Krishnamurti on the religious mind

Last night, I read another chapter of Krnishnamurti's "On God". There he talks about what is the state of mind that inquires into the question of religion.

He starts off by making a distinction between isolation and aloneness. He thinks that our daily activity is centred on ourselves, on our particular point of view, our particular experiences and idiosyncrasies: we think in terms of our family, our job, what we wish to achieve, in terms of our fears, our secret desires, our hidden hopes and ambitions and despairs. We are never deeply related to anyone, our husbands, wives, children. To him, such self-isolation is the result of our running away from our daily boredom, the frustrations and trivialities of our daily life. We feel "an extraordianry sense of loneliness" when everything appears to be at a distance and there is no communion, no relationship with anyone. We feel all alone.

To escape from this sense of isolation and loneliness, we try to identify ourselves with something greater than our mind: the state, an ideal or a concept of what God is. "This identification with something great or immortal, something outside the field of our own thought, is generally called religion and it leads to belief, dogma, ritual, the separative pursuits of competing groups, each believing in different aspects of the same thing". Paradoxically, this leads to still further isolation. Thus the world is divided into competing nations, each with its soevereign governments and economic barriers. We have built walls between ourselves and our neighbors, through nationalism, through race, caste, class, which brings further isolation and loneliness.

To Krishnamurti, a mind caught in such isolation can never understand what religion is: "It can believe,..have certain theories, concepts, formulas, it can try to identifiy itself with that which it calls God", but to him, "religion ...has nothing whatsover to do with any belief, with any priest, with any church, or so-called sacred book". To him, religion is all about beauty but such beauty can be approached only through total aloneness: "Only when the mind is completely alone can it know what beauty is, and not in any other state.". The religious mind must therefore be alone but not isolated. But aloneness is not uniqueness, and certainly not isolation. To be completely alone demands "extraordinary sensitivity, intelligence and understanding. It must be free of every kjind of influence, uncontaminated by society." We must be completely alone to find out for oneself if there is something immortal and beyond time.

He says that "Our mind now is the result many thousands of years of influence--bioloigical, sociological, environmental, climatic, alimentary etc. We are influenced by the food we eat, the newspaper we read, by our husband or wife, by our neighbor, by the politician, by radio and television and a thousand other things", consciously or unconsciously. Our mind is often merely the instrument of our environment from whose influence we create an image of what it thinks is God, the Eternal Truth etc. But to him, such belief is not religious at all. "As a Christian, you were brought up in a church built by man over two thousand years, with its priests, dogmas, rituals. In childhood, you were baptized and as you grew up, you were told what to believe; you went through that whole process of conditioning, brainwashing.". The influence of this propagandist religion is very strong because it is well organized through education, through the worship of images, through fear, through traditions which condition our mind in a thousand other ways.

We must therefore learn to unlearn all the other influences which have consciously and unconsciously conditioned us in our past: our nationality, our church, our beliefs, our dogmas, our greed, our envy, our fear, our sorrow, our ambition, our anxiety etc and learn to free ourselves from all such pressures both from the outside and from within because they only cause division, contradiction, neurosis. Such a mind can never learn to appreciate the beauty of what is true or if there is something beyond time, what is eternal, the unnameable, the supreme. We must learn how we are being contaminated, shaped and conditioned but before we can do that, we must first of all be aware of the importance of doing so through meditation. But we cannot do so if we merely resist or defend ourselves against being influenced because resistance is itself a reaction which further conditions our mind. "The understanding of the total process of influence must be effortless; it must have the quality of immediate perception." Once we are totally aware of the importance of not being influenced, then a part of our mind will constantly monitor whether or not we are being influenced, being always alert and watchful and ready to cleanse itself from further influence, however subtle. Only so will our mind know what beauty is, a beauty which is outside of time. To do this, the mind must be totally uninfluenced and totally alone.

