An Illuminating Meditation (Part II)

To undertake this psychological journey is hard work. It requires a great deal of enquiry, penetration, and self-knowledge. It is also meditation, which is something you have to do as you breathe, as you think, as you live. But it is a pilgrimage open to us all. If we can take this journey together, and simply observe as we go along the extraordinary width and depth and beauty of life, then out of this observation may come a love which is a state of being free of all demand and we may perhaps be awakened to something far more significant than the boredom and frustration, the emptiness and despair of our daily lives.--Jiddu Krishnamurti in The Revolution Within

[The following edited text is taken from a compilation of talks entitled Total Freedom - The Essential Krishnamurti. The specific talk referred to here, What I Want to Do, was given by Krishnamurti in Mexico City on October 20, 1935.]

What I want to do is help you, the individual, to cross the stream of suffering, confusion and conflict, through deep and complete fulfillment. Before we can understand the richness and the beauty of fulfillment, mind must free itself from the background of tradition, habit, and prejudice. That background of tradition prevents the complete understanding of life, and so causes confusion and suffering.

I would beg of you to listen to what I have to say, freeing yourself for this hour at least from the background in which you have been brought up, with its traditions and prejudices, and think simply and directly about the many human problems. To be truly critical is not to be in opposition.¹ Most of us have been trained to oppose and not to criticize. When a man merely opposes, it generally indicates that he has some vested interest which he desires to protect, and that is not deep penetration through critical examination.

Either you are conscious of the chaotic state of the world, or you are completely asleep, living in a fantastic world, in an illusion. If you are aware, you must be grappling with these problems. In trying to solve them, some turn to experts for their solution, and follow their ideas and theories. Gradually they form themselves into an exclusive body, and thus they come into conflict with other experts and their parties; and the individual merely becomes a tool in the hands of the group or of the expert.

Or you think that to change all this cruelty and horror there must be a mass movement, a collective action. True collective action can take place only when you, the individual, who are also the mass, are awake and take full responsibility for your action without compulsion.

Please bear in mind that I am not giving you a system of philosophy which you can follow blindly, but I am trying to awaken the desire for true and intelligent fulfillment, which alone can bring about happy order and peace in the world.

There can be fundamental and lasting change in the world, there can be love and intelligent fulfillment, only when you wake up and begin to free yourself from the net of illusions which you have created about yourself through fear. When the mind frees itself from these hindrances, when there is that deep, inward, voluntary change, then only can there be true, lasting, collective action, in which there can be no compulsion.

So the question is: How can there be this profound individual revolution? How are you going to awaken as individuals to this profound revolution?

Now what I am going to say is not complicated, it is simple; and because of its simplicity, I am afraid you will reject it as not being positive. What you call positive is to be given a definite plan, to be told exactly what to do. But if you can understand for yourself what are the hindrances that are preventing your deep and true fulfillment, then you will not become a mere follower and be exploited.²

To have this profound revolution, you must become fully conscious of the structure which you have created about yourself and in which you are now caught. Before you can act fully and truly, you must know the prison in which you are living, how it has been created; and in examining it without any self-defense you will find out for yourself its true significance, which no other can convey to you.³ Through your own awakening of intelligence, through your own suffering you will discover the manner of true fulfillment.

Each one of us is seeking security, certainty⁴, through egotistic thought and action, objectively and subjectively. As you are objectively seeking security, so also you are seeking subjectively a different kind of security, certainty, which you call immortality. You crave egotistic continuance in the hereafter, calling it immortality. Through your own desire for immortality, for selfish continuance, you have built this illusion which you call religion, and you are unconsciously or consciously caught in it. Or you may not belong to any society or sect, but there may be an inward desire, hidden and concealed, to seek your own immortality.⁵

Your first concern is to become conscious of the prison; then you will see that your own thought is continually trying to avoid coming into conflict with the values of the prison. That is, the mind wants to escape into an illusion rather than face the suffering which will inevitably arise when it begins to question the values, the morality, the religion of the prison. When you begin to question these values, you begin to awaken that true intelligence which alone can solve the many human problems.

As long as the mind is caught up in false values, there cannot be fulfillment. Completeness alone will reveal truth, the movement of eternal life.⁶

1.     Italics mine.

2.     This is, of course, what commonly occurs when people follow a guru.

3.     Italics mine. Such an exploration is true meditation. It bears repeating that no one else can do the work for you; that is, no one else can live your life.

4.   “Listening to others who disagree with me and are willing to criticize me is essential to piercing the seduction of certainty.” –James B. Comey in A Higher Loyalty

5.     For example, the desire for literary immortality or military glory.

6.   "Completeness" here can be interpreted as a form of integrity, of a sense of wholeness in contrast to a divided or split mind. Such single-minded awareness calls forth the truth that alone has the power to liberate us from the prison of the known.