U. G. Krishnamurti Quotes

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

Don't follow me, I'm lost.

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.

Thought can never capture the movement of life, it is much too slow.

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.

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

The fact is that we don't want to be free. What is responsible for our problems is the fear of losing what we have and what we know.

You can have the courage to climb the mountain, swim the lakes, go on a raft to the other side of the Atlantic or Pacific. That any fool can do, but the courage to be on your own, to stand on your two solid feet, is something which cannot be given by somebody.

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 lets that express itself in its own way is a "Natural Man".

The body is a fortuitous concourse of atoms. There is no death for the body, only an exchange of atoms. Their changing places and taking different forms is what we call 'death.' It's a process which restores the energy level in nature that has gone down. In reality, nothing is born and nothing is dead.

Q.= WHO AM I? WHO ARE YOU? U.G = You are what you are doing RIGHT NOW!

My interest is to point out to you that you can walk, and please throw away all those crutches. If you are really handicapped, I wouldn’t advise you to do any such thing. But you are made to feel by other people that you are handicapped so that they could sell you those crutches. Throw them away and you can walk. That’s all that I can say. ‘If I fall....’ - that is your fear. Put the crutches away, and you are not going to fall.

Life has to be described in pure and simple physical and physiological terms. It must be demystified and depsychologised

Yes! is the thing that blows the whole structure apart.

If you have the courage to touch life for the first time, you will never know what hit you. Everything man has thought, felt and experienced is gone, and nothing is put in its place.

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

Society has put before you the ideal of a 'perfect man'. No matter in which culture you were born, you have scriptural doctrines and traditions handed down to you to tell you how to behave. You are told that through due practice you can even eventually come into the state attained by the sages, saints and saviors of mankind. And so you try to control your behavior, to control your thoughts, to be something unnatural.

As long as you are not at peace with yourself, it is not possible for you to be at peace with others.

freedom exists not in finding answers, but in the dissolution of all questions.

It is fear that makes you believe that you are living and that you will be dead.What we do not want is the fear to come to an end. That is why we have invented all these new minds, new sciences,new talks, therapies, choiceless awareness and various other gimmicks.

I discovered for myself and by myself that there is no self to realize -- that's the realization I am talking about. It comes as a shattering blow. It hits you like a thunderbolt. You have invested everything in one basket, self-realization, and, in the end, suddenly you discover that there is no self to discover, no self to realize -- and you say to yourself "What the hell have I been doing all my life?!" That blasts you.

When you'r no longer identified with roles and labels and conventional definition of person

The fear of extinction will probably bring us together, not 'love' or feeling of brotherhood.

The very motivation, the drive behind our demand to understand the laws of nature is to use them for the purpose of continuing the human species at the expense of every other form of life on this planet.

I am not out to liberate anybody. You have to liberate yourself, and you are unable to do that. What I have to say will not do it. I am only interested in describing this state, in clearing away the occultation and mystification in which those people in the 'holy business' have shrouded the whole thing. Maybe I can convince you not to waste a lot of time and energy, looking for a state which does not exist except in your imagination.

Human thinking is born out of this neurological defect in the human species. Anything that is born out of human thinking is destructive. Thought is destructive. Thought is a protective mechanism. It draws frontiers around itself, and it wants to protect itself. It is for the same reason that we also draw lines on this planet and extend them as far as we can.

What you know can never be the beyond. Whatever you experience is not the beyond. If there is any beyond, this movement of 'you' is absent. The absence of this movement probably is the beyond, but the beyond can never be experienced by you; it is when the 'you' is not there. Why are you trying to experience a thing that cannot be experienced?

Sometimes we are so involved with our activity that we lose ourselves in it, and in that sense we are living in the moment.

The end of illusion is the end of you.   U.G. Krishnamurti

understanding is the absence of the demand for understanding -- now or tomorrow.

The demand to be prepared for all future actions and all situations is the cause of our problems. Every situation is so different; and our attempt to be prepared for all those situations is the one that is responsible for our not being able to deal with situations as they arise.