To Krishnamurti, beauty is synonymous with eternity. For most of us, beauty is is a matter of proportion, shape, size, contour, color but if we see a building, a mountain, a river as an outsider, an experiencer, then we still operate within the field of time because we are then seeing through our accumulated experience from the past which judges, evaluates and thinks. "To find out what is eternal, the immortal, your mind must be free of time--time being tradition, the accumulated knowledge and experience of the past. It is not a question of what you believe or disbelieve....But the mind that is in earnest, that really wants to find out, will relinguish totally the self-centred activty of isolation and will thereby come upon a state in which it is completely alone.... In this state of complete aloneness there comes a sense of extraordinary beauty, of something not created by the mind. It has nothing to do with putting a few notes together, or using a few paints to create a picture, but because it is alone, the mind is in beauty and therefore it is completely sensitive....the mind renews itself every day, which is to die every day to the past, to everything it has known."

Krishnamurti asks: "Is it possible to live in this world without giving continuity to action, so that one comes to every action afresh? That is, can I die to each action throughout the day, so that the mind never accumulates and is therefore never contaminated by the past, but is always new, fresh, innocent?" He thinks that it is possible and that one can live in this way. We must die to and be free from the word, the symbol, be free from a desire to be certain and cease to search for the permanent, the immortal, the eternal because such a search is merely a reaction from our fear of the impermanent. "Only when the mind is free of this desire to be certain that it can begin to find out if there is such a thing as the eternal, something beyond space, beyond time, beyond the thinker and the thing that he is thinking about or seeking.". To do so requires our total attention with no distraction, no strain, no movement in any particular direction. To him, every such movement, every motive, is the result of influence, either of the past or of the present. "In that state of effortless attention, there comes an extraordinary sense of freedom, and only then, being totally empty, quiet, still, is the mind capable of discovering that which is eternal.".

What we need to do is not to resist the desire to be certain but to find out, not how to end desire but what it is that gives rise to that desire. To him, as to the Buddha, what gives continuity to desire is thought. We cannot be free from desire but we must be constantly aware of how that desire comes about and how it continues. It is through understanding the process of desire that we can in a way remove its sting. "What matters is not freedom from desire, but to understand the structure of desire and how thought gives it continuity--that is all. Then the mind is free and you do not have to seek freedom from desire. The moment you seek freedom from desire, you are caught in conflict. Each time that you see a car, a woman, a house or whatever it may be that attracts you, thought steps in and give desire a continuity, and then it all becomes an endless problem.".  To him "what is important is to live a life without effort, without a single problem. You can live without a problem if you understand the nature of effort and see very clearly the whole structure of desire...we must be able to end each problem immediately it arises...such a mind is the only religious mind, because it has understood sorrow and the ending of sorrow. It is without fear, and is therefore a light unto itself.".

It seems that Krishnamurti is constantly harping on one theme. The theme that he is harping on looks remarkably like the theme that the Buddha is harping on too and one which is epitomised  by the phrase one sees constantly in Buddhist sutras. The words are : "as is" or "so it is" or in Christian terminology "amen". It seems that he is telling us to do our best to shed all our previous accumulated knowledge and influences and do our best to live each moment as if we were looking and experiencing the world and all that it has to offer for the very first time, but in a most relaxed way, without ardently aiming at achieving a target, as if it were a project in which we must be successful, but naturally. This appears also to be the message of the Taoists, who constantly urge us to revert to the state of a newborn baby.  Krishnamurti's idea of religion is certainly not organized religion with its ideology, its beliefs, its dogmas, its places of worship, its rituals, its professional class of clerics. He seems to want us to live in a way in which we are constantly on the alert about being influenced by our past knowledge and our future desire, a state of pure being. To be truly religious, we must have not what Eric Fromm calls a "having mode" of existence, whereby we are constantly striving to own or possess or to hold on to this or to achieve that etc., whether that be material possession, persons dear to us or some ideal or other. We merely exist and rest content with such existence, in the here and now, in an attitude of contemplation, appreciation, gratefulness, naturalness and complete relaxation and a mindful and alert ease. Paradoxically, it is only if we are able to free ourselves from our desire to achieve or to possess religion, or belief in God that we may have a glimpse of immortality, of eternity, a state free from the pressures of both time and space.