this world will make it difficult for you to live in harmony with the things around you.

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The understanding is the absence of the demand for understanding.

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To be yourself is very easy, you don't have to do a thing.

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Everything you are doing to be at peace with yourself is what is destroying the peace that is already there.

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You think the thoughts of your society, feel the feelings of your society and experience the experience of your society. There is no new experience.

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Knowing what is there is impossible.

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To acquire more and more knowledge is to acquire more and more power over others.

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In order to bring doing to an end, you are doing something else. That is the crux of the problem.

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All our problems have arisen because of our acceptance that it is possible for us to understand the reality of the world or existence.

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Your value system is responsible for the human tragedy, forcing everybody to fit into that model.

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Wanting and thinking always go together.

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The hope keeps you going.

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You have to actually touch life at a point where nobody has touched it before. Nobody can teach you that.

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Your search for happiness is prolonging your unhappiness.

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There is no such thing as looking at something without the interference of knowledge.

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You have invented the goal to give yourself hope.

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If you are lucky enough to be free from fear then there is no God.

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Perfection and absolutes are false.

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How to live one's life is the one question which has transformed itself into millions of questions.

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A real guru, if there is one, frees you from himself.

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You don't stop searching because such an act would be the end of you.

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You are lost only because you are searching.

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Knowledge is just naming things.

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Your insecurity springs from your refusal to face the temporary nature of thought.

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I am trying to stop what you are making out of what I am saying.

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Spirituality is the invention of the mind, and the mind is a myth.

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The moment you ask ‘how’, you turn to someone for answers, becoming dependent.

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The search must come to an end before anything can happen.

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Because you are not interested in the everyday things and happenings around you, you have invented the beyond, timelessness, God, truth, reality, enlightenment or whatever, and search for it.

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What makes one person come into his natural state and not another person, I don't know. Perhaps it is written in the cells.

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No dialogue is possible. When the you is not there, when the question is not there, what is, is understanding. You are finished. You'll walk out.

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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 let's that express itself in its own way is a natural man.

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Man becomes man for the first time when he frees himself from the burden of heritage of man as a whole.

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Animals follow. Animals create leaders. And animal traits are still persisting in man. That is why he creates a leader and follows.

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Your naturalness is something that you don't have to know. You just have to let that function in its own way.

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You become restless because of this drive in you which is put in there by the society or culture that makes you feel that there is something more interesting, more meaningful, more purposeful, than whatever you are doing this moment.

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The hunger must burn itself out completely without knowing satisfaction. The thirst you have must burn itself out without being quenched.

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Wanting to change your material life into that so called religious pattern given to you by these religious people is destroying the possibility of your living in harmony and accepting the reality of this material world exactly the way it is.

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Any doing in any direction is violence. Any effort is violence. Anything you do with thought to create a peaceful state of mind is using force and so is violence.

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Anything you do to free yourself from anything, for whatever reason, is destroying the sensitivity, clarity and freedom that is already there.

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Seeing today demands action. Seeing tomorrow involves only hope.

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The energy you are devoting to the search is taking away the energy you need to live.

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Getting what you want in this world is a relatively easy thing if you are ruthless enough.

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You can't come into your own uniqueness unless the whole of human experience is thrown out of your system. Then you are on your own.

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The body, which is only interested in survival and procreation, treats both pain and pleasure alike. It is you who insist on stopping pain and extending pleasure.

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I don't know what happiness is and so I would never be unhappy.

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How does the body turn over many times during sleep without your being aware of it, much less trying to control it? The body is handling itself.

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When you see for yourself the absurdity of your search, the whole culture is reduced to ashes inside you and then you are out of that.

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Questioning is not a hallmark of intelligence. Cessation of questioning is.

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All the accumulated knowledge, experience and suffering of mankind is inside of you. You must build a huge bonfire within you. Then you will become an individual. There is no other way.

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You were born and are alive because your parents had sex, period. Don't look for a meaning to life.

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The way you are thinking, feeling and experiencing is exactly the same way everyone else in this world is thinking, feeling and experiencing.

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It is the object that creates the subject.

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The cultural input, or what society has placed before us as the goal for all of us to reach and attain, is the enemy of this living organism.

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Happiness is a cultural input. Is there any such thing as happiness? I would say, no.

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Nothing needs to be done to change anything. Things are changing in their own ways.

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When you are no longer caught up in the dichotomy of right and wrong, or good and bad, you can never do anything wrong. As long as you are caught up in this duality, the danger is that you will always be wrong.

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Not answers but ending of questions is the important thing.

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I will never suggest that anyone use me as a model or follow in my footsteps.

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Man has created religion because it gives him a cover.

