Going deep on a Sunday afternoon... perhaps I should just post this entire book.. there is something about these talks in Ojai.... Questioner: Some philosophers assert that life has purpose and meaning while others maintain that life is utterly haphazard and absurd. What do you say? You deny the value of goals, ideals, and purposes; but without them, has life any significance at all? Krishnamurti: Has what the philosophers say a great significance to each one of us? Some intellectuals say there is meaning, significance to life, while others say it is haphazard and absurd. Surely, in their own way, negatively or positively, both are giving significance to life, are they not? One asserts, the other denies, but essentially they are both the same. That is fairly obvious. Now, when you pursue an ideal, a goal, or inquire what is the purpose of life, that very inquiry or pursuit is based on the desire to give significance to life, is it not? I do not know if you are following all this. My life has no significance, let us suppose, so I seek to give significance to life. I say, “What is the purpose of life?” because if life has a purpose, then according to that purpose, I can live. So I invent or imagine a purpose, or by reading, inquiring, searching, I find a purpose; therefore, I am giving significance to life. As the intellectual in his own way gives significance to life by denying or asserting that it has purpose and meaning, we also give significance to life through our ideals, through our search for a goal, for God, for love, for truth. Which means, really, that without giving significance to life, our life has no meaning for us at all. Living isn’t good enough for us, so we want to give a significance to life. I do not know if you see that. What is the significance of our life, yours and mine, apart from the philosophers? Has it any significance, or are we giving it a significance through belief, like the intellectual who becomes a Catholic, this or that, and thereby finds shelter? His intellect has torn everything to pieces; he cannot stand being alone, lonely, and all the rest of it, so he has to have a belief in Catholicism, in communism, or in something else which nourishes him, which for him gives significance to life. Now, I am asking myself: Why do we want a significance? And what does it mean to live without significance at all? Do you understand? Our own life being empty, harried, lonely, we want to give a significance to life. And is it possible to be aware of our own emptiness, loneliness, sorrow, of all the travail and conflict in our life, without trying to get out of it, without artificially giving a significance to life? Can we be aware of this extraordinary thing which we call life, which is the earning of a livelihood, the envy, the ambition, the frustration—just be aware of all that without condemnation or justification, and go beyond? It seems to me that as long as we are seeking or giving a significance to life, we are missing something extraordinarily vital. It is like the man who wants to find the significance of death, who is everlastingly rationalizing it, explaining it—he never experiences what is death. We shall go into that in another talk. So, aren’t we all trying to find a reason for our existence? When we love, do we have a reason? Or is love the only state in which there is no reason at all, no explanation, no endeavor, no trying to be something? Perhaps we do not know that state. Not knowing that state, we try to imagine it, give significance to life; and because our minds are conditioned, limited, petty, the significance we give to life, our gods, our rituals, our endeavors, is also petty. Isn’t it important, then, to find out for ourselves what significance we give to life, if we do? Surely, the purposes, the goals, the Masters, the gods, the beliefs, the ends through which we are seeking fulfillment are all invented by the mind; they are all the outcome of our conditioning, and realizing that, is it not important to uncondition the mind? When the mind is unconditioned and is therefore not giving significance to life, then life is an extraordinary thing, something totally different from the framework of the mind. But first we must know our own conditioning, must we not? And is it possible to know our conditioning, our limitations, our background, without forcing, without analyzing, without trying to sublimate or suppress it? Because that whole process involves the entity who observes and separates himself from the observed, does it not? As long as there is the observer and the observed, conditioning must continue. However much the observer, the thinker, the censor, may try to get rid of his conditioning, he is still caught in that conditioning because the very division between the thinker and the thought, the experiencer and the experience, is the perpetuation of conditioning; and it is extremely difficult to let this division disappear because it involves the whole problem of will. Our culture is based on will—the will to be, to become, to achieve, to fulfill—therefore, in each one of us there is always the entity who is trying to change, control, alter that which he observes. But is there a difference between that which he observes and himself, or are they one? This is a thing that cannot be merely accepted. It must be thought of, gone into with tremendous patience, gentleness, hesitancy, so that the mind is no longer separated from that which it thinks, so that the observer and the observed are psychologically one. As long as I am psychologically separate from that which I perceive in myself as envy, I try to overcome envy; but is that ‘I’, the maker of effort to overcome envy, different from envy? Or are they both the same, only the ‘I’ has separated himself from envy in order to overcome it because he feels envy is painful, and for various other reasons? But that very separation is the cause of envy. Perhaps you are not used to this way of thinking, and it is a little bit too abstract. But a mind that is envious can never be tranquil because it is always comparing, always trying to become something which it is not; and if one really goes into this problem of envy radically, profoundly, deeply, one must inevitably come upon this problem—whether the entity that wishes to be rid of envy is not envy itself. When one realizes that it is envy itself that wants to get rid of envy, then the mind is aware of that feeling called envy without any sense of condemning or trying to get rid of it. Then from that the problem arises: Is there a feeling if there is no verbalization? Because the very word envy is condemnatory, is it not? Am I saying too much all at once? Is there a feeling of envy if I don’t name that feeling? By the very naming of it, am I not maintaining that feeling? The feeling and the naming are almost simultaneous, are they not? And is it possible to separate them so that there is only a sense of reaction without naming? If you really go into it, you will find that when there is no naming of that feeling, envy totally ceases—not just the envy you feel because somebody is more beautiful or has a better car, and all that stupid stuff, but the tremendous depth of envy, the root of envy. All of us are envious; there isn’t one who is not envious in different ways. But envy isn’t just the superficial thing; it is the whole sense of comparing which goes very deep and occupies our minds so vastly, and to be radically free of envy, there must be no censor, no observer of the envy who is trying to get rid of envy. We shall go into that another time.
Posted on: Sun, 16 Mar 2014 19:50:17 +0000
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