U. Krishnamurti - The Collected Works

Q: I'm convinced of what you say.

UG:It's not a question of conviction; it's a fact, and that fact cannot be experienced by you. As long as you say to yourself that you are convinced, you are not so sure.

Q: There's no power outside of me, here and now?

UG:You don't let that power express itself, because that's a thing that you cannot experience. You want to experience it. How is that possible? That power is something living, vital — it's the throb, the pulse, the beat of life — you are one expression of that life, that's all. How can you experience that? This structure of thought, through which you experience, is dead; it cannot experience that life at all, because the one is something living and the other is dead, and there can't be any relationship between the two. You can only experience dead things, not a living thing. Life has to express itself. This is a thing which nobody can teach you. You don't have to get it from somebody; what you have is there.

Q: Yes. But if....

UG:There is no 'yes, but'. You can't say 'yes' and begin the next sentence with 'but'. There is no 'but' there. If the 'yes' is a real 'yes', that releases the thing there — the 'yes' fades into nothingness and then what is there begins to express itself. If you say 'but', you are giving continuity to that dead structure of thought, experience and hope. 'Yes!' is the thing that blows the whole structure apart.

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No outside agency can help you — nobody — not even this chap who is talking so much about all this; he cannot help you. (At least he is honest — "All right, I cannot help.") So all outside agencies are finished — that is a very difficult point to arrive at — "All outside agencies are finished for me!" You don't go and listen to anybody, no matter however holy he may be. He may be the God of Gods, he may say "I have come to liberate the whole of mankind!" but you don't go there, you understand? (If you go there just to satisfy your curiosity, that's a different matter.) You don't seek anything from any source outside. So you fall back on yourself, and you really don't know . You want to find out. You ask the question again and again — you are stuck with it — "How can I understand this thing?" When you are finished with all answers from outside and no answer is forthcoming from inside, what happens to that question? That question cannot remain there; it dissolves itself. Ionization of thought takes place because it cannot escape, and that is energy, that is life.

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Q: We hear you spent seven years with J. Krishnamurti. Do you mean to say his influence has no bearing on your present state? It is a big zero for you?

UG:Absolutely. Some people come and ask me "You hung around Krishnamurti for seven years. Do you mean to say that it had no impact?" I say "In spite of Krishnamurti this thing happened." If it has to happen, it has to happen in spite of me and in spite of my teachers. No impact, nothing; on the contrary it made it very difficult for me. I can say that it prevents and destroys the possibility of being yourself, of unburdening yourself of your past.

How can you unburden yourself of the past? You see, the language.... The word 'unburden' implies there is something that you can do to unburden yourself. There is nothing you can do to free yourself from the past. This is only a description of the state where the past does not operate anymore — it cannot influence your actions. Those actions — they are not your actions anymore. You don't know anything about that action — it is a thing that cannot be manipulated by you at all, the action of life itself. At the same time I want to point out that it is not a mystical or religious thing or a pure, spontaneous action; it has nothing to do with that. Life is acting all the time, in the sense that as long as sensory activity is in operation something is happening. Not one, but millions and millions of sensations are hitting the human organism. This human organism is not separate from that; it is one electromagnetic field. It is one field, and what isolates and separates you and creates a tiny electromagnetic field is thought.

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Q: Can one uncondition one's thought through being aware of it?

UG:How do you see the thought? Have you really tried this, or have you just accepted the idea? The one who is looking at conditioned thought is also conditioned, so do you see the absurdity of doing this? I don't think so. You can't do a thing. Don't get on this journey of freeing yourself from the conditioning of your own thought.

But you are still trying. You accept these ideas; you never question the validity of those statements. It doesn't matter who says it, it is false for you. Not only that, it is falsifying you because you do not test the validity of those statements for yourself.

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The conditioning, you see — you will never be free from that. Don't believe anybody. There is no such thing as an unconditioned mind; the mind is conditioned. It is absurd, you see, to.... If there is a mind, it is bound to be conditioned. There is no such thing as an open mind. In the Theosophical Society we used to repeat '"An open mind". How absurd that statement is! Mind can never be open; it is a closed thing. I don't accept that there is such a thing as the mind, let alone the open mind or the unconditioned mind. There is no totality of these thoughts and experiences; they are all disconnected, disjointed things.

The thoughtless state, silence.... How can you experience silence? — that's my question. How can you experience the thoughtless state? You'll never be free from thought. If there is any such thing as a thoughtless state, it can never be experienced by you or by anybody. Whatever you experience there is created by this thought.

The timeless.... We used to write essays, "Time and the Timeless," ridiculous stuff. It is time that creates the timeless and then pursues the timeless — and through this pursuit time is continuing — continuity is all that it is interested in.

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Abstractions are very misleading. If you start talking in terms of 'innocence', in terms of this, that and the other, you are lost. Abstractions are very misleading, very misleading. You talk of innocence. What do you know about that innocence? In that state you really don't know what you are looking at. You don't know that you are looking at your wife. Can there be any relationship? Can there be a wife? Can there be children? You see, you can talk of innocence, but when there is no mind, why talk of the innocent mind? Where is the mind, or the unconditioned mind? These phrases are very misleading; they are not going to help in any way.

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To me there is no such thing as mind; mind is a myth. Since there is no such thing as mind, the 'mutation of mind' that J. Krishnamurti is talking about has no meaning. There is nothing there to be transformed, radically or otherwise. There is no self to be realized. The whole religious structure that has been built on this foundation collapses because there is nothing there to realize. To me, Krishnamurti is playing exactly the same game as all those ugly saints in the market whom we have in the world today. Krishnamurti's teaching is phony baloney. There is nothing to his teaching at all, and he cannot produce anything at all. A person may listen to him for sixty, seventy or a hundred years, but nothing will ever happen to that man, because the whole thing is phony. If the number of followers is the criterion of a successful spiritual teacher, JK is a pygmy. Here's a mere wordsmith. He has created a new trap.