Comment: From my background. Thinking is the most natural process.
KRISHNAMURTI: I ask you, “Where do you live?” And your response is immediate. Isn’t it? Because where you live is very familiar to you, without a thought you reply quickly. Isn’t that so, sir? And I ask you a further complex question. There is a time lag between the reply and the challenge. In that interval one is thinking. The thinking is looking into the recesses of memory. Isn’t it?
I ask you, “What is the distance between here and Madras?” You say, “I know it, but let me look it up.” Then you say the distance is so many miles. So you have taken an interval of a minute; during that minute, the process of thinking was going on—which is looking into the memory and the memory replying. Isn’t that so, sir? Then if I ask you a still more complex question, the time interval is greater. And if I ask a question the answer to which you don’t know, you say, “I don’t know,” because you have not been able to discover the reply in your memory. However, you are waiting to check, you ask a specialist, or go back home and look into a book and tell. This is the process of your thinking, isn’t it?—waiting for an answer. And if we proceed a little further, if we ask a question of which you don’t know the answer at all, for which memory has no response, there is no waiting, there is no expectation. Then the mind says, “I really do not know, I cannot answer it.”
Now can the mind ever be in such a state when it says, “I really do not know”?—which is not a negation, which isn’t still saying, “I am waiting for an answer.” I ask you what truth is, what God is, what is, and you will reply according to your tradition. But if you push it further and if you deny the tradition because mere repetition is not discovery of God, or reality, or what you will, a mind that says “I don’t know” is entirely different from a mind which is merely searching for an answer. And isn’t it necessary that a mind should be in such a state when it says, “I really do not know”? Must it not be in that state to discover something, for something new to enter into it?
The Collected Works of J. Krishnamurti -Volume XII 1961: There Is No Thinker, Only Thought
Jiddu Krishnamurti