The Essential Works of U. G. Krishnamurti. U. G. Krishnamurti
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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.
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As I see it, there is no preparation for it, no sadhana, no meditation. You can stand on your head for forty years; nothing is going to happen; probably you will experience what you can experience, anything you want. Thought is something extraordinary: you can create something, a solid object, and put it out there, touch it, feel it, experience it and talk to it — you think it is something extraordinary. You have to go through all these experiences.
Sometimes, out of nowhere, something like an experience too extraordinary to have happened to you or anybody ever before is there. But that did not come out of nowhere; it is part of the knowledge of consciousness. All that man has experienced before you is part of consciousness — it is all there — all that is a contamination. Anything you experience, however profound it may be, is a contamination; it has nothing to do with this state; somebody has experienced that before. Anything you experience there is a worthless thing; it is not that.
Whatever is experienced is thought-induced. Without knowledge you can't experience. And experience strengthens the knowledge. It is a vicious circle: the dog chasing its own tail.
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Expansion of consciousness is nothing, but you give so much importance to that. Drugs will make it a lot easier than all these meditations and yogas. I know lots of people who have taken LSD. (Please don't misunderstand me — I am not advocating it.) You are in the presence of a huge mountain. Suddenly the consciousness expands to the size of the mountain, literally. There is a sudden blow-up of consciousness, and this sudden expansion releases tremendous energy there inside of you. What is the effect of that on the physical body? The physical body responds to what you call the 'sudden expansion of consciousness'. The only way the physical body can respond to that sudden expansion of consciousness is by taking a sudden breath — suddenly you take a breath, and the whole breathing pattern changes — so that is why you have that expression 'a breath-taking view'. I went to the Elephanta caves (near Bombay). They have this trimurti (religious sculpture) there — a huge thing, you know — and I was standing before it. Suddenly there was an expansion of my consciousness (or whatever you want to call it) to the size of that. You experience such things all the time. There is nothing to these experiences.
None of these experiences means anything, whether you are 'this side' or 'that side'. Actually there is no 'this side' or 'that side', because there is no line of demarcation here. The realization dawns on you that those experiences, however profound they may be, aren't worth anything, that's all. You may be in a blissful state — even after that 'calamity' you have blissful states, ecstatic states, a sudden melting away of everything that is there — it doesn't mean anything. You experience, I experience — what is the difference? In India holy people experience some petty little thing called a 'blissful state' or the 'absence of body consciousness' and they think something marvelous is happening. All those things are limitations, they are limiting consciousness, they are not in any way helping; but to you probably they are of great interest, because man is functioning all the time in that limited consciousness.
You start with the assumption that LSD is something terrible. Why, I wonder? I'm not supporting or recommending it. Drugs only produce experiences, and what I am talking about is not an experience. But all the young people in the West have tried it — little girls and boys, everybody — that is why they are suddenly interested in this kind of stuff, the Indian stuff; not because they are dissatisfied with their wealth or their values. They have tried LSD, and it has given them some kind of a feeling that there must be something more to consciousness. But they are ordinary experiences.
All those religious experiences are no different from the experiences people have when they take drugs. I know a boy who had never heard of the Tibetan literature, but when he was 'on a trip' (as they put it), he experienced all kinds of mandalas (mystical designs). He started talking about them, and he met one Tibetan chap who described them to him. How is that kind of thing possible? You don't have to be in Tibet; no matter where you are, you see, all that is part of consciousness. Even Donald Duck has become part of the human consciousness.
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You cannot experience anything which you can call your own. Whatever you experience, however profound that experience may be, is the result of the knowledge that is part of your consciousness. Somebody must have, somewhere along the line, experienced the bliss, beatitude — call it 'ecstasy', call it by whatever name you like, but somebody somewhere along the line — not necessarily you — must have experienced that, and that experience is part of your consciousness. you have to come to a point where there is no such thing as a new experience at all: somebody has experienced it before, so it is not yours.
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The saint or mystic is a second-hand man who experiences what the sages have talked about, so he is still in the field of duality, whereas the sages or seers are functioning in the undivided state of consciousness. The mystic experience is an extraordinary one because it is not an intellectual experience; it helps them to look at things differently, to feel differently, to experience things differently and to interpret the statements of the sages and seers for others.
The world should be grateful to the saints rather than to the sages. Had it not been for the saints, the sages would have been clean forgotten long ago. The sages don't depend upon any authority; what they say is the authority. This the sages talked about, and the saints — some of them — had experiences, and this became a part of their experience. They tried to share that (experience) through music and all kinds of things. But this