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An artist is a craftsman like any other craftsman. He uses that tool to express himself. All art is a sensual movement.

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There is more life in the chorus of the barking dogs than in the music of your famous musicians and singers.

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A messiah is the one who leaves a mess behind him in this world.

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It is terror, not love, that will help us to live together.

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Going to the pub or the temple is exactly the same, it is a quick fix.

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God and sex go together. If God goes sex goes too.

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All I can guarantee you is that as long as you are searching for happiness, you will remain unhappy.

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Understanding yourself is one of the greatest jokes perpetrated not only by the purveyors of ancient wisdom – the holy men – but also the modern scientists. The psychologists love to talk about self-knowledge, self-actualisation, living from moment to moment and such rot.

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Humility is an art that one practises. There is no such thing as humility. As long as you know, there is no humility. The known and humility cannot coexist.

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All experiences however extraordinary they may be are in the area of sensuality.

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Love and hate are opposite ends of the same spectrum. They are one and the same thing. They are much closer than kissing cousins.

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There is nobody like you anywhere in this world among the six billion people we have. The individual is an extraordinary piece of creation by the evolutionary process.

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Gurus play a social role, so do prostitutes.

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Hinduism is not a religion in the usual sense. It is a combination and confusion of many things. It is like a street with hundreds of shops.

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By using the models of Jesus, Buddha or Krishna, we have destroyed the possibility of nature throwing up unique individuals.

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The man who spoke of ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself’ is responsible for this horror in the world today.

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The appreciation of music, poetry and the arts 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.

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We are no more purposeful or meaningful than any other thing on this planet. 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.

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We have to accept the absurdity of depending upon anything. We must face our helplessness.

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You think that through a self-imposed asceticism you will increase your awareness and then be able to use that awareness to be happy. No chance.

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You must be a machine, function automatically in this world, never questioning your actions before, during or after they occur.

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Society is not going to feed you unless you give something in return. You have to give them what they want, not what you have to give.

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When hoping and attempting to understand is not there then life becomes meaningful.

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What I am suggesting is that the very demand to understand the mystery of existence is destructive. Just leave the mystery alone.

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Ambition is a reality, competition is a reality, but you have superimposed on that reality the idea that you should not be ambitious. It has turned us all into neurotic individuals.

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We demand that there must be something permanent. That is what these religious teachers are peddling. They offer you eternal happiness.

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The intelligence that is necessary for survival is already there in the physical organism, you don't have to learn a thing.

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There are moments of happiness and there are moments of unhappiness. But the demand to be in a permanent state of happiness is the enemy of this body.

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The mind has invented both religion and dynamite to protect what it regards as its best interest.

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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.

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As long as you are doing something to be selfless, you will be a self-centered individual.

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Truth is a movement. You can't capture it, contain it, give expression to it or use it to advance your interests.

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A natural man is of no use to society. On the contrary, he becomes a threat.

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Something is trying to express itself and the culture is pushing it down. When once it throws the culture out then it expresses itself in its own way.

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This consciousness which is functioning in me, in you, is the same. In me it has no frontiers. In you there are frontiers. You are enclosed in that.

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The individual is an extraordinary piece of creation by the evolutionary process.

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You are not an ordinary being. You are an extraordinary being. The ideal of perfection that has been placed before us has put the whole thing on the wrong track. The perfect being doesn't exist at all.

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Thought is only for the purposes of communication. Otherwise it has no value whatever.

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Life guides you. This organism is interested in protecting itself and it knows how to survive. Just use your eyes and your ears and they will guide you.

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These religious people have created a policeman inside you. That hasn't helped in any way.

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If you don't recognise what you are looking at, it means you are not there.

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A sage cannot have a follower because it is not an experience that can be shared. Even an ordinary experience you can't share with others. Can you tell somebody who has never experienced sex what the sex experience is like?

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The absence of imagination, the absence of will, the absence of effort, the absence of all movement in any direction, on any level, in any dimension – that is the thing.

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We have placed before man the ideal of a perfect man, a truly religious man. So anything you do to reach that goal of perfection is destroying the sensitivity of this body.

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That is the real courage – the courage to brush aside everything that man has experienced and felt before you.

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If you are lucky enough to be free from this pursuit of virtue as a goal, along with it the vice also goes out of your system.

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If you and I go, life goes on. Those lights go off but the electricity continues.

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What is truth for me is something that cannot, under any circumstances, be communicated to you. The certainty here cannot be transmitted to another. For this reason the whole guru business is absolute nonsense.

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I don't believe in education. You can teach a technique – mathematics, auto mechanics, but not integrity. How can you teach them about non-greed and non-ambition in an insanely greedy and ambitious society? You will only succeed in making them more neurotic.