What is morality? It is not the following of enjoined rules of conduct. It is not a question of standing above temptations, or of conquering hate, anger, greed, lust and violence. Questioning your actions before and after creates the moral problem. What is responsible for this situation is the faculty of distinguishing between right and wrong and influencing your actions accordingly.Life is action. Unquestioned action is morality. Questioning your actions is destroying the expression of life. A person who lets life act in its own way without the protective movement of thought has no self to defend. What need will he have to lie or cheat or pretend or to commit any other act which his society considers immoral?

Wanting has to go. Wanting to be free from something that is not there is what you call "sorrow.” Wanting to be free from sorrow is sorrow. There is no other sorrow. You don't want to be free from sorrow. You just think about sorrow, without acting. Your thinking endlessly about being free from sorrow is only more material for sorrow. Thinking does not put an end to sorrow. Sorrow is there for you as long as you think. There is actually no sorrow there to be free from. Thinking about and struggling against "sorrow" is sorrow. Since you can't stop thinking, and thinking is sorrow, you will always suffer. There is no way out, no escape.

As a human body it is an extraordinary piece of creation. But as a human being he is rotten because of the culture.

I may sound very cynical, but a cynic is really a realist.

Life is simply a process of stimulus and response; and stimulus and response are one unitary movement.

If that idea of the meaningful is dropped, then you will see meaning in whatever you are doing in daily life.

The demand for permanence in every area of our existence is the cause of human misery. There's no such thing as permanence at all.

I still maintain that it is not love, compassion, humanism, or brotherly sentiments that will save mankind. No, not at all. It is the sheer terror of extinction that can save us, if anything can.

When once we are freed from the goal [of solving problems], the question of whether it is a positive approach or a negative approach does not even arise.

The framing of what there is by the mind is what you call beauty.

Each cell of a living organism cooperates with the cell next to it. It does not need any sentiment or declarations of undying love to do so. Each cell is wise enough to know that if its neighbour goes, it also goes. The cells stick together not out of brotherhood, love and that kind of thing, but out of the urgent drive to survive.   It is the same with us, but only in a larger scale. Soon we will all come to know one simple thing: if I try to destroy you, I will also be destroyed.

You say that I am living in illusion. But poverty, work, war, they are not illusions. Are they? In what sense am I being deluded? What you experience through your separative consciousness is an illusion. You can't say that falling bombs are an illusion. It is not an illusion, only your experience of it is an illusion. The reality of the world that you are experiencing now is an illusion. That is all I am trying to say. If you say that

Those who are marching into the battlefield and are ready to be killed today in the name of democracy, in the name of freedom, in the name of communism, are no different from those who threw themselves to the lions in the arenas. The Romans watched that fun with great joy. How are we different from them? Not a bit. We love it. To kill and to be killed is the foundation of our culture.

You will be peaceful when all your ideas about awareness are dropped and you begin to function like a computer. You must be a machine, function automatically in this world, never questioning your actions before, during, or after they occur.

I tell you, when you stop doing things out of hope and the desire for continuity, all you do along with it stops. You will stay afloat.

Nobody knows anything about life and there is NO point in defining life.

The body is not interested in your perceptions. It is not interested in learning anything from you or knowing anything from you. All the intelligence that is necessary for this living organism is already there. Our attempts to teach this body, or make it function differently from the way it is programmed by nature, are what are responsible for the battle that is going on. There is a battle between what is put in by culture and what is inherent there in the body.

A person asked an avadhut, "What is your teaching sir?" The avadhut replied, "No teaching, no teacher, no taught." And he disappeared.                   (Avadhuta-Gita, often repeated by U.G.)

Nature is interested in only two things—to survive and to reproduce one like itself. Anything you superimpose on that, all the cultural input, is responsible for the boredom of man. So we have varieties of religious experience. You are not satisfied with your own religious teachings or games; so you bring in others from India, Asia or China. They become interesting because they are something new. You pick up a new language and try to speak it and use it to feel more important. But basically, it is the same thing.

