Banaras 1949
Banaras 4th Public Talk 13th February 1949
I wonder what action means to most of us? Is action the outcome of an
idea, or the approximation to an idea, or conformity to a pattern or
ideation? Is action independent of relationship? Is not action,
relationship? And if we base it on an idea, on a principle, on a
conclusion, is it action? Is an action based on belief, which is a form
of ideation, creative? Has such action the power of releasing, not only
vitality, but creative energy, creative understanding?
Surely, it is important to find out, is it not?, how far our action
is dependent on an idea, and whether the idea comes first or action
comes first; whether mentation is the step preceding action, or whether
action is independent of mentation, of thought process. We have to
discuss this and find out; because, if action is merely conforming to a
particular pattern, to an idea or ideation, then the idea becomes
all-important, and not action. Action then is merely the carrying out of
that idea. Then, the problem arises of how to approach action with the
idea, how to put the idea into practice in order to complete the idea,
how to fulfil the idea through action, and so on. Is idea the primary
incentive to action, or does action take place first, and then the
ideation come into being? Surely, if we observe very closely, action
comes first: first we do something, pleasurable or non pleasurable, and
then the idea is born out of that action. The idea then further controls
the action; so the idea be- comes all-important, and not action. Action
then is merely the continuation of an idea. So, with most of us, the
difficulty is, is it not?, that ideas, which arc the recording of
previous experiences, of the past, are controlling, guiding, and shaping
action.
Now, as I said, action is relationship; and what happens when action,
when relationship, is based on an idea? Action born of an idea must
continue to condition thought; because an idea is the outcome of one's
background, and the background shapes the action and therefore controls
relationship. Therefore, action born of an idea can never be releasing
it must always be conditioned, because the idea is a conditioned
response, and an action born of an idea is necessarily conditioned.
There is no freedom, no creative release, through action which is based
on an idea; and yet all our systems of action are based on ideation.
So, to look to an idea as a means of revolution, as a means of
releasing creative energy, is obviously erroneous. Then, what is action
without ideation? I hope you are interested, because this is our
problem. Our life is action, action is relationship; and if that action
is merely the outcome of an idea, which is but the residue of previous
experience, then that action can never be releasing; it is merely the
continuation of the past, only modified. So, we cannot look for freedom,
for liberation, for the understanding of reality, through action which
is the outcome of an idea. An experience, a previous experience, cannot
be the way to truth. Experience which leaves a scar, as memory, cannot
be the way to the understanding of truth. Therefore, experience as an
idea, as a memory of yesterday shaping action, surely cannot be the way
to truth. Memory is not the way to understanding. That is, if action is
based on an idea, which is the result of previous experience, then that
action, being the outcome of the past, can never understand the living
present.
So, what is the way of true action, action which is not the outcome
of an idea? There is an action which is not merely the repetition of an
idea. Experience is not the way to truth; but to most of us, experience
is of the highest importance. We experience through the screen of
memories, which again conditions the experience. That is, the idea, the
background, has met the challenge; and out of that response, there is
experience. That experience is conditioned, therefore action is
conditioned; therefore action, as experience, cannot lead to truth,
cannot lead to understanding. Please see the importance of this: that
experience is a hindrance to the state of experiencing; for experience
is a conditioned action, and being limited, can never be complete.
Therefore, an experience is always a hindrance to the understanding of
reality. This is contrary to what we have believed - that we must have
more and more experience, knowledge, technique, in order to understand.
So, there has to be quite a different approach. You have to find out
for yourself, inwardly, whether you are acting on an idea and if there
can be action without ideation. We see that action based on an idea does
not lead to truth, that action based on experience is limited action.
That which is measurable cannot understand the immeasurable, and
experience is always measurable. So, experience is not what we have made
it out to be. Therefore, action based on experience is an impediment to
understanding reality, or to understanding anything new. So, there must
be a different approach. Let us find out what that is: action which is
not based on an idea.
When do you act without ideation? When is there an action which is
not the result of experience? Because an action based on experience is,
as we said, limiting, and therefore a hindrance. Action which is not the
outcome of an idea is spontaneous when the thought process, which is
based on experience, is not controlling action; which means, there is
action independent of experience when the mind is not controlling
action. That is the only state in which there is understanding: when the
mind, based on experience. is not guiding action; when thought, based
on experience, is not shaping action. What is action, when there is no
thought process? Can there be action without thought process? That is, I
want to build a bridge, a house. I know the technique, and the
technique tells me how to build it. We call that action. There is the
action of writing a poem, of painting, of governmental responsibilities,
of social, environmental responses. All are based on an idea or
previous experience, shaping action. But is there an action when there
is no ideation?
