Question: Your teaching concerning the family seems to be heartless and cold. Is not the family a most natural outcome of affection between human beings? Why then are you against it?

Krishnamurti: What is the family now? It is based on possessiveness, which destroys love. Where there is a sense of possession, there must be exploitation. Where there is love, there is no imposition or possessiveness. But if you consider our present morality, you will see that it is based on maintaining this possessive attitude towards life. By our egotistic craving we are destroying the perfume and the beauty of life. Where there is love, family does not become a centre of exploitation.

Question: If one lives free of such vices as the use of alcohol and tobacco and follows a strictly vegetarian diet, can this not be a great factor in helping one to understand your teachings?

Krishnamurti: Please. it is not what you put into your mouth that gives you understanding. (Laughter) What gives you understanding is facing life directly, simply and truly. But by merely giving up meat, alcohol or tobacco you are not going to understand reality. A great many people have given up these things, hoping for happiness. Fulfilment lies not in giving up but in understanding. Mind cannot be a slave to fear and to illusions. Discover first the impediments, the limitations which cripple the mind and heart, and when you liberate yourself from them, then there will be intelligent and natural existence.

Question: How can there possibly be individual well-being until there is a mass movement to remove the capitalistic exploiters from power? Surely the mass movement must come first in order to clear the way for the underdog, and only then will there be an equal opportunity for all.

Krishnamurti: Now, to put one or the other first, individual well- being or collective action, must ultimately hinder man’s fulfilment, True fulfilment brings about the welfare of the whole as well as of the individual. What is it that we call the mass? It is you. There cannot be true collective action without individual comprehension. The mass movement is really the result of clear thought and action on the part of every individual. If each one of you merely says that there ought to be collective action, then such action will never take place, because you are merely avoiding your individual responsibility of action. When a man relies on the action of the mass, he himself is truly afraid to act.

If there is to be a radical, complete change, you, the individual, must awaken to the limitations that now cripple your mind and heart. In liberating yourself from those egotistic, illusory hopes, ambitions and cruelties, there will be intelligent co-operation and not compulsion and exploitation.

Question: I have a friend who is mediumistic. When she goes into a trance, many great spirits talk through her, including Napoleon, Plato and Jesus, and their advice is very helpful in the spiritual life. Why do you not speak about the value of spiritualism and mediumship?

Krishnamurti: I have been talking about authority and its destructive influence upon intelligence, whether it be the authority of the living or of the dead. It does not become any the holier because it is of the past or of the dead. Authority, compulsion, destroys fulfilment, whether it is exercised by religion, by society or by mediums. What is behind this desire for guidance? One is afraid that by one’s own act one will be caught up in suffering; so, in order to avoid it – in fact, not to live – one says, “I must follow, I must be guided.” There is the movement of truth only when the mind is no longer held by fear, with all its illusions, when it is no longer seeking guidance or being guided. This aloneness is not exclusiveness; it comes into being when there is the discernment of the false.

Question: You say that spiritual organizations are useless. Is this true for all people, or only for those persons who have gone beyond the spiritual level of mankind in general?

Krishnamurti: When you think that what I say is applicable only to the few, you make of me an exploiter. You think that another needs the falseness, the illusions of organized belief. If it is false, if it is unspiritual for you, then it is unspiritual and false for all. There is no relative stupidity. Because we do not desire to think directly and clearly, we pacify ourselves by saying that intelligence is a matter of slow growth. For example, acquisitiveness, if you really think about it profoundly, is a poison in itself. But if you thought about it deeply, it would involve action and suffering, so you say that freedom from acquisitiveness is progressive, relative, to be realized by degrees. In other words, you are not at all sure that acquisitiveness is a poison. In the same way, you are not at all sure that religions, sects are inherently stupid. If a thing is false, it is false for everyone, under all circumstances.

This is an excerpt from A Return To Love, written by Marianne Williamson. A very spiritually-enlightening book. Amazing read.

**********

Often when we think we are “in love” with a person, as A Course in Miracles indicates, we’re actually anything but. The special relationship is based not on love but on guilt. The special relationship is the ego’s seductive pull away from God. It is a major form of idolatry, or temptation to think that something other that God can complete us and give us peace. The ego tells us that there is some special person out there who will make all the pain go away. We don’t really believe that, of course, but then on the other hand we really do. Our culture has bred the idea into us, through books, songs, movies, advertising and more importantly, the conspiracy of other egos. It is the job of the Holy Spirit to transform the energy of special love from treachery to holiness.

The special relationship makes other people- their behavior, their choices, their opinions of us- too important. It makes us think we need another person, when in fact we are complete and whole as we are. Special love is a “blind” love, seeking to heal the wrong wound. It doesn’t actually exist but which we think does. By addressing this gap as real, and displacing its source onto other people. we actually manufacture the experience we seek to rectify.

Under the holy spirit’s guidance, we come together to share joy. Under the ego’s direction, we come together to share desperation. Negativity, however, cannot really be shared because it is an illusion. “A special relationship is a kind of union from which union is excluded.”