But we have turned that, what you call sexual activity, which is biological in its nature, into a pleasure movement.   There must be two, you know. I love somebody and somebody else loves me. Wherever there is division, there can’t be love. We are trying to bridge this gap, which is horrible for us, which has no meaning, which is demanding something from us, with this fancy idea that there must be love between these two individuals.

Sorrow is there for you as long as you think. There is actually no sorrow there to be free from. Thinking about and struggling against "sorrow" is sorrow. Since you can't stop thinking, and thinking is sorrow, you will always suffer. There is no way out, no escape.

The problem is this: nature has assembled all these species on this planet. The human species is no more important than any other species on this planet. For some reason, man accorded himself a superior place in this scheme of things. He thinks that he is created for some grander purpose than, if I could give a crude example, the mosquito that is sucking his blood. What is responsible for this is the value system that we have created. And the value system has come out of the religious thinking of man. Man has created religion because it gives him a cover. This demand to fulfill himself, to seek something out there was made imperative because of this self-consciousness in you which occurred somewhere along the line of the evolutionary process. Man separated himself from the totality of nature.

The body cannot be afraid of death. The movement that is created by society or culture is what does not want to come to an end. . . . What you are afraid of is not death. In fact, you don't want to be free from fear. . . . It is the fear that makes you believe that you are living and that you will be dead. What we do not want is the fear to come to an end. That is why we have invented all these new minds, new science, new talk, therapies, choiceless awareness and various other gimmicks. Fear is the very thing that you do not want to be free from. What you call “yourself” is fear. The “you” is born out of fear; it lives in fear, functions in fear and dies in fear.

I am like a puppet sitting here. It's not just I; all of us are puppets. Nature is pulling the strings, but we believe we are acting. If you function that way (as puppets), then the problems are simple. But we have superimposed on that (the idea of) a "person" who is pulling those strings.

What I am emphasizing 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. Take desire. As long as there is a living body, there will be desire. It is natural. Thought has interfered and trying to suppress, control, and moralize about desire, to the detriment of mankind. We are trying to solve the ‘problem’ of desire through thought. It is thinking that has created the problem.

Nature’s laws know no reward, only punishment. The reward is only that you are in harmony with nature.

Someone asked me, “What do you have to say about Rajneesh after his death?” I said that the world has never seen such a pimp nor will it ever see one in the future. He combined Western therapies, the Tantric system, and everything that you could find in the books. He made a big business out of it. He took money from the boys; he took money from girls, and kept it for himself. He is dead and so we don't say anything. Nil nisi bonum (Of the dead speak not unless it be good)

You don't actually know anything about that person or that thing, except what you are projecting on that object or the individual. The knowledge you have about it is the experience. It goes on and on. That's all. What that really is, you have no way of knowing.

What is the difference whether or not you find this freedom, this enlightenment? You will not be there to benefit from it. What possible good can this state do you? This state takes away everything you have. That is why they call it jivanmukti—living in liberation. While living, the body has died.

But thought is a very protective mechanism and is interested in its own survival. At the same time thought is opposed fundamentally to the functioning of this living organism. We are made to believe that there is such a thing as mind. But there is no such thing as your mind or my mind. Society or culture, or whatever you want to call it, has created us solely and wholly for the purpose of maintaining its own continuity and status quo. At the same time, it has also created the idea that there is such a thing as individual. But actually, there is a conflict between the two – the idea of the individual and the impossibility of functioning as an individual separate and distinct from the totality of man’s thoughts and experiences.

Your own death, or the death of your near and dear ones, is not something you can experience. What you actually experience is the void created by the disappearance of another individual and the unsatisfied demand to maintain the continuity of your relationship with that person for a nonexistent eternity. The arena for the continuation of all these "permanent" relationships is the tomorrow, heaven, next life, and so on. These things are the inventions of a mind interested only in it's undisturbed, permanent continuity in a "self" generated, fictitious future. The basic method of maintaining the continuity is the repetition of the question, "How? How? How?" "How am I to live? How can I be happy? How can I be sure I will be happy tomorrow?" This has made life an insoluble dilemma for us. We want to know, and through that knowledge we hope to continue on with our miserable existences forever.

