Krishnamurti on God. 2

Krishnamurti is one of the greatest spiritual writers who has ever lived. So it'd be interesting to know what he thinks about how to find God. I read two chapters of his book "On God" when he was questioned on 4th July, 1948 and 21st August, 1955.

Krishnamurti thinks that human beings demand something to worship, something sacred in our lives. "We go to temples, mosques or to churches, or we have other symbols, images and ideas that we worship...the necessity of worship seems very urgent because we want to be taken out of ourselves into something greater, wider, more profound, more permanent. So we begin to invent masters, teachers, divine beings in heaven or on the earth; we devise various symbols, the cross, the crescent and so on....There is always this effort within the field of the known, within the field of the mind, of memory, and we never seem able to break away and find something sacred that is not manufactured by the mind."

Krishnamurti speculates on the question of whether it is possible for the mind to go beyond the field of recognition, of memory, of thought. To do so requires complete attention to our very thought processes themselves in the here and now. To Krishnamurti, we should not compare what we are experiencing now to what we have already accumulated in our memory or evaluate it because once we do so, we shall be distracted from our perception and our concentration on the here and now. Such comparison and evaluation derive its force from the past but to him, "any form of cumulative knowledge destroys further discovery." Once we do so, we will invariably start to discard something, accept others, condemns something and justify others. If so, then what we perceive will remain within the realm of the known, the realm of the past, the realm of the conditioned response and we learn nothing new. To him, "memory is helpful in directing, improving oneself". However to him only if the sense of self-improvement completely ceases will there be a possibility for something transcendental, something totally new coming into being. If we can honestly say, "I do not know", then something extraordinary happens: all fear may cease and all the sense of recognition, all our search into memory will come to an end. If so, all conditioning will stop. To him "That state in which the mind says, 'I do not know' is not negation. The mind has completely stopped searching, it has ceased making any movement, for it sees that any movement out of the known toward the thing it calls the unknown is only a projection of the known....But the man who says, 'I know', the man who has studied infinitely the varieties of human experience and whose mind is burdened with information, with encyclopedic knowledge, can he ever experience something that is not to be accumulated? He will find it extremely hard. When the mind totally puts aside all the knowledge that it has acquired, when for it there are no Buddhas, no Christ, no masters, no teachers, no religions, no quotations, when the mind is completely alone, uncontaminated--which means that the movement of the known has come to an end--it is only then that there is a possibility of a tremendous revolution, a fundamental change...The religious man is he who does not belong to any religion, to any nation, to any race, who is inwardly completely alone, in a state of not knowing. And for him, the blessing of the sacred comes into being." Paradoxically, only when we cease to seek will that which we seek arrive, all by itself and quite naturally.

To Krishnamurti, "we are all seeking something permanent, ..in the sense of time, something enduring, everlasting. We see that everything about us is transient, in flux--being born, withering and dying--and our search is always to establish something that will endure within the field of the known. But that which is truly sacred is beyond the measure of time, it is not to be found within the field of the known. The known operates only through thought, which is the response of memory to challenge....all the answers--of the Buddha, of the Christ, of the masters, the teachers, the gurus--have no meaning; because if they have a meaning, that meaning is born of the collection of memories that is my conditioning." Ironically, knowledge instead of enlightening us, serves only to cloud and befuddle our ability to see. Instead of liberating us from ignorance so that we may see something we have not previously seen before, it merely reinforces and imprisons us further and more rigidly in what we already knew.

He was asked how he would introduce the idea of God to man without bringing God to man's level. He replied by asking whether the impetus behind the search for God is real and says that for most of us, it is an escape from actuality and we must ask ourselves whether our search for God is an escape or whether it is a real search for truth in everything--in our relationship with others, the value of things, in ideas. "If we are seeking God merely because we are tired of this world and its miseries, then it is an escape. Then we create God and therefore it is not God: the God of the temples, of books but merely a marvellous escape". But on the other hand, "If we try to find the truth, not in one exclusive set of actions but in all our actions, ideas, and relationships, if we seek the right valuation of food, clothing and shelter, then because our minds are capable of clarity and understanding, when we seek reality, we shall find it." But God, truth or reality cannot be known by a mind that is confused, limited and conditioned by society and by ourselves, both externally and internally. We must first decondition ourselves and free our mind of its own limitations.To him, only a tranquil mind can know God. However, if a mind is compelled, disciplined to be tranquil, that tranquility is itself a limitation and merely the effect of a form of self-hypnosis. "As long as the mind creates contention, conflict in relationship, it cannot know reality." Reality thus remains unknown. But that which is known is not real!

