Aug 21, 2012

Passages from Mind is a Myth

Mind is a Myth - U.G. Krishnamurti 
 

We are trying to solve our basic human problems through a psychological framework, when actually the problem is neurological. The body is involved. Take desire. As long as there is a living body, there will be desire. It is natural. Thought has interfered and tried to suppress, control, and moralize about desire, to the detriment of mankind. We are trying to solve the "problem" of desire through thought. It is thinking that has created the problem. You somehow continue to hope and believe that the same instrument can solve your other problems as well. You hope against hope that thought will pull you through, but you will die in hope just as you have lived in hope. That is the refrain of my doom song.



Mind is a Myth - U.G. Krishnamurti

Q: All religions have placed the desire for freedom, heaven, liberation, or God before all others as being worthy of pursuit. But if these ultimate goals do not exist, as you seem to suggest, they are, therefore, inferior desires, being false and hence impossible to satisfy. But this repels us; we insist that some desires, especially those which ostensibly transcend "the flesh", are more divine than others. Would you comment on this? 

U.G.: Unless you are free from the desire of all desires, moksha, liberation, or selfrealization, you will be miserable. The ultimate goal--which society has placed before us--is the one that has to go. Until you are free from that desire, you cannot be free from any of your miseries. By suppressing these desires, you are not going to be free. This realization is the essential thing, going as it does to the crux of the problem. It is society that has placed the desire for freedom, the desire for liberation, the desire for God, the desire for moksha -- that is the desire you must be free from. Then all these other desires fall into their own natural rhythm. You suppress these desires only because you are afraid society will punish you if you act on them, or because you see them as "obstacles" to your main desire -- freedom. If this kind of thing should happen to you, you will find yourself back in a primeval state without primitivity, and without any volition on your part. It just happens. Such a free man is not in conflict with society any more. He is not antisocial, not at war with the world; he sees that it can't be any the different. He doesn't want to change society at all; the demand for change has ceased. Any doing in any direction is violence. Any effort is violence. Anything you do with thought to create a peaceful state of mind is using force, and so, is violent. Such an approach is absurd. You are trying to enforce peace through violence. Yoga, meditations, prayers, mantras, are all violent techniques. The living organism is very peaceful; you don't have to do a thing. The peacefully functioning body doesn't care one hoot for your ecstasies, beatitudes, or blissful states. Man has abandoned the natural intelligence of the body. That is why I say--it is my "doom song"--that the day man experienced that consciousness that made him feel separate and superior to the other animals, at that moment he began sowing the seeds of his own destruction. This warped view of life is slowly pushing the entire thinking towards total annihilation. There is nothing you can do to halt it. I am not an alarmist. I am not frightened, I am not interested in saving the world. Mankind is doomed anyway. All I am saying is that the peace you are seeking is already inside you, in the harmonious functioning of the body.



Mind is a Myth - U.G. Krishnamurti 

Anything you do with thought to create a peaceful state of mind is using force, and so, is violent. Such an approach is absurd. You are trying to enforce peace through violence. Yoga, meditations, prayers, mantras, are all violent techniques. The living organism is very peaceful; you don't have to do a thing. The peacefully functioning body doesn't care one hoot for your ecstasies, beatitudes, or blissful states.



Mind is a Myth - U.G. Krishnamurti 
 

The peace you are seeking is already inside you, in the harmonious functioning of the body.

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