Somewhere along the line in human consciousness, there occurred self-consciousness. (When I use the word "self" I don't mean that there is a self or a center there.) That consciousness separated man from the totality of things. Man, in the beginning, was a frightened being. He turned everything that was uncontrollable into something divine or cosmic. and worshiped it. It was in that frame of mind that he created, quote and unquote, "God." So culture, is responsible for whatever you are. I maintain that all the political institutions and ideologies we have today are the outgrowth of the same religious thinking of man. The spiritual teachers are in a way responsible for the tragedy of mankind.

An Italian yoga teacher, after many years, came to see U.G. in Gstaad. She brought four of her students with her. U.G. was very polite and gracious to them. She came with her students a second time, and U.G. started asking her over and over again why she was teaching yoga — each time the answer was more self-revealing. After the second visit, she and her students never came back.

The teacher is everything to the student. Everything means: EVERYTHING.

Your wanting something that does not exist is the root of your problem. Transformation, moksha, liberation, and all that stuff are just variations on the same theme: permanent happiness. The body cannot take that. The pleasure of sex, for instance, is by nature temporary. The body can’t take uninterrupted pleasure for long, it would be destroyed. Wanting to impose a fictitious, permanent state of happiness on the body is a serious neurological problem.

You can’t experience anything except through thought. You can’t experience your own body except through the help of thought. The sensory perceptions are there. Your thoughts give form and definition to the body, otherwise you have no way of experiencing it. The body does not exist except as a thought. There is one thought. Everything exists in relationship to that one thought. That thought is “me.” Anything you experience based on thought is an illusion.

The only way the past can survive and maintain its continuity is through the constant demand to experience the same thing over and over. That is why life has become a bore. Life has become boring because we have made of it a repetitive thing. So what we mistakenly call the present is really the repetitive past projecting a fictitious future. Your goals, your search, your aspirations are cast in that mold.

No sir, I feel that I am benefited by talking with you. Are you saying that no religious commitment, no spiritual path, no sadhana is necessary? I say no. Somebody else says yes. Where does that leave you? Understanding your goal is the main thing. To achieve that goal implies struggle, battle, effort, will, that is all. There is no guarantee that you will reach your goal. You assume the goal is there. You have invented the goal to give yourself hope. But hope means tomorrow. Hope is necessary for tomorrow, not for today.

Belief is like any other habit, the more you try to control and suppress it, the stronger it becomes.

Thought creates the space between the thinker and his thoughts, and then tells himself, “I am looking at my thoughts.

Every thought that is born has to die. It is what they call the death wish. If a thought does not die, it cannot be reborn. It has to die, and with it you die. But you don’t die with each thought and breath. You hook up each thought with the next, creating a false continuity. It is that continuity that is the problem.

All your actions, whether thinking of God or beating a child, spring from the same source—thinking. The thoughts themselves cannot do any harm. It is when you attempt to use, censor, and control those thoughts to get something that your problems begin. You have no recourse but to use thought to get what you want in this world. But when you seek to get what does not exist—God, bliss, love, etc.—through thought, you only succeed in pitting one thought against another, creating misery for yourself and the world.

What is necessary is not to find out the answer to the question, but to understand that the question which you are asking, posing to yourself, and putting to somebody else, is born out of the answer you already have, which is the knowledge. So, the question and answer format, if we indulge in it for long, becomes a meaningless ritual. ... If you are really interested in finding reality, what has to dawn on you is that your very questioning mechanism is born out of the answers that you already have. Otherwise there can't be any question.

It is your thinking that makes you feel that you are alive, that you are conscious. That is possible only when the knowledge you have about things is in operation. You have no way of knowing or finding out whether you are alive or dead. In that sense, there is no death at all, because you are not alive. You become conscious of things only when the knowledge is in operation. When the knowledge is absent, whether the person is dead or alive is of no importance to this movement of thought which comes to an end before what we call "death" takes place.