Surely, there is such action when the idea ceases; and the idea
ceases only when there is love. Love is not memory. Love is not
experience. Love is not the thinking about the person that one loves,
for then, it is merely thought. Surely, you cannot think of love. You
can think of the person you love or are devoted to - your guru, your
image, your wife, your husband; but the thought, the symbol, is not the
real which is loved. Therefore, love is not an experience.
Now, when there is love, there is action, is there not; and is that
action not liberating? It is not the result of mentation, and there is
no gap between love and action, as there is between idea and action.
Idea is always old, casting its shadow on the present and trying to
build a bridge between action and idea. When there is love - which is
not mentation, which is not ideation, which is not memory, which is not
the outcome of an experience, of a practised discipline - , then that
very love is action. That is the only thing that frees. As long as there
is mentation, as long as there is the shaping of action by an idea
which is experience, there can be no release; and as lone as that
process continues, all action is limited. When the truth of this is
seen, the quality of love, which is not mentation, which you cannot
think about, comes into being.
This is what actually happens when you love somebody with all your
being; this is exactly what takes place. You may think of that person,
but that is not the actual; and, unfortunately, what happens is that
thought takes the place of love. Thought can then adjust itself to the
environment, but love can never adjust itself. Adjustment is essentially
of the mind, and the mind can invent `love'. When I say, "I love you", I
am adjusting myself to you; but there can be no adjustment where there
is love - it is alone, it has no second. Therefore it cannot adjust
itself to anything. When there is love, this idea of adjustment, of
conformity of action based on idea, completely ceases. When there is
love, there is action which is relationship; and where there is
adjustment in relation ship, there is no love. When I adjust myself to
you because I love you, it is merely conforming to your desires, and the
adjustment is always to the lower. How can you adjust yourself to the
higher, to that which is noble, pure? You cannot. So, adjustment exists
only when there is no love. Love is second to none; it is alone, but not
isolated. Such love is action. which is relationship; it has not the
possibility of corruption, as mentation has, because there is no
adjustment. As long as action is based on an idea, action is mere
adjustment, a reformed, modified continuity; and a society which is the
outcome of an approximation to an idea, is a society of conflict, misery
and strife. There is freedom in the action which is not the result of
mentation; and love is not devotion to something which is ideation. A
devotee is not a lover of truth. Devotion is not love. In love, there is
not the you and the other. There is complete fusion of the two, whether
of the man with the woman, or the devotee with his idea. Such love is
not the gift of the few, it is not reserved for the mighty ones.
But you have not understood the implications of action based on
experience. When one really sees that profoundly, when one is aware of
all the implications, there is the cessation of mentation. Then there is
that state of being which is the outcome of discontent. Discontent is
not pacified through self-fulfilment; but as long as there is no
self-fulfilment, discontent is the springboard from which there is a
jump into the unknown. It is this quality of the unknown which is love.
The man who is aware that he is in a state of love, is not loving. Love
is not of time. Therefore, you cannot think about it; what you can think
about is of time. What you can think about is merely the projection of
itself; it is already the known. When you know love, when you practise
love, surely it ceases to be love, because it is merely an adjustment of
experience to the present; and where there is adjustment, there can be
no love.
Question: What is the best method of stilling the mind? Meditation
and repetition of God's name are known to be the only method. Why do you
condemn them? Can intellect by itself ever achieve this?
Krishnamurti: Let us go into this question of meditation, which is
really a very complex problem and needs careful thinking. Let us see its
whole implication. Let us unroll the map of what we call meditation.
What do we mean by meditation? By meditation, we mean, don't we?, the
stilling of the mind, as it is generally understood; and let us see how
we approach it, because the means matter, for the means create the end.
If you employ wrong means, you will create a wrong end. If you
discipline your mind to be quiet, then your mind should be quiet; but it
is not. It is merely a disciplined mind, a mind that is held within the
room; and such a mind is not quiet, it is only tethered, held in
control. So, we have to go into this question carefully.
What is the purpose of meditation? Is it to still the mind? Is the
stilling of the mind necessary for the discovery of truth or the
experiencing of reality? Is the process of exclusion, meditation? Let us
approach it negatively, because we do not know what right meditation
is. People have said this and that, and you do not know what is real
meditation. Is it through a series of denials of thought, or through
resistance, that you come to the quietness of mind? That is, the mind is
vagrant, it wanders ceaselessly; and you proceed to choose one course,
and resist all others, which is a process of exclusion, denial. You
build a wall of resistance by concentration on a thought which you have
chosen, and you try to ward off all the others. That is what you are
doing all the time, struggling to learn concentration. Concentration
then is an exclusion. You choose to rest your thinking on a word or an
image, on a phrase or a symbol, and you resist every other thought that
comes and interferes. So, what we call meditation is the cultivation of
resistance, of exclusive concentration on an idea of our choice.
