Passages from The Mystique of Enlightenment

The Mystique of Enlightenment - U.G. Krishnamurti

 

The conditioning, you see -- you will never be free from that. Don't believe anybody. There is no such thing as an unconditioned mind; the mind is conditioned. It is absurd, you see, to.... If there is a mind, it is bound to be conditioned. There is no such thing as an open mind. In the Theosophical Society we used to repeat '"An open mind". How absurd that statement is! Mind can never be open; it is a closed thing. I don't accept that there is such a thing as the mind, let alone the open mind or the unconditioned mind. There is no totality of these thoughts and experiences; they are all disconnected, disjointed things. The thoughtless state, silence.... How can you experience silence? -- that's my question. How can you experience the thoughtless state? You'll never be free from thought. If there is any such thing as a thoughtless state, it can never be experienced by you or by anybody. Whatever you experience there is created by this thought. The timeless.... We used to write essays, "Time and the Timeless," ridiculous stuff. It is time that creates the timeless and then pursues the timeless -- and through this pursuit time is continuing -- continuity is all that it is interested.

The Mystique of Enlightenment - U.G. Krishnamurti

You keep listening to someone (it makes no difference whom), and you keep hoping that somehow, tomorrow or the next day, by listening more and more, you will get off the merry-go- round. You listen to your parents and to your teachers at school, and they tell you to be good and dutiful and not be angry and so on, and that doesn't do any good, and so you go and learn how to do Yoga, and then presently some old chap comes along and tells you to be choicelessly aware. Or maybe you find someone in the 'holy business', and he does miracles -- he produces some trinkets out of the air, and you fall for it -- or perhaps he touches you, and you see some blue light or green light or yellow light or God knows what, and you hope he will help you experience enlightenment. But he cannot help you. It is not something that can be captured, contained or given expression to. I do not know if you see the utter helplessness of the situation, and how, if anyone thinks he can help you, he will inevitably mislead you, and the less phoney he is, the more powerful he is, the more enlightened he is, the more misery and mischief he will create for you.

The Mystique of Enlightenment - U.G. Krishnamurti

Q: Do you mean to say that if I stop seeking, a change will take place in me?

UG: Yes, it will. And when I've said "Yes, it will," then what? What good is my assurance to you? It is not good at all -- it is utterly worthless -- so you don't listen to me or anybody. Listening to other people is what you've been doing all your life -- it's the cause of your unhappiness. You are unique. There is no reason for your wanting to be like another chap. You can't be like him, anyway. This wanting -- wanting to listen, wanting to understand, wanting to be like such-and-such an individual -- has come about because society is interested in creating a perfect man; but there is no such thing as a perfect man -- this is our problem. All we can do is be ourselves, and no one can help you be that. He can teach you how to ski or fix a motor car, but he cannot teach you anything important.

The Mystique of Enlightenment - U.G. Krishnamurti

 

Life as such has no beginning and no end; it is a beginningless and endless movement, and you are only an expression of it. You are only an expression of life, like a bird or a worm or a cloud.

Q: But with the singular difference that I am conscious of myself, and the worm is not.

UG: You are conscious of yourself through thought (by which I mean not just conscious thought, but that conditioning which transforms the life that passes through you into feelings, into pleasure and pain). And this thought is not yours; it is what you have learned from others, it is second-hand, it belongs to everybody. You belong to everybody. So why don't you accept the natural thing? If you accept the natural thing, all falls into its own rhythm: there is nothing to do, there is nothing to control, there is nothing to ask. You don't have to do a thing. You are finished.