The Essential Works of U. G. Krishnamurti. U. G. Krishnamurti
Читать онлайн книгу.
in everything.
_______
Q: Why am I not in the state you are describing?
UG: Because there is a constant demand on your part to experience everything that you look at, everything that you are feeling inside. Constantly, because if you don't do that, you are coming to an end — 'you' as you know yourself, 'you' as you experience yourself, are coming to an end — and you do not want that to come to an end; you want the continuity. So all spiritual pursuits are in the direction of strengthening that continuity. It's a self-centered activity. Through self-centered activity, how can you be free from the activities of the self? (I use the word 'self' in quotation marks.) So all your experiences, all your meditations, all your sadhana, all
that you do is a self-centered activity — it is strengthening the self, it is adding momentum, gathering momentum, so it is taking you in the opposite direction. Whatever you do to be free from the self also is a self-centered activity. You can't divide these things into two; the process you adopt to reach what you call 'being' is also a becoming process. I don't know if I make myself clear. So there is no such thing as being and becoming. You are always in the becoming process, no matter what you call it. If you want to be yourself and not somebody else, that also is a becoming process. There is nothing to do about this. Anything you do to put yourself in that state of being is a becoming process — that is all that I am point out.
Q: It can never lead to the being process?
UG: No, anything you do, any movement in any direction on any level is a self-centered activity. That is a very clever thing — it has survived for centuries — it knows all the tricks in the world.
Q: How could this illusion of an entity called the 'self' have remained with us all these millennia, in spite of all these people who have gotten whatever it is, realization and all that?
UG: How? (laughs) It is there. It is there. Every time you do something, whether it is a good deed or a bad deed, you are strengthening that. You see, we are all functioning in this 'thought sphere', if I may use that word. What you pick out of that 'thought sphere' is your particular background, your culture, so it's like an antenna. The 'antenna' is the product of the culture. You pick up thoughts which are beneficial to you to protect thought. Thought is a protective mechanism. What is it that it is protecting? It is protecting itself. It will do everything possible to prevent itself from breaking up. So even if you introduce the so-called spiritual pursuits, it is only the strengthening of that — it is not in the opposite direction — so you are on the wrong track. There is neither a positive nor a negative approach. The so-called negative approach also is a positive approach. Any approach, all approaches, whether you call them 'negative' or 'positive' or whatever — they are approaches. So there is no approach: there is nothing that you can do.
_______
You have adopted the negative approach because your positive approaches have proved to be very frustrating. You feel there is a distinction between the two. But even what you call the 'negative approach' is a positive approach — you turn it into a positive approach — because the goal you want to reach is a positive goal, you want to achieve something, you want to accomplish something, to attain God knows what, the 'state of not knowing', through a negative approach.
The negative approach has to negate itself by itself. This is not a negative approach with a positive goal, with the idea of arriving at some conclusion. I am always negating what I am saying. I make a statement, but that statement is not expressing all that is being said, so I negate it. You say I am contradicting myself. I am not contradictory at all. I negate the first statement, the second statement, and all the other statements — that is why sometimes it sounds very contradictory. I am negating it all the time, not with the idea of arriving at any point; just negating. There is no purpose in my talking. I am only pointing out the basic situation that you cannot understand what I am talking about. It is not possible for you to listen to me without interpreting. I am all the time trying to knock off the reference point. When the reference point is absent, there is no need to understand me, you understand? — I am all the time saying that. The old chappie talks of the 'art of listening', the 'real listening', and you think there is a way to listen, an art of listening. There's nothing like that at all. You won't even know what I am talking about.
_______
You are not in a position to accept or reject what I am saying. You accept a statement because it fits your reference point, your assumptions like 'self-realization', 'God-realization', etc. The reference point is you. There is nothing other than the reference point there — that is you. If the reference point goes, you go with it — that is the end of you.
_______
Your very listening is interpretation. You never listen to anybody: it is not possible for you to listen to anybody without interpreting. The interpretation is a part of your background, you see, so it is not possible for you to listen to anything without interpreting what you are listening to.
So, is there any other listening? There is a listening quite independent of words, but that is not on the conscious level. (It does not mean that you are unconscious — I must make it very clear.) That is a pure and simple physical response to the sound: the sound sets in motion the tympanum, so it is just a vibration — you really don't know what he is talking about. This is a physiological phenomenon, so I express this only in physiological terms. Not in psychological, not in religious, not in spiritual terms, because it's very important for me to express this state in pure and simple physical and physiological terms.
_______
If you play back a tape of this conversation, it will make no sense to me. Yesterday I was listening to a tape of me talking in Bangalore — "What is this fellow saying? All this is meaningless twaddle. I wouldn't listen to that chap." That tape is a dead thing. It may be my words, but it has no meaning to me. Forget it! Burn it! Throw it away! This is just a machine responding to the stimuli of your questions. You have created the problem of their 'answers'; I am not involved. I have no commitment to consistency, I have no viewpoint to put forward, no thesis to expound; I only respond to your stimulus.
_______
When you ask a question, it is picked up immediately. I don't even decode it; before you have even asked the question, the answer is there. You can do it; it is nothing unusual. If you are not preoccupied with anything of your own, it is an easy thing. It is not thought-reading; it is just an echo chamber: what is going on there is going on here. You can't do that; you want to decode every thought, to translate everything.
_______
What I'm saying can't be experienced by you except through the help of thought. In other words, as long as movement of thought is there, it is not possible for you to understand what I'm talking about. When it is not there, there is no need for you to understand. In that sense, there is nothing to understand.
_______
Life is one unitary movement, not two different movements. It's moving, it's a continuous flux, but you cannot look at that flux and say "That is a flux." Then why do I say this is a flux? It is only to give you a feel about it that I use those words. But if you translate these words in terms of your concepts and abstractions, you are lost. Really, you do not know a thing about what is being said, you don't understand at all — so, if you realize that, what happens? Then there is no movement of thought there. (Wanting to understand means there is a movement of thought.) You really don't know a thing about what this chap is saying. Then, what happens inside of you is only that you repeat these phrases, phrase by phrase, word by word, without translating them, without interpreting them in terms of your concepts — his talking is just a noise; you are an echo chamber there — that's all that happens. You are not there. (When the 'you' is there, you are translating.) This is just a pure and simple physiological functioning of the organism. Because there is life, there is a response. The response and