U. Krishnamurti - The Collected Works

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What do you want? Tell me, what is it? Look here, you can't ask for a thing which you don't know, and you don't know a thing about this — now or then — even assuming for a moment that you are an enlightened man, you have no way of knowing anything about it. This can never become a part of your knowledge.

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This has understood that it is not possible to experience anything any more. I don't know if I quite make myself clear. The individuality, the isolation, the separation (or whatever you want to call it) is not there any more. What separates you, what isolates you, is your thought — it creates the frontiers, it creates the boundaries. And once the boundaries are not there, it is boundless, limitless. Not that you can experience that boundlessness and limitlessness of your consciousness; the content of your consciousness is so immense that you can't say anything about it. That is why I use the words "It's a state of not knowing." You really don't know. But how do you know that you do not know? It's not that you say to yourself that you do not know; but in relation to the ordinary state of consciousness you have no way of knowing that at all — nobody has any way. There is not even an attempt on your part to grasp something.

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You don't accumulate experiences. If you want to experience one thing, the whole series of mysteries are there knocking on your door. That is not an experience at all. You are interested in experiencing the ultimate reality, truth, God, God knows what; but it's futile for you to attempt to experience a thing which you cannot experience. It doesn't mean that it is beyond the experiencing structure — "It's a thing which I cannot describe, which I cannot...." — you see, it's not all that stuff; the experiencing structure comes to an end. If you don't recognize what you are looking at — that flower as a flower, that rose as a rose — it means you are not there . What are you? You are nothing but a bundle of all these experiences, the knowledge you have about them.

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I see, and I don't know what I'm looking at. My sensory perceptions are at their peak capacity, but still there is nothing inside of me which says "That is green. That is brown. You have white hair. You wear glasses...." The knowledge I have about things is in the background — it is not operating. So, "Am I awake? Am I asleep?" — I have no way of knowing it for myself. That is why I say that in this consciousness there is a total absence of any division into wakeful, dreaming and deep-sleep states. This may be called turiya(to use your Sanskrit term) — not transcending these things; a total absence of this division.

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Q: There are no dreams in your world?

UG:In a way, the whole of life is like a great big dream. I am looking at you, but I really don't know anything about you — this is a dream, a dream world — there is no reality to it at all. When the experiencing structure is not manipulating consciousness (or whatever you want to call it), then the whole of life is a great big dream, from the experiential point of view — not from this point of view here; but from your point of view. You see, you give reality to things — not only to objects, but also to feelings and experiences — and think that they are real. When you don't translate them in terms of your accumulated knowledge, they are not things; you really don't know what they are.

Q: So, this state of not knowing is like living in a dream?

UG:To you. In relation to the reality you give to things, you would call this state of not knowing a 'dream'. I really don't even know whether I am alive or dead.

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Here there is no such thing as reality any more, let alone the ultimate reality. I function in the world as if I accept the reality of everything the way you accept it. For example (I always ask this), is it possible for you to experience the three-dimensional space in which you are functioning? No. You must have knowledge — length so many feet, width, height so many feet. How can you experience the three-dimensional space except through knowledge? So even this cannot be experienced — let alone the fourth dimension — we really don't know about it. So I can say that the walls don't exist for me, in the sense that there is no direct experience of the wall over there. That does not mean that I will knock myself against the wall when I move in that direction. It's like the water flowing: when there is an obstacle to the water, there is an action there — either it overflows or it takes a diversion. And that action is possible only when the knowledge that is there in the background comes into operation — then there is an action there. But here and now, when I begin to walk in that direction, there is no question of an obstruction or anything there.

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You see, if I use the word "matter," it is not in the sense in which the scientists use the word. (Touches the carpet.) There is a contact. A clever man asks "How do you know there is a contact?" That contact is awareness, you can say. But the moment you say that it is hard, you have given solidity to it; otherwise, is it hard or is it soft? Can you experience directly? I don't know, language is the most misleading thing. If I use the word "directly," you think there is a direct way of experiencing something. So when I use the word "directly," I mean that you cannot experience anything at all. When I talk of 'vistavision,' it is not that I can experience that vistavision; what I am saying is that you cannot. Don't try to experience what I am talking about. I can't experience, you can't experience, nobody can experience. Then, why talk about it? Because you are there and I am here.

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Q: Unless you have to catch a train or something, you are living in the present moment?

UG:To call it 'living from moment to moment' is very misleading. That moment to moment living can never be captured by you — that can never become part of your conscious existence, much less your conscious thinking.

Look here, there is no present to the structure of the 'you'; all that is there is the past, which is trying to project itself into the future. You can think about past, present, and future, but there is no future, there is no present; there is only the past. Your future is only a projection of the past. If there is a present, that present can never be experienced by you, because you experience only your knowledge about the present, and that knowledge is the past. So what is the point in trying to experience that moment which you call 'now'? The now can never be experienced by you; whatever you experience is not the now. So the now is a thing which can never become part of your conscious existence, and which you cannot give expression to. The now does not exist, as far as you are concerned, except as a concept. I don't talk about the now.

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How can you expect to experience a thing that is beyond, if you can't experience a simple thing like that bench there, which you have handled and used all your life. Even a simple thing like that bench, you can't experience. What you experience is only the knowledge you have about it, and the knowledge has come from some outside agency always — it is somebody else's; it is not yours. If you experience somebody else's experience, it is not yours. Somebody else will come along and take it away: a more persuasive man comes along and says "That's not the way to experience; there's another way," and so on and so on.