Question: Have you not set up an authority to liberate yourself from all authority including itself?

Krishnamurti: The gentleman says that I have an authority which liberates me from all authorities including itself. Should I accept such an authority? If I met an authority which destroys all previous authorities including itself, should I accept such authority? Authority can never liberate you from any other authority; and if it does, that new authority has taken root in you; it has not destroyed authority; you have only replaced old authority by a new one. If that authority has denied all authority and helped you to be free of all authority including itself, where is the need of acceptance of any authority? I see authority is pernicious. I have gone into it. Do not ask me about the authority of policemen, of Government, etc; I won't go into it now.

The understanding of authority is absolutely essential for a free mind; and it is only a free mind that can find - not a crippled mind. If you understand the full significance of authority, not because somebody else tells you to look, or somebody else tells you that you are free only when you are free from authority, but through your own examination, through your own questioning, from your own enquiry, every day of your life, then you will find there is no authority. You have got to accept no authority of any kind including my own; but that requires a tremendous understanding, that requires you seeing facts.

The question is: is the religious mind, an individual mind or the collective mind? Or, is it something else? Sir, is your mind, the mind that you use, an individual mind - individual being unique? is your mind unique? Or is it merely the collective and the interaction of the collective modified in the present by various experiences and incidents and accidents? Is yours an individual mind? You may have a technical job, a mechanical functioning; is it an individual mind? Are you not of the collective? You are all Hindus, Christians, Catholics, Buddhists, Communists, Indians or Russians - you are the collective. To see that you are the collective and to see the fact of it and to free the mind from the collective - that can only be done through self-enquiry, through self-knowing. And the freeing of the mind from its conditioning through self-knowing brings about a new mind which is neither individual nor collective; that mind is something totally new.

May I say something, sirs? First of all, it is very kind of you to have come and listened to these talks. And these talks will be utterly useless, absolutely worthless, will be empty ashes, if you merely lived by the word, if you merely treated it as an idea, as a theory which is added to the old theories which you already have. But if you have listened so that the very listening is an act of self-enquiry, self-knowing, then these talks will have real significance; then they will take you infinitely far.