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Violence is an integral part of the evolutionary process. That violence is essential for the survival of the living organism. You can't condemn the hydrogen bomb, for it is an extension of the policeman and your desire to be protected.

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What I am trying to say is that you must discover something for yourself. But do not be misled into thinking that what you find will be of use to society, that it can be used to change the world. You are finished with society, that is all.

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God is the ultimate pleasure, uninterrupted happiness. No such thing exists. Transformation, moksha, liberation and all that stuff are just variations on the same theme: permanent happiness.

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There is one thought. Everything exists in relationship to that one thought. That thought is ‘me’. Anything you experience based on that thought is an illusion.

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There is no such thing as your mind and my mind. There is only mind – the totality of all that has been known, felt and experienced by man, and handed down from generation to generation.

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What I am emphasising is that we are trying to solve our basic human problems through a psychological framework, when actually the problem is neurological. The body is involved.

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Where is this ego or self that you talk of? Your non-existent self has heard of spirituality and bliss from someone. To experience this thing called bliss you feel you must control your thoughts. It is impossible, you will burn yourself out and die if you attempt it.

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The day man experienced that self-consciousness that made him feel separate and superior to the other animals, at that moment he began sewing the seeds of his own destruction.

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All I am saying is that the peak you are seeking is already inside you, in the harmonious functioning of the body.

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Effortlessness through effort is like peace through war.

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Courage is not an instrument or quality you can use to get somewhere. The stopping of doing is courage. The ending of tradition in you is courage.

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Getting out of your situation is your only aim. Why do you want to get out of your situation? Wanting to get out of situations is what has created the problem in the first place.

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Consciousness has to flush itself out. It has to purge itself of every trace of holiness, every trace of unholiness, everything. Even what you consider sacred and holy is a contamination in that consciousness.

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I have no teaching. There is nothing to preserve. Teaching implies something that can be used to bring about change. Sorry, there is no teaching here, just disjointed, disconnected sentences.

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As long as you think, accept and believe that there is something to understand, demanding search and struggle, you are lost and will live in misery.

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Anything you try to make out of my statements is not it. You sense a freshness, a living quality to what is being said here. That is so, but this cannot be used for anything. It is worthless.

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My mission, if there is any, is to debunk every statement that I ever made. If you take seriously and try to use or apply what I have said you will be in danger.

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The only answer to this human problem is not to be found through new ideas, new concepts or new ideologies, but through bringing about a change in the chemistry of the human body.

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Whatever you do in the pursuit of truth or reality takes you away from your own very natural state in which you always are.

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To deny yourself the basic needs is not a sign of spirituality. But to require more than food, clothing and shelter is a neurotic state of mind.

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You are dissatisfied with your everyday experiences and so you want new ones. You want to perfect yourself, to change yourself. You are trying to be something other than what you are. It is this that is taking you away from yourself.

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This movement of thought within you is parallel to the movement of life but isolated from it. It can never touch life. You are a living creature yet you lead your entire life within the realm of this isolated, parallel movement of thought. You cut yourself off from life.

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The natural state is not a thoughtless state. You will never be without thought. Being able to think is necessary to survive but in this state thought stops choking you. It falls into its natural rhythm.

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If it had not been for culture, life would have produced more flowers, different kinds and variety of flowers, not only the one rose that you are so proud of. You want to turn everything into one model. What for?

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When this thing happened to me I realised that all my search was in the wrong direction and that this is not something psychological, but a purely physiological functioning of the senses at their peak capacities.

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For some reason or the other the culture has limited the possibility of the potential evolving into its completeness and wholeness.

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Life is trying to destroy the enclosing thing, that dead structure of thought and experience which is not of its nature. It's trying to break open. You don’t want that.

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You have to become completely disillusioned. Then the truth begins to express itself in its own way.

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The separation between mind and body must come to an end. Actually, there is no separation. I have no objection to the word mind but it is not in one particular location or area. Every cell in your system has a mind of its own.

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In a way the whole of life is like a big dream. I am looking at you but I really don't know anything about you. This is a dream, a dream world. There is no reality to it at all.

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Look here, there is no present to the structure of the you. All that is there is the past which is trying to project itself into the future.

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You arrive seeking understanding, while I am only interested in making it clear that there is nothing to understand.

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It is thought that has created the reality of the body, of your living, of your sleep, and of all your perceptions. You experience this reality through knowledge. Otherwise there is no way of your knowing for yourself that you have a body, that you are alive, that you are awake. All that is knowledge.

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The one answer for all questions is, ‘Stop asking questions!’