Every time a thought is born, you are born. Thought in its very nature is shortlived, and once it is gone, that's the end of it. That is probably what the traditions meant by rebirth -- death and birth and death and birth. It is not that this particular entity, which is non-existing even while you are living, takes a series of births. The ending of births and deaths is the state that they are talking about.

You are not looking at anything; you are not in contact with anything living, as long as you use your thoughts to understand and experience anything.

I don’t have any moral position. Society, which has created all these sociopaths, has invented morality to protect itself from them. Count me out.

Because the unique individual cannot reproduce himself either physically or spiritually, nature discards him as useless. Nature is only interested in reproducing, and from time to time throwing out a “sport” or unique specimen. This specimen, not able to reproduce itself, is finished with evolution, and is not interested in making of itself a model for others.

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.

You are living. As soon as you introduce the question “how to live?” you have made of life a problem. “How” to live has made life meaningless. The moment you ask “how,” you turn to someone for answers, becoming dependent.

You cannot measure anything unless you have a point. So, if the center is absent, there is no circumference at all. That is pure and simple basic arithmetic.

The society is interested only in fitting every individual into its framework and maintaining its continuity.

Vegetarianism for what? For some spiritual goals? One form of life lives off another. That's a fact, whether you like it or not.

Not answers, but the ending of questions, is the important thing.

Your natural state has no relationship whatsoever with the religious states of bliss, beatitude and ecstasy; they lie within the field of experience. Those who have led man on his search for religiousness throughout the centuries have perhaps experienced those religious states. So can you. They are thought-induced states of being, and as they come, so do they go. Krishna Consciousness, Buddha Consciousness, Christ Consciousness, or what have you, are all trips in the wrong direction: they are all within the field of time. The timeless can never be experienced, can never be grasped, contained, much less given expression to, by any man.

There are no spiritual goals at all; they are simply an extension of material goals into what you imagine to be a higher, loftier plane. You mistakenly believe that by pursuing the spiritual goal you will somehow miraculously make your material goals simple and manageable. This is in actuality not possible. You may think that only inferior persons pursue material goals, that material achievements are boring, but in fact the so-called spiritual goals you have put before yourself are exactly the same.

God or Enlightenment is the ultimate pleasure, uninterrupted happiness. No such thing exists. Your wanting something that does not exist is the root of your problem. Transformation, moksha, and all that stuff are just variations of the same theme: permanent happiness. The body can't take uninterrupted pleasure for long; it would be destroyed. Wanting a fictitious permanent state of happiness is actually a serious neurological problem.

If the word is not the thing what the hell is it? Without the word you have no way of experiencing anything at all. Without the word you are not separate from whatever you are looking at or what is going on inside of you. The word is the knowledge. Without that knowledge you don't even know whether it is pain or pleasure that you experience, whether it is happiness or unhappiness, whether it is boredom or its opposite.

We invent what is called a thoughtless state or an effortless state, I don't know for what reason. Why one should be in an effortless state is beyond me. But to be in an effortless state or to act effortlessly we use effort. That's absurd. We don't seem to have any way of putting ourselves into a thoughtless state except through thought.

I have to accept the reality of present-day capitalist society however exploitative or inhumane it may seem to be. Not because it is the best system that can ever be, or because its exploitation and inhumanity are unreal, but for pure and simple reasons of survival. The acceptance has only a functional value. Nothing more and nothing less. If I do not accept social reality as it is imposed on me, I will "end up in the loony-bin singing merry melodies and loony tunes.

I personally feel that the basic question, which we all should ask ourselves is, what kind of human beings we want on this planet? Unfortunately, culture, whether it is Oriental or Occidental, has placed before us the model of a perfect being. That model is patterned after the behaviour of the religious thinkers of mankind who have done more harm than good. Everything that we are confronting today is a product of the religious thinking of man. But that thinking has no answers for the future of mankind. So if you want, you have to find answers within the framework of the systems that have failed to deliver the goods. I don’t think religious thinking has any answers for our problems today.

The body is not interested in anything you are interested in. And that is the #battle that is going on all the time.

As a human body it is an extraordinary piece of creation. But as a human being he is rotten because of the #culture.