Krishnamurti & the Art of Awakening

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Krishnamurti Quote of the Day

Santiago, Chile | 1st Public Talk 1st September, 1935

What happens when you seek security, certainty? There must be fear; and if you are conscious of your thought, you will discern that it has its root in fear. Morality, religion and objective conditions are based fundamentally on fear, for they are the outcome of the desire on the part of the individual to be secure. Though you may not have any religious belief, yet you have the desire to be subjectively secure, which is but the religious spirit. Let us understand the structure of what we call religion.

As I said, when one seeks security there must be fear; to be subjectively certain, you seek what you call immortality. In search of that security, you accept teachers who promise this immortality, and you come to regard them as authorities, to be feared, to be worshipped. And where there is this fear, there must be dogmas, creeds, beliefs, ideals and traditions to hold the mind.

Tags: dogma, fear, security

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Now, when you face the inexplicable, faith comes to your aid and asserts that there is a God, that he has created us and we are his instruments, that we are transcendent beings, with a permanent identity.
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If we recognise we are blind, we would be careful and would not make any dogmatic assertion about anything.
Through attachment the inevitable darkness of fear is waiting
Most of us want to be occupied; otherwise we shall feel lost, otherwise we do not know what to do, we will be lonely, we will be confronted with what we actually are
It is the fear of being nothing that compels us to accumulate;
From my point of view, religions with all their intermediaries, their ceremonies, their priests, destroy creative understanding and pervert judgment.
We have divided life into dying and living. And this division has brought about great fear. And out of that fear we invent all kinds of theories, very comforting, may be illusory, but it is very comforting, illusions are comfortably neurotic.
Followers are those who want power through knowledge, through enlightenment
The 'me' is created by thought and the 'me' says: "I am independent of thought".
As long as you think time and thought are necessary, in the psychological world, in the world of the self, in the world of psyche, in the world of inside the skin, then you will be perpetually in fear.
The relationship between what one is and what one desires to be causes fear.
Though we have theories, speculations, and there are certain observable facts, death is still the unknown.
If what I say is destructive to any particular organization or society, then either that society is false or what I say is false; and it is for you to consider, to judge and to act without compromise.
There cannot be human, vital relationships, or living joyously in the plenitude of life in the present - which to me is the only eternity - so long as mind and heart are crippled through fear;
The very inquiry into the future shows that you are already dying.
Patriotism is a disease, and when you begin to realize, become aware that it is a disease, then you will see how your mind is reacting to that disease.
Where there is fear there must be discipline, compulsion, influence, domination, the search for power which the mind glorifies as virtue and as divine.
You have created disciplines, codes and authorities, and your life is moulded, controlled and shaped by compulsion of various forms and degrees.
As in a circus the animals are trained to function for the amusement of spectators, so the individual through fear seeks out these spiritual trainers whom he calls priests and swamis, who are the defenders of spurious spirituality and the inanities of religion.
When we say we seek out or cultivate a new value, it is but the overcoming of that in which the mind is already caught up, which is its opposite.
The illusion of economic security is shown throughout the world by these depressions, crises, wars, calamities, and chaos.
Question: I do not care what happens after death, but I am afraid of dying. Must I fight this fear, and how can I overcome it?
Illusion divides itself infinitely.
In order to escape from fear, you create faith.
Man is almost suffocated in the prison of false values, of which he is unconscious.
To discuss and intellectually discover what is intelligence would be, I feel, a waste of time and energy, for that would not lift the burden of ignorance and illusion.
Fear is so subtle. so swift, so cunning, that it hides itself in many places.
What really awakens intelligence is action without the fear of not adjusting oneself to a standard or an ideal.
One can wholly eliminate fear, it is not a fundamental part of life.
The will to survive, the will to be satisfied, the will to continue - this is the very root cause of fear.
Please do not [at the beginning of these talks] expect an immediate solution for your various problems.
Intellect merely guides fear, controls it, but can never destroy it, for intellect is the very cause of fear.
When there is discontentment, sorrow, the intellect mechanically comes forward with solutions, explanations, tentative suggestions, which gradually crystallize and become habits of thought.
There is only one fundamental problem, which expresses itself in many different ways.
Desire cannot exist by itself, it must always be in relation to something.
Is not the mind, as we know it, an instrument developed for survival, for satisfaction, for self-protection, for resistance, and therefore the instrument of fear?
Do not think by merely wishing for peace, you will have peace, when in your daily life of relationship you are aggressive, acquisitive, seeking psychological security here or in the hereafter.
Craving engenders fear, fear nourishes dependence, dependence on things, people or ideas.
Because we are as the dead we fear death; the living do not.
if we were aware of what is, then the truth of sorrow, of impermanency, of imprisonment would liberate thought from its own ignorance.
We have never understood the significance of Death.
In understanding the process of self-protection which is primary, fear which is secondary, loses its significance.
From my point of view, religions with all their intermediaries, their ceremonies, their priests, destroy creative understanding and pervert judgment.
Instead of addressing heterogeneous crowds in many places and dazzling and confounding them with your brilliance and subtlety, why do you not start a community or colony and create a reference for your way of thinking?
One takes comfort, security, in any form of illusion. And man apparently needs many illusions.
Until you are committed, dedicated, to eradicating this national, economic, religious division, you are perpetuating war
The other day as one was walking along a secluded wooded lane far from the noise and the brutality and the vulgarity of civilization, right away from everything that was put together by man, there was a sense of great quietness, enveloping all things - serene, distant and full of the sound of the earth.
Actually, there is no security in life - neither physical nor intellectual, neither emotional nor spiritual.
There is no such thing as comfort in life, no such thing as security.
When you realize that there is no such thing as comfort, no such thing as security, either in possession of things or of ideas, then you face life as it is, not with the background of intense longing for comfort.
Where there is a search for comfort, security, there must be a pattern, a mould, in which we take shelter, and therefore we begin to preconceive what God must be, and what truth must be.
As in a circus the animals are trained to function for the amusement of spectators, so the individual through fear seeks out these spiritual trainers whom he calls priests and swamis, who are the defenders of spurious spirituality and the inanities of religion.
There is no such thing as fundamental security
The illusion of economic security is shown throughout the world by these depressions, crises, wars, calamities, and chaos.
To find out what is true, what is the significance of life, what is immortality, without which life becomes a chaotic triviality, a senseless, blind suffering, you must have intelligence;
this search for physical security expresses itself in possessions, with all its cruelties, exploitations, and the rather terrifying stupidities such as nationalism, class wars, racial hatred.
When there is complete nakedness, utter hopelessness, then in that moment of vital insecurity there is born the flame of supreme intelligence, the bliss of truth.
There is no security, no comfort, but only clarity of thought which brings about the understanding of the fundamental cause of suffering, which alone will liberate man.
The continual process of awakening the mind from its own limitations is true experience.
A man who would understand truth must be free from the desire for security and comfort.
One creates one's own authority when there is the desire to protect oneself or take shelter in a hope or in an ideal or in a certain set of values.
Intelligence, which has no concern with the conception of security, arranges the well-being of the whole and not merely of the particular.
Do not think by merely wishing for peace, you will have peace, when in your daily life of relationship you are aggressive, acquisitive, seeking psychological security here or in the hereafter.
Seeking security is an indication that you do not know what you are.
... self-knowledge has an extraordinary creative significance, if we treat it as an experiment, and not try to achieve a result;
I do not know if you have observed the process of your thinking; but if you have, you will see that your thought is always moving from the known to the known, or to an unknown of its own creation which it then pursues until it becomes the worship of God.
In the unknown, there is no security because we do not know it at all.