Vinstant

The best way to help another

Question: I want to help people, serve them. What is the best way?

Krishnamurti: The best way is to begin to understand yourself and change yourself. In this desire to help another, to serve another, there is hidden pride, conceit. If you love you serve. The clamour to help is born of vanity.
    If you want to help another, you must know yourself for you are the other. Outwardly we may be different—yellow, black, brown, or white—but we are all driven by craving, by fear, by greed, or by ambition; inwardly we are very much alike. Without self-knowledge, how can you have knowledge of another’s needs? Without understanding yourself, you cannot understand another, serve another. Without self-knowledge you are acting in ignorance, and so creating sorrow…

J. Krishnamurti/The Collected Works vol III, p 219

We do not have to beg for help

To follow another, however great, prevents the discovery of  the ways of the self; to run after the promise of some ready-made utopia makes the mind utterly unaware of the enclosing action of its own desire for comfort, for authority, for someone else’s help. The priest, the politician, the lawyer, the soldier are all there to “help” us; but such help destroys intelligence and freedom.  The help we need does not lie outside ourselves. We do not have to beg for help; it comes without our seeking it when we are humble in our dedicated work, when we are open to the understanding of our daily trials and accidents.

We must avoid the conscious or unconscious craving for support and encouragement, for such craving creates its own response, which is always gratifying. It is comforting to have someone to encourage us, to give us a lead , to pacify us; but this habit of turning to another as a guide, as an authority soon becomes a poison in our system. The moment we depend on another for guidance, we forget our original intention, which was to awaken individual freedom and intelligence.

                  

J. Krishnamurti/Education and the Significance of Life, p 109

You have to be your own teacher

The speaker is not important at all; what is important is for you to find out these things for yourself, so that you are free and not second-hand human beings. You must look to find out, to find out whether or not it is possible for the mind to be completely and totally free of this violence, pride and arrogance, and so come upon a different quality altogether. And to find that out you must look most intimately and discover for yourself; then it is your own, not somebody else’s, not something that you have been told, because there is no teacher and no follower. Unfortunately that word “guru” has been bandied about recently in this country; the word in Sanskrit means “the one who points”, like a signpost by the roadside. However, you don’t worship that post, hang garlands around it; neither do you follow it around and carry out all the mysterious orders a guru is supposed to give; he is just a signpost by the roadside, you read and pass by.

    So you have to be your own teacher and your own disciple, and there is no teacher outside, no saviour, no master; you yourself have to change, and therefore you have to learn to observe, to know yourself. This learning about yourself is a fascinating and joyous business…

J. Krishnamurti/Talks with American Students, p 98

All authority must come to an end

What we are going to do is to learn about ourselves—not according to the speaker, or to Freud, or to Jung, to some analyst or philosopher—but to learn actually what we are. If we learn about ourselves according to Freud we learn about Freud, not about ourselves. To learn about oneself, all authority must come to an end, all authority—whether it be the authority of the church or of the local priest, or the famous analyst, or of the greatest philosophers with their intellectual formulas, and so on. So the first thing that one has to realize when we become serious, demanding a total revolution within the structure of our own psyche, is that there is no authority of any kind. That is very difficult, for there is not only the outward authority, which one can easily reject, but there is inward authority: the inward authority of one’s own experience, of one’s own accumulated knowledge, of the opinions, ideas, ideals which guide one’s life and according to which one tries to live.

                     

J.Krishnamurti/Talks & Dialogues Saanen 1967, p 11

The real problem is the mind itself

It seems to me that the real problem is the mind itself, and not the problem which the mind has created and tries to solve. If the mind is petty, small, narrow, limited, however great and complex the problem may be, the mind approaches that problem in terms of its own pettiness. If I have a little mind and I think of God, the God of my thinking will be a little God, though I may clothe him with grandeur, beauty, wisdom, and all the rest of it.

It is the same with the problem of existence, the problem of bread, the problem of love, the problem of sex, the problem of relationship, the problem of death. These are all enormous problems, and we approach them with a small mind; we try to resolve them with a mind that is very limited. Though it has extraordinary capacities and is capable of invention, of subtle, cunning thought, the mind is still petty. It may be able to quote Marx, or the Gita, or some other religious book, but it is still a small mind, and a small mind confronted with a complex problem can only translate that problem in terms of itself, and therefore the problem, the misery increases. So the question is: Can the mind that is small, petty, be transformed into something which is not bound by its own limitations?  

J. Krishnamurti/The Collected Works vol X, pp 155-156

Why can’t we…not seek an answer to a problem?