What makes you choose? What makes you say this is good, true, noble,
and the rest is not? Obviously, the choice is based on pleasure, reward,
or achievement; or it is merely a reaction of one's conditioning or
tradition. Why do you choose at all? Why not examine every thought? When
you are interested in the many, why choose one? Why not ex amine every
interest? Instead of creating resistance, why not go into each interest
as it arises, and not merely concentrate on one idea, on one interest?
After all, you are made up of many interests; you have many masks,
consciously and unconsciously. Why choose one and discard the others, in
controlling which you spend all your energies, there by creating
resistance, conflict and friction? Whereas, if you examine every thought
as it arises - every thought, not just a few thoughts - , then there is
no exclusion; but it is an arduous thing to examine every thought.
Because, as you are looking at one thought, another thought slips in;
but if you are aware, without domination or justification, you will see
that by merely looking at that thought, no other thought intrudes. It is
only when you condemn, compare, ap proximate, that other thoughts come
in. Is that clear?
So, concentration is not meditation. We are going to find out what
meditation is, but first we must see what it is not. Concentration
implies discipline, various forms of denial, and resistance. A mind that
is caught up in exclusive concentration, can never find truth. But a
mind that understands every interest, every movement of thought, a mind
that is aware of every feeling, every response, and sees the truth in
every response - such a mind, being extremely pliable, swift, is capable
of understanding what is, which is truth. But a mind that is
concentrated is not a swift mind; a mind that is disciplined is not a
pliable mind. How can the mind be subtle, swift and pliable, when it has
learned merely to concentrate?
Then, meditation cannot be supplication, supplication being prayer.
Have you ever prayed? What actually happens when you pray? Why do you
pray? You pray, don't you?, only when you are in difficulty, only when
you are troubled. You do not pray when you are happy, joyous, clear; you
pray only when there is confusion, when there is fear of a certain
event, in order to ward it off; or you pray to gain what you want. You
pray, because there is fear in you. I do not say prayer is only fear;
but all supplication arises from fear. A petition, a prayer, may give
you joy; the supplicatory prayer to the so-called unknown may bring you
the answer you seek; but that answer to your petition may come from your
unconscious, or from the general reservoir, the storehouse of all your
demands. The answer is not the still voice of God.
What happens when you pray? By the constant repetition of certain
phrases, and by controlling your thoughts, the mind becomes quiet,
doesn't it? At least, the conscious mind becomes quiet. You kneel as the
Christians do, or sit as the Hindus do, and you repeat and repeat; and
through that repetition, the mind becomes quiet. In that quietness,
there is an intimation of something. That intimation of something for
which you have prayed, may be from your unconscious, or it may be the
response of your memories. But, surely, it is not the voice of reality;
for the voice of reality must come to you; it cannot be appealed to, you
cannot pray to it. You cannot entice it into your little cage by doing
puja, bhajan, and all the rest of it, by offering it flowers, by
placating it, by suppressing yourself or emulating others. Those are all
forms of self-hypnosis; but once you have learnt the trick of quieting
the mind through the repetition of words and of receiving hints in that
quietness, the danger is - unless you are fully alert as to whence these
hints come - that you will be caught; and then prayer becomes a
substitute for the search for truth. So, a mind that is made quiet
through prayer is not a still mind, for it is a thing that is put
together and so can be undone. All that happens is, that the conscious
layer of your mind, made quiet through pacification, made dull through
repetition, receives some response to your petition; and that which you
ask for, you get - but it is not the truth. If you want, and if you
petition, you receive; but you will pay for it in the end.
We see, therefore, that prayer as petition supplication, helps to
make the mind still; but there is also another form of prayer, which is
to be completely receptive, not asking a thing, at least not
consciously. This sensitive receptivity, induced through prayer, is also
a form of stillness. It is merely your desire that is calling the
response out of the unconscious; and that open receptivity of the
conscious mind that is made still, is not capable of understanding,
because the mind is made still, but is not still. A mind that is made
still can never be still; it can receive an answer only from with in the
confines of its own limitation. A stupid mind can be made still, but
its answer will be stupid. A stupid mind may think that the answer it
has received is directly from God, but it is not. A mind that is made
still can only receive an answer in accordance with its own
conditioning. So, we see that prayer is not meditation.
