Category Archives: Krishnamurti, Jiddu

Renunciation. Non-essential. JK

Krishnamurti, Jiddu, Self

Question: Do you advocate renunciation and self-abnegation as a means of finding personal happiness?

KRISHNAMURTI: Personal happiness does not exist. So there are no means to it. There is only the creative ecstasy of life, whose expressions are many. This idea of sacrifice, renunciation, self-abnegation, is false. You think that happiness is to be found through giving up certain things, following certain actions. So you are really trading in, exchanging your sacrifice, your abnegations, for happiness. There is no abnegations or renunciation, but only understanding; and in that there is creative happiness, which is not personal, individualistic.

Let me put it differently. I begin to accumulate because I think happiness lies through accumulation, but I find at the end of a certain time that possession does not bring me happiness. Therefore I begin to renounce possessions and try to possess and pursue abnegations, which is only another form of acquisitiveness. But if I discern the inherent significance of possessiveness, then in that there is creative happiness.

Question: Isn’t it true that the essential can be found in all the phases of life, in everything?

KRISHNAMURTI: I do not think that there is the essential or the unessential. What is the essential? What is the unessential? One day I want a thing and that becomes the most essential, the most important, and in the very possession of it, it has become the unessential. Then I want some other thing; and so I go on, moving from one essential which becomes the unessential, to another essential which in its turn becomes the unessential.

In other words, where there is a craving there can never be lasting discernment. As most people are slaves to craving, they are in constant conflict of the essential and the unessential. From possessiveness merely of things, which no longer gives satisfaction, you move to mental and emotional possession of virtues, of truth, of God. From things, which were once essential, you have moved “forward” to abstraction. This abstraction becomes the essential.

Can’t we look at life, not from this point of view of the essential and the unessential, but from that which is intelligent, comprehensive? Why have we this division of the essential and the unessential, the important and the unimportant? Because we are always thinking in terms of acquisition, gain; but if we look at it from the point of view of understanding, then this division ceases, then we are meeting life continually as a whole. This is one of the most difficult things to do, because we have been and are being trained in religious and economic systems which impose certain sets of values. To a mind that is really not attributing values but is trying to live completely, without the desire of gain—to such a mind there are no degrees of changing values, and therefore there is no conflict between the impermanent and the permanent, between the stationary and the constant movement of life.

The Collected Works of J. Krishnamurti – Volume II 1934-1935: What Is Right Action?
Jiddu Krishnamurti

Don’t want followers JK

Krishnamurti, Jiddu

This is no magnificent deed, because I do not want followers, and I mean this. The moment you follow someone you cease to follow Truth. I am not concerned whether you pay attention to what I say or not. I want to do a certain thing in the world and I am going to do it with unwavering concentration. I am concerning myself with only one essential thing: to set man free. I desire to free him from all cages, from all fears, and not to found religions, new sects, nor to establish new theories and new philosophies.
J. Krishnamurti

You are nothing. JK

Krishnamurti, Jiddu

You are nothing. You may have your name and title, your property and bank account, you may have power and be famous; but in spite of all these safeguards, you are as nothing. You may be totally unaware of this emptiness, this nothingness, or you may simply not want to be aware of it; but it is there, do what you will to avoid it.

You may try to escape from it in devious ways, through personal or collective violence, through individual or collective worship, through knowledge or amusement; but whether you are asleep or awake, it is always there. You can come upon your relationship to this nothingness and its fear only by being choicelessly aware of the escapes. You are not related to it as a separate, individual entity; you are not the observer watching it; without you, the thinker, the observer, it is not. You and nothingness are one; you and nothingness are a joint phenomenon, not two separate processes.

If you, the thinker, are afraid of it and approach it as something contrary and opposed to you, then any action you may take towards it must inevitably lead to illusion and so to further conflict and misery. When there is the discovery, the experiencing of that nothingness as you, then fear -which exists only when the thinker is separate from his thoughts and so tries to establish a relationship with them- completely drops away.

Jiddu Krishnamurti
‘You and nothingness are one’