…The answer is in the problem, not away from the problem. I go through the searching, analysing, dissecting process, in order to escape from the problem. But, if I do not escape from the problem and try to look at the problem without any fear or anxiety, if I merely look at the problem—mathematical, political, religious, or any other—and  not look to an answer, then the problem will begin to tell me. Surely, this is what happens. We go through this process and eventually throw it aside because there is no way out of it. So, why can’t we start right from the beginning, that is, not seek an answer to a problem?—which is extremely arduous, isn’t it? Because, the more I understand the problem, the  more significance there is in it. To understand, I must approach it quietly, not impose on the problem my ideas, my feelings of like and dislike. Then the problem will reveal its significance.

    Why is it not possible to have tranquillity of the mind right from the beginning?

J. Krishnamurti/The Collected Works vol V, p 283

Not to have a single problem

…From childhood we are trained to have problems. When we are sent to school, we have to learn how to write, how to read, and all the rest of it. How to write becomes a problem to the child. Please follow this carefully. Mathematics becomes a problem, history becomes a problem, as does chemistry. So the child is educated, from childhood, to live with problems—the problem of God, problem of a dozen things. So our brains are conditioned, trained, educated to live with problems. From childhood we have done this. What happens when a brain is educated in problems? It can never solve problems; it can only create more problems. When a brain that is trained to have problems, and to live with problems, solves one problem, in the very solution of that problem, it creates more problems. From childhood we are trained, educated to live with problems and, therefore, being centred in problems, we can never solve any problem completely. It is only the free brain that is not conditioned to problems that can solve problems. It is one of our constant burdens to have problems all the time. Therefore our brains are never quiet, free to observe, to look. So we are asking: Is it possible not to have a single problem but to face problems? But to understand those problems, and to totally resolve them, the brain must be free.
J. Krishnamurti/That Benediction is Where You Are, pp 18-19

To look at life not as a problem

First, we must be very clear that you and the speaker are treating life not as a problem but as a tremendous movement. If your brain is trained to solve problems, then you will treat this movement as a problem to be solved. Is it possible to look at life with all its questions, with all its issues, which is tremendously complex, to look at it not as a problem, but to observe it clearly, without bias, without coming to some conclusion which will then dictate your observation? You have to observe this vast movement of life, not only your own particular life, but the life of all humanity, the life of the earth, the life of the trees, the life of the whole world—look at it, observe it, move with it, but if you treat it as a problem, then you will create more problems. 

J. Krishnamurti/Mind Without Measure, p105

We are really inquiring into the whole human being

I would like now, if I may, to go into the problem of observing ourselves. When we observe ourselves we are not isolating ourselves, limiting ourselves, becoming self-centred, because, as we explained, we are the world and the world is us. This is a fact. And when we, as human beings, examine the whole content of our consciousness, of ourselves, we are really inquiring into the whole human being—whether he lives in Asia, Europe, or America. So it is not a self-centred activity. When we are observing ourselves, we are not  becoming selfish, self-centred, becoming more and more neurotic, lopsided; on the contrary, we are examining, when we look at ourselves, the whole human problem of misery, conflict and the appalling things that man has made for himself and for others. So it is very important to understand this fact that we are the world and the world is us. You may have superficial mannerisms, superficial tendencies, but basically all human beings throughout this unfortunate world go through misery, confusion, turmoil, violence, despair, agony. So there is a common ground upon which we all meet. So when we observe ourselves, we are observing human beings.

J. Krishnamurti/On Mind and Thought, pp 62-63

The purpose of human existence

Questioner: What is the ultimate reason or purpose of human existence?

Krishnamurti: Do you know any purposes? The way we live has no meaning and no purpose. We can invent a purpose, the purpose of perfection, enlightenment, reaching the highest form of sensitivity; we can invent endless theories. And we are caught in those theories, making them our problems. Our daily life has no meaning, no purpose, except to make a bit of money and lead an idiotic kind of life. One can observe all this, not in theory but actually in oneself; the endless battle in oneself, seeking a purpose, seeking enlightenment, going all over the world—specially to India or to Japan—to learn a technique of meditation. You can invent a thousand purposes but you need not go anywhere, not to the Himalayas, to a monastery, or to any ashram—which is another form of  concentration camp—because everything is in you. The highest, the immeasurable, is in you, if you know how to look. Do not assume it is there; that is one of the stupid tricks we play upon ourselves: that we are God, that we are the ‘perfect’ and all the rest of that childish stuff. Yet through the illusion, through ‘what is’, through the measurable, you find something that is immeasurable; but you must begin with yourself, where you can discover for yourself how to look.

J.Krishnamurti/Beyond Violence, pp 106-107