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Jiddhu Krishnamurti (1895 - 1986)

KRISHNAMURTI TO HIMSELF
Ojai, Saturday, 23 April, 1983

One likes these quiet mornings. The oranges are so bright and the leaves, dark green, are shining. And there is a perfume in the air from the orange blossom, strong, almost suffocating. There is a different kind of orange to be picked later on before the summer heat. Now there is the green leaf, the orange and the flower on the same tree at the same time. It is a beautiful world and man is so indifferent to it, spoiling the earth, the rivers and the bays and the fresh-water lakes.

But let's leave all that behind and walk along a narrow path, up the hill where there is a little stream which in a few weeks will be dry. You and a friend are walking along the path, talking now and then, looking at all the various colours of green. What a variety there is, from the lightest green, the Nile green, and perhaps even lighter, bluer, to the dark greens, luscious, full of their own richness. And as you go along up the path, just managing to walk along together side by side, you happen to pick up something ravishingly beautiful, sparkling, a jewel of extraordinary antiquity and beauty. You are so astonished to find it on this path of so many animals which only a few people have trodden. You look at it with great astonishment. It is so subtly made, so intricate that no jeweller's hand can ever have made it. You hold it for some time, amazed and silent. Then you put it very carefully in your inside pocket, button it, and are almost frightened that you might lose it or that it might lose its sparkling, shining beauty. And you put your hand outside the pocket that holds it. The other sees you doing this and sees that your face and your eyes have undergone a remarkable change. There is a kind of ecstasy, a speechless wonder, a breathless excitement.

When the man asks: `What is it that you have found and are so extraordinarily elated by?' you reply in a very soft, gentle voice (it seems so strange to you to hear your own voice) that you picked up truth. You don't want to talk about it, you are rather shy; the very talking might destroy it. And the man who is walking beside you is slightly annoyed that you are not communicating with him freely, and he says that if you have found the truth, then let's go down into the valley and organize it so that others will understand it, so that others will grasp it and perhaps it will help them. You don't reply, you are sorry that you ever told him about it.

The trees are full of bloom. Even up here on the slight breeze coming up the valley you smell the orange blossom and look down the valley and see the many orange trees and feel the quiet, still, breathless air. But you have come upon something that is most precious, that can never be told to another. They may find it, but you have it, grasp it and adore it.

Institutions and organizations throughout the world have not helped man. There are all the physical organizations for one's needs; the institutions of war, of democracy, the institutions of tyranny and the institutions of religion - they have had their day and they continue, and man looks up to them, longing to be helped, not only physically but inside the skin, inside the throbbing ache, the shadow of time and the far reaching thoughts. There have been institutions of many, many kinds from the most ancient of days, and they have not inwardly changed man. Institutions can never change man psychologically, deeply. And one wonders why man created them, for all the institutions in the world are put together by man, hoping that they might help him, that they might give him some kind of lasting security. And strangely they have not. We never seem to realize this fact. We are creating more and more institutions, more and more organizations - one organization opposing another.

Thought is inventing all these, not only the democratic organizations or the totalitarian organizations; thought is also perceiving, realizing, that what it has created has not basically changed the structure, the nature of one's own self. The institutions, the organizations and all religions are put together by thought, by cunning, clever, erudite thought. What thought has created, brought about, shapes its own thinking. And one asks oneself, if one is serious, earnest in one's enquiry: why has not thought realized its own activity? Can thought be aware of its own movement? Can thought see itself, see what it is doing, both in the outer and the inner?

There is really no outer and inner: the inner creates the outer, and the outer then shapes the inner. This ebb and flow of action and reaction is the movement of thought, and thought is always trying to overcome the outer, and succeeds, bringing about many problems; in solving one problem other problems arise. Thought has also shaped the inner, moulded it according to the outer demands. This seemingly endless process has created this society, ugly, cruel, immoral and violent. And having created it, the inner becomes a slave to it. The outer shapes the inner and the inner shapes the outer. This process has been going on for thousands upon thousands of years and thought seems not to realize its own activity. So one asks: can thought ever be aware of itself - aware of what it is doing? There is no thinker apart from thought; thought has made the thinker, the experiencer, the analyser. The thinker, the one who is watching, the one who acts, is the past, with all the inheritance of man, genetically, biologic- ally - the traditions, the habits and all accumulated knowledge. After all, the past is knowledge, and the thinker is not separate from the past. Thought has created the past, thought is the past; then thought divides the thinker and the thought, which the thinker must shape, control. But that is a fallacy; there is only thought. The self is the 'me', the past. Imagination may project the future but it is still the activity of thought.

So thought, which is the outcome of knowledge, has not changed man and will never change him because knowledge is always limited and will always be limited. So again one asks: can thought become aware of itself, thought which has put together all our consciousness - action and reaction, the sensory response, the sensuality, the fears, the aspirations the pursuit of pleasure, all the agony of loneliness and the suffering which man has brought upon himself through wars, through his irresponsibility, through callous self-centredness? All that is the activity of thought, which has invented the limitless and the god who lives in the limitless. All that is the activity of time and thought.

When one comes to this point one asks the old instrument, which is worn out, whether it can bring about a radical mutation in man, which is, after all, the brain. When thought realizes itself, sees where knowledge is necessary in the physical world and realizes its own limitation, it then becomes quiet, silent. Only then is there a new instrument which is not put together by time or thought, totally unrelated to knowledge. It is this instrument - perhaps the word instrument may be wrong - it is this perception which is always fresh, because it has no past, no remembrance; it is intelligence born of compassion. That perception brings a deep mutation in the very brain cells themselves, and its action is always the right action, clear, precise, without the shadow of the past and time.