I’ll sing this song the rest of my life until I drop dead;
whether anybody listens to it or not is of no importance to me.
U.G. Krishnamurti
The words of U.G. Krishnamurti: Part III
IF ANYONE MAKES YOU BELIEVE you can get somewhere, he’s taking you for a ride. He may be honest. Distrust all honest fellows! Throw them out! There is no one who is honest in this field. No outside agency can help you…
I wish you the best of luck. I know very well that it is not something that you or anybody else can get or that anybody can give. I can’t give it. If there is somebody who promises, he is just promising, and he is going to take you for a long ride. He is just kidding you. He cannot deliver the goods, so he says “Next life” or “Ten years hence” – he is safe.
You can’t be interested in this. How can you be interested in this? – that is my question. How can you be interested in this kind of a thing? What you are interested in is a totally different thing, fancy stuff, fantasy. You may indulge in all kinds of fantasy – that’s your affair. If this is not fantasy, you will be interested in some other kind of fantasy. How can you be interested in liquidating yourself? – that is my question. All that you know – ‘you’ as you know yourself, ‘you’ as you experience yourself – is interested in continuity. It knows all the tricks: you cannot beat that.
I am not interested in the whole field of self-expression, getting in touch with one’s feelings, overcoming inhibitions and so on; I respond to what people come to see me about, the natural state. If people are interested in psychological change, so-called consciousness expansion and all that, let them go to encounter groups, or see psychiatrists and engage in what I call the ‘Freudian fraud’. In the end their so-called growth will not bring them happiness and neither will their improved sex lives (if their sex lives improve); at best they will simply have learned to be unhappy in a new and richer way.
Everything is okay with me. If you have a million dollars and eight girl friends, that’s okay with me. If you are lonely and disagreeable and penniless and dying of cancer, that also is okay with me. I am perfectly happy with everything as it is. I am happy with misery, poverty and death; I am also happy with wealth and psychological fulfillment.
[Asked about Buddha and Christ.]
Why do you bother about those fellows? They are dead. You should pitch them in the river. And yet you don’t; you keep listening to someone (it makes no difference whom), and you keep hoping that somehow, tomorrow or the next day, by listening more and more, you will get off the merry-go-round. You listen to your parents and to your teachers at school, and they tell you to be good and dutiful and not be angry and so on, and that doesn’t do any good, and so you go and learn how to do Yoga, and then presently some old chap comes along and tells you to be choicelessly aware. Or maybe you find someone in the ‘holy business’, and he does miracles – he produces some trinkets out of the air, and you fall for it – or perhaps he touches you, and you see some blue light or green light or yellow light or God knows what, and you hope he will help you experience enlightenment. But he cannot help you. It is not something that can be captured, contained or given expression to. I do not know if you see the utter helplessness of the situation, and how, if anyone thinks he can help you, he will inevitably mislead you, and the less phony he is, the more powerful he is, the more enlightened he is, the more misery and mischief he will create for you.
But you are waiting for something to happen or for some grace to descend upon you – you are still depending upon some outside agency. I can tell you that there is no power outside of you – no power. This does not mean that you have all the attributes that you read about of the super-duper gods; but there is no power outside of you. If there is any power in this universe, it is in you.
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, J. Krishnamurti (here, U.G. refers to Jiddu Krishnamurti; an acquaintance, not a relation) 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… Here’s a mere wordsmith. He has created a new trap… These gurus are the worst egotists the world has ever seen. All gurus are welfare organizations providing petty experiences to their followers. The guru game is a profitable industry: try and make two million dollars a year any other way. Even J. Krishnamurti, who claims he has no possessions, is the president of an eighty million-dollar empire.
What prevents you from understanding what you want to understand is this very thing which you are using to understand things. This is not my teaching or anybody’s teaching, but this is the only thing: You are trying to understand something through an instrument which is not the instrument to understand.
QUESTIONER: Yes. But if–
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.
As long as you follow somebody else’s path, the path is the product of thought, so it is actually not a new path; it’s the same old path, and you are playing the same old game in a new way. It is not a new game; it is the same old game that you are playing all the time, but you think you are playing a new game. When you see the absurdity of what you are doing, maybe you’ll realize “What the hell have I been doing for thirty years, forty years, fifty years!”
One thing I must say. This is not born out of thinking. This is not a logically ascertained premise that I am putting forth. These are just words springing up from their natural source without any thought, without any thought structure. So take it or leave it! You will be better off if you leave it.
Your teacher must go, it doesn’t matter who the teacher is. The very thing that you are reading – that’s the very thing you must be free from.
QUESTIONER: Sir, what is your message?
It is quite simple. You are not going to get anything here. You are wasting your time. Pack up and go! That is my message. I have nothing to give; you have nothing to take. If you continue to sit there, you are wasting your time. The one thing you have to do is get up and go.
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