A relationship is not meant to be the joining at the hip of two emotional invalids. The purpose of a relationship is not for two incomplete people to become one, but rather for two complete poeple to join together for the greater glory of God.

**********

This is a book excerpt from Think on These Things. Written by Indian philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti. This excerpt particularly stand out because of its importance to the context of our society.

The book is an amazing read. Very thought provoking. The bold parts of the excerpt are those that really strike a chord with me.

You can find a copy of the book here, should you be keen to read the book.

**********

When you go outside the school, when you read the newspapers or talk to people, you must have noticed almost everyone wants to bring about a change in the world. And have you not also noticed that these very people are always in conflict with each other over something or other – over ideas, property, race, caste or religion? Your parents, your neighbors, the minister and bureaucrats – are they not all ambitious, struggling for a better position, and therefore always in conflict with somebody? Surely, it is only when all this competitiveness is removed that there will be peaceful society in which all of us can live happily, creatively.

Now how is this to be done? Can regulation, legislation, or the training of your mind not to be ambitious, do away with ambition? Outwardly you may be trained not to be ambitious, socially  you may cease to compete with others; but inwardly you are still ambitious, are you not? And is it possible to sweep away completely this ambition, which is bringing so much misery to human beings? Probably you have not thought about it before, because nobody has talked to you like this; but now that somebody is talking to you about it, don’t you want to find out if it is possible to live in this world richly, fully, happily, creatively, without the destructive drive of ambition, without competition? Don’t you want to know how to live so that your life will not destroy another or cast a shadow across his path?

You see, we think this is a Utopian dream which can never be brought in fact; but I am not talking about Utopia, that would be nonsense. Can you and I, who are simple, ordinary people, live creatively in this world without the drive of ambition which shows itself in various ways as the desire for power, position? You will find the right answer when you love what you are doing. If you are an engineer merely because you must earn a livelihood, or because your father or society expects it of you, that is another form of compulsion; and compulsion of any form creates a contradiction, conflict. Whereas, if you really love to be an engineer, or a scientist or if you can plant a tree, or paint a picture, or write a poem, not to gain recognition but just because you love to do it, then you will find that you never compete with another. I think this is the real key: to love what you do.

But when you are young it is often very difficult to know what you love to do, because you want to do so many things. You want to be an engineer, a locomotive driver, an airplane pilot zooming along in the blue skies; or perhaps you want to be a famous orator or politician. You may want to be an artist, a chemist, a poet or a carpenter. You may want to work with your head, or do something with your hands. Is any of these things what you really love to do, or is your interest in them merely a reaction to social pressures? How can you find out? And is not the true purpose of education to help  you to find out, so that as you grow up you can begin to give your whole mind, heart and body to that which you really love to do?

To find out what you love to do demands a great deal of intelligence; because, if you are afraid of not being able to earn a livelihood, or of not fitting into this rotten society, then you will never find. But, if you are not frightened, if you refuse to be pushed into the groove of tradition by your parents, by your teachers, by the superficial demands of society, then there is a possibility of discovering what it is you really love to do. So, to discover, there must be no fear of not surviving.

But most of us are afraid of not surviving, we say,” What will happen to me if I don’t do as my parents say, if I don’t fit into the society?” Being frightened, we do as we are told, and in that there is no love, there is only contradiction; this inner contradiction is one of the factors that bring about destructive ambition.

So, it is a basic function of education to help you find out what you really love to do, so that you can give your whole mind and heart into it, because that creates human dignity, that sweeps away mediocrity, the petty bourgeois mentality. That is why it is very important to have the right teachers, the right atmosphere so that you will grow up with the love which expresses itself in what you are doing. Without this love your examinations, your knowledge, your capacities, your position and possessions are just ashes, they have no meaning; without this love, your actions are going to bring more wars, more hatred, more mischief and destruction.

**********

This is an excerpt from 50 Spiritual Classics byTom Butler-Bowdon. It commented on Jiddu Krishnamurthi’s book Think On These Things.

It is an amazing read. This particular excerpt stands out to me for it’s clarity as well as explaination on the human condition.

**********

The Myth Of Security

We want to make life permanant, but in doing so we go against nature, and there lies our pain. Only the mind that is always moving, without resting places and fixed ideas, can be in tune with life and therefore joyful. Human beings, Krishnamurti says, ” dig a little pool themselves away from the swift current of life, and in that little pool they stagnate, die; and this stagnation, this decay we call existence.”

Harsh words, but could it be true that the life we make for ourselves, a little pool of family, work, fears, ambition, religion and so on, is an attempt to avoid experiencing larger reality? The more we believe that this place beside the river of life is secure, the less we are aware of the real nature of life- constant change. We cling the the known, Krishnamurti says, but in this clinging we become a person of fear.

All this does not mean that we have to give up the external circumstances of our life, but simply that we need to appreciate that we have created merely a representation of life that suits us. The object of living is to find truth, and if we are not actively engaged in trying to get closer to the heart of things, then we are quickly dying.

**********