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LikeKrishnamurti On Belief in God
Question: Belief in God has been a powerful incentive to better living. Why do you deny God? Why do you not try to revive man’s faith in the idea of God?
Krishnamurti: Let us look at the problem widely and intelligently. I am not denying God – it would be foolish to do so. Only the man who does not know reality indulges in meaningless words. The man who says he knows, does not know; the man who is experiencing reality from moment to moment has no means of communicating that reality.
Belief is a denial of truth, belief hinders truth; to believe in God is not to find God. Neither the believer nor the non-believer will find God; because reality is the unknown, and your belief or non-belief in the unknown is merely a self-projection and therefore not real. I know you believe and I know it has very little meaning in your life. There are many people who believe; millions believe in God and take consolation. First of all, why do you believe? You believe because it gives you satisfaction, consolation, hope, and you say it gives significance to life. Actually your belief has very little significance, because you believe and exploit, you believe and kill, you believe in a universal God and murder each other. The rich man also believes in God; he exploits ruthlessly, accumulates money, and then builds a temple or becomes a philanthropist.
Krishnamurti On Beliefs
BELIEF AND KNOWLEDGE are very intimately related to desire; and perhaps, if we can understand these two issues, we can see how desire works and understand its complexities.
One of the things, it seems to me, that most of us eagerly accept and take for granted is the question of beliefs. I am not attacking beliefs. What we are trying to do is to find out why we accept beliefs; and if we can understand the motives, the causation of acceptance, then perhaps we may be able not only to understand why we do it, but also be free of it. One can see how political and religious beliefs, national and various other types of beliefs, do separate people, do create conflict, confusion, and antagonism – which is an obvious fact; and yet we are unwilling to give them up. There is the Hindu belief the Christian belief, the Buddhist – innumerable sectarian and national beliefs, various political ideologies, all contending with each other, trying to convert each other. One can see, obviously, that belief is separating people, creating intolerance; is it possible to live without belief? One can find that out only if one can study oneself in relationship to a bel1ef. Is it possible to live in this world without a belief – not change beliefs, not substitute one belief for another, but be entirely free from all beliefs, so that one meets life anew each minute? This, after all, is the truth: to have the capacity of meeting everything anew, from moment to moment, without the conditioning reaction of the past, so that there is not the cumulative effect which acts as a barrier between oneself and that which is.
Krishnamurti: Action & Ideas
I SHOULD LIKE TO discuss the problem of action. This may be rather abstruse and difficult at the beginning but I hope that by thinking it over we shall be able to see the issue clearly, because our whole existence, our whole life, is a process of action.
Most of us live in a series of actions, of seemingly unrelated, disjointed actions, leading to disintegration, to frustration. It is a problem that concerns each one of us, because we live by action and without action there is no life, there is no experience, there is no thinking. Thought is action; and merely to pursue action at one particular level of consciousness, which is the outer, merely to be caught up in outward action without understanding the whole process of action itself, will inevitably lead us to frustration, to misery.
Our life is a series of actions or a process of action at different levels of consciousness. Consciousness is experiencing, naming and recording. That is consciousness is challenge and response, which is experiencing, then terming or naming, and then recording, which is memory. This process is action, is it not? Consciousness is action; and without challenge, response, without experiencing, naming or terming, without recording, which is memory, there is no action.
Krishnamurti: Self Knowledge & the World
THE PROBLEMS OF the world are so colossal, so very complex, that to understand and so to resolve them one must approach them in a very simple and direct manner; and simplicity, directness, do not depend on outward circumstances nor on our particular prejudices and moods. As I was pointing out, the solution is not to be found through conferences, blueprints, or through the substitution of new leaders for old, and so on, The solution obviously lies in the creator of that problem, in the creator of the mischief, of the hate and of the enormous misunderstanding that exists between human beings, The creator of this mischief, the creator of these problems, is the individual, you and I, not the world as we think of it. The world is your relationship with another. The world is not something separate from you and me; the world, society, is the relationship that we establish or seek to establish between each other.
Krishnamurti: What are we seeking?
Do we not seek, through all this confusion, something permanent, something lasting, something which we call real, God, truth, what you like – the name doesn’t matter, the word is not the thing, surely. So don’t let us be caught in words. Leave that to the professional lecturers. There is a search for something permanent, is there not?,in most of us – something we can cling to, something which will give us assurance, a hope, a lasting enthusiasm, a lasting certainty, because in ourselves we are so uncertain. We do not know ourselves. We know a lot about facts, what the books have said; but we do not know for ourselves, we do not have a direct experience.
And what is it that we call permanent? What is it that we are seeking, which will, or which we hope will give us permanency? Are we not seeking lasting happiness, lasting gratification, lasting certainty? We want something that will endure everlastingly, which will gratify us. If we strip ourselves of all the words and phrases, and actually look at it, this is what we want. We want permanent pleasure, permanent gratification – which we call truth, God or what you will.
S. C. Malik The Illusion of Seeking Peace
A human being is a part of this whole, called by us ‘Universe’, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to apportion for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
Albert Einstein
The Crisis of Fragmentation
Modern civilization, since the sixteenth-seventeenth centuries, has persistently been subscribing to propositions which have logically led to the atomization of the whole fabric of human existence, experience and being. Analytic dismemberment has certainly produced enormous material wealth, but with it immense suffering, both physical and spiritual. However, it is evident that the hegemony of material and intellectual vested interests seems to preclude a basic reappraisal of this suicidal specialization, this mechanical model of thought which has long outlived its usefulness. The old paradigm continues to merely reinforce dormancy on a major part of the brain. It is time to end the stranglehold of linear, causal, mechanical orientation over the intellectual culture of our times. Any attempt to overcome this conditioning requires, primarily, a serious engagement with one’s self.