Neither is devotion, meditation. Meditation is not self-immolation to
an idea. What is your devotion? You are devoted to something that will
give you gratification. If it does not give you gratification, you will
not be devoted. You are a devotee as long as that to which you are
devoted gives you gratification; when it ceases, you go elsewhere. You
change your guru, you change the idea. The teacher, the guru, the image,
is the self-projection of the devotee; and that self-projection is
based on gratification. So, you are really being devoted to yourself,
externalized as a deity, as an idea, or as a Master, or a picture. You
are devoted only to that which gives you gratification; and so a
devotee, with all his puja, his garlands, his chants, is worshipping his
own image, glorified, enlarged. Surely, that is not meditation.
Meditation is not discipline. Merely to discipline the mind is to
limit the mind, to build a wall around it, so that it cannot escape.
That is why a mind that is disciplined, a mind that is shaped,
controlled, suppressed, that has found substitutes, that has found
sublimation, is still a mind that is incapable of freedom. Does freedom
come into being through discipline? Can you discipline yourself to be
free? If you use wrong means, the end will also be wrong, for the end is
not different from the means. So, when a mind is disciplined in order
to achieve a result, the result is only the projection of the
disciplined mind. Therefore, there is no freedom, there is only a
disciplined state. So meditation is not discipline.
Meditation is not concentration, meditation is not prayer, meditation
is not devotion, meditation is not a process of discipline. Then, what
is it? We are going to find out. Now, when you discover that
concentration, prayer, devotion, discipline, are not meditation, then
what happens? You are discovering yourself in action, are you not? The
understanding of these things is the discovery of your own process of
thinking, which is self-knowledge, is it not? The uncovering of this
process is the uncovering of yourself in action; to understand this, is
to understand yourself. Therefore, meditation is the process of
understanding yourself. There is no meditation without self-knowledge,
and that is what you have discovered just now. Therefore, you are
watching yourself in action through concentration, through prayer,
through discipline, through devotion.
What we are doing now is discovering ourselves as we are, without
deception, without illusion. Then what happens? Self-knowledge is not an
end in itself; self-knowledge is the movement of becoming. In examining
these four aspects of myself in action, I have found that there is only
one process, and that is, that I am interested in becoming, in
continuing. So then, the more knowledge of the self there is, of the
self at any level - which is seeing the truth of every moment, the truth
which is not the outcome of experience, but immediate perception - ,
the more is there tranquillity of the mind. For example, seeing the
truth of prayer, and all its implications, surely frees the mind from
prayer, from fear, from supplication. Similarly in seeing the truth of
discipline, with all its implications, there is freedom from discipline.
So, there is that much more knowledge, intelligence and awareness. The
mind is made free from its becoming, therefore there is the awareness of
truth.
Now, we have to experience this; we cannot go further without
experiencing. If you are still caught in prayer, then your going further
has no meaning; if you are still caught in discipline, what we proceed
into has no meaning; so, too, if you are still concerned about the
control of thought. But a mind that is quiet, not made quiet, not put
together; a mind that is quiet because it has real interest, because it
has seen truth, because truth has come to it, is a mind that is
intelligent, that is free of conflict. Conflict has been resolved
through the perception of every movement of thought and feeling, and by
seeing the truth of that movement. Truth can be perceived, or truth can
come into being, only when condemnation, justification, and comparison,
cease; only then is the mind quiet, only then is there the cessation of
memory.
Now, what happens when the mind is tranquil, when it is still, when
it is no longer becoming, no longer seeking an end; when it is
extraordinarily alert, passive? In that silence there is a movement,
there is an experiencing, in which time is not. It is a state of being
in which neither the past nor the present nor the future exists.
Meditation is the living from moment to moment every day. It is not
isolating oneself in a room or in a cave, for that way one can never
know reality. Reality is to be found in relationship, not in the distant
relationship, but in the relationship of our daily existence. If there
is no understanding of truth in relationship, you will not understand
what it is to have a mind that is still. It is the truth that makes the
mind still, not your desire to be still; and truth is to be found in
relationship, which is action, which is as a mirror in which to see
yourself.
So, self-knowledge is the beginning of wisdom, and without wisdom
there can be no tranquillity. Wisdom is not knowledge. Knowledge is a
hindrance to wisdom, to the uncovering of the self from moment to
moment. A mind that is still shall know being, shall know what it is to
love. Love is neither personal nor impersonal. Love is love, not to be
defined or described by the mind as exclusive or inclusive. Love is its
own eternity; it is the real, the supreme, the immeasurable.
February 13, 1949
