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Jiddhu Krishnamurti (1895 - 1986)

The Kingdom of Happiness

Talks in Eerde Castle, Holland, 1926

PERSONALITY

In trying to realize Truth, the ultimate Happiness, we should bear in mind that the motive must not be personal satisfaction, nor personal enjoyment, but the desire to serve and to help. You should not have the idea that to serve and to help is the lot of the small, the narrow-minded, the bourgeois; that by serving you should become machines, that you should ever obey someone else. In realizing the perfection of Truth, you are gaining real Happiness, and you serve because you cannot help serving.

I have seen the Vision for myself, and now no one can shatter it or take it away from me, because it is part of my soul, part of my body, part of my very being. It has become unalterable; and the more I change, the more permanent it becomes. You can only see it, you can only absorb the Truth and become part of the Truth, if you learn to become impersonal -in the sense that you lose your own self, your own personal point of view, which is small- and identify yourself with eternal Truth. Personality, of course, each one of us must have; you should not get rid of personality, but you need not be personal. The more you evolve, the nearer to the Truth you come, the greater your personality will be and the more flowerlike your soul will become; but the further you are from the Truth, the more personal you will be. While you are attaining this Truth, you will develop your own personality, express your own tendencies.

To gain the impersonal attitude, the first elementary thing that you have to struggle against is self-satisfaction. You must revolt against being satisfied with yourself. If you succeed in the world, or achieve a spiritual distinction, there is at once a tendency to be satisfied with what you have done, and to glory in it. If you go on submitting yourselves to that satisfaction, you will not advance, nor march towards your goal. You cannot get near to the Truth until you have learned to be above sorrows and pleasures. You suffer, if you are personal, if you are self-satisfied, if you are contented with your little selves. But as long as you keep that Vision constantly in front of you, as long as you are all the time tearing away the veil you create around it, you can never be self-satisfied. You know how people, when they have succeeded in little things, bear on their faces an appearance of contentment, as though they had done some tremendous work; and gradually that physical satisfaction spreads to the soul, and so they stagnate. If you want to arrive at this goal, if you want to have Truth with you, you must not stop to worship at little shrines and little truths. You need not go and worship at little altars all your lives when the great Temple of worship is there. You are halting, you are wasting your time at these shrines, instead of being driven to worship at the One Altar of Truth ceaselessly, to keep pace with the demands of evolution. And if you believe in the Teacher of Humanity, you are also beyond all Altars, dogmas, and doctrines, and see the Truth through all the screens that hide the Vision.