How to begin to find out about God? We start by learning the limitations and conditioning of our own mind: "The mind becomes free and tranquil only when it understands the values with which it is surrounded...to understand that which is the highest, the supreme, the real, we must begin very low, very near ie. find the values of things, relationships and ideas which occupy us everyday." One such conditioning is the capacity of our mind to copy and imitate. Because it has read so many books, it can repeat the experience of others but this is not real. "To experience the real, the mind must cease to create, because whatever it creates is still within the bondage of time. The problem is not whether there is or is not God but how man may discover God." But most people prefer to speculate,which is a very convenient escape. That is why religion offers such a marvellous drug for most people. The task of disentangling the mind from all the values that it has created is extremely arduous. Because our minds are weary or because we are lazy, we prefer to read religious books and speculate about God but this cannot be the discovery of reality. Realizing is experiencing, not imitation.

Next, Krishnamurti was asked whether the mind is different from the thinker. He answers by a number of questions: " Is the thinker different from his thoughts? Does the thinker exist without thoughts? Is there a thinker apart from thought? Stop thinking, and where is the thinker? Is the thinker of one thought different from the thinker of another thought? Is the thinker separate from his thought or does thought create the thinker, who then identifies himself with the thought when he finds it convenient, and separates himself from it when it is not convenient." ie. what is the "I", the thinker?" He answers "Obviously, the thinker is composed of various thoughts that have become identified as the "me". Therefore the thoughts produce the thinker in the same manner that actions produce the actor, not the other way round.

In the same manner that thoughts produce the thinker and the thoughts cannot be separated from the thinker, perception is also always mixed up with the perceiver. "It is a joint phenomenon."., two sides of the same medal. "We know no perceiver without perception and we know no perception without a perceiver, the "I" and the will are two sides of the same medal: two aspects of the same phenomenon, which is neither perception nor perceiver. But the whole thought process, which includes the thinker, has to come to an end because it is only then that we find reality. If the thinker brings the process to an end, the thinker is still the product of thought: the thinker putting an end to thought is still the continuity of thought. Any exertion by the thinker is still the thinking process." But in fact, when people think, they tend in practice to separate the perceiver from the perception and the rememberer from the memory and the experiencer from the experience, the thinker from his thoughts because they hope to make the thinker etc. permanent by such thoughts. Krishnamurti says, "Memories are obviously fleeting. So the rememberer, the experiencer, the mind separates itself because it wants permanency. But a mind which is making an effort, that is striving, that is choosing, that is disciplined, cannot find the real because through that very effort, it projects itself and sustains the thinker. Whatever the thinker thinks must be the result of thinking. Thus man creates God, truth etc. out of memory and thus it obviously is not real. The mind is constantly moving from the known to the unknown. When memory functions, the mind can move only in the field of the known. To free the mind from the known, any effort is detrimental because effort is still of the known. Thus all effort must cease." He thinks that if I understand and see that all effort is futile, that all effort is a further projection of the mind, of the "I" of the thinker and that any such effort is detrimental, then I shall be free of effort. But God, truth is not a result, a reward, an end. If so, God must come to us. We cannot go to it. He says, "The mind that would discover what is true cannot believe in truth, cannot have theories or hypothesis about God...Having read this or that book about what truth or God is, your mind is astonishingly restless. A mind that is full of knowledge is restless; it is not quiet, it is only burdened, and mere heaviness does not indicate a still mind. When the mind is full of belief, either believing that there is a God or that there is not God, it is burdened, and a burdened mind can never find out what is true. To find out what is true, the mind must be free, free of rituals, free of beliefs, of dogmas, of knowledge and experience. ...Because such a mind is quiet, it no longer has the movement of going out,or the movement of coming in that is the movement of desire. It has not suppressed desire, which is energy.. ". If we make an effort to go to it, we are seeking a result, an achievement. Passive awareness is to be aware without judgement, without choice, not in some ultimate sense but in every way: it is to be aware of our actions, our thoughts, our relative responses, without choice, without condemnation, without identifying or denying, so that the mind begins to understand every thought and every action without judgement.But it is difficult to be free of effort because we are not sure. So we keep on striving.

If we cease to strive, does that mean that we are indifferent to the result of what we may find? Krishnamurti thinks that indifference is also a form of judgement. He says, "A dull mind, an indifferent mind, is not aware. To see without judgement, to know exactly what is happening, is awareness. So it is in vain to seek God or truth without being aware now, in the immediate present. It is much easier to go to a temple, but that is an escape into the realm of speculation. To understand reality, we must know it directly, and reality is obviously not of time and space. It is in the present and the present is our own thought and action.".

To Krnishnamurti, God, which may be another name for the reality of all that is, is not known. God is all that is unknown. Therefore, if we wish to find God, we should abandon all previous "knowledge", all that has been written and said about "God", whether it be by religious leaders, church, gurus etc. We should merely try our best, without any excessive effort but naturally, allow our mind to see what is there right in front of ourselves and see and observe whatever there is to see and observe. Only then will there be any chance of our discovering what God or Reality may be. We should abandon all sense of our "ego" and not be distracted by our past experience and past knowledge, so that we may truly "experience" the present moment. In his words, we can only discover God with a quiet mind, one not dominated by any desire, even the desire to find God! When we are in that kind of state, then we shall see that God is not different from love and not different from our true relationship to everything and everyone ie. that we and God may be one.