U G Krishnamurti

"If you have the courage to touch life for the first time, you will never know what hit you. Everything man has thought, felt and experienced is gone, and nothing is put in its place."

You have to brush everything aside to find out. Your problem is not how to get something from somebody, but how to reject everything that is offered by anybody.

As long as you are doing something to be selfless, you will be a self-centered individual.

When the movement in the direction of becoming something other than what you are isn't there any more, you are not in conflict with yourself.

The total absence of will and the total absence of effort, all and every kind, may be called an effortless state--but that effortless state is not something that you can achieve through effort.

You all fool yourselves thinking that you are going to get something by hanging around me… ho ho ho! You’re not going to get a thing because there is no need to get anything from anybody.

There is no need to change this world at all; and there is no need to change yourself either.

The search ends with the realization that there is no such thing as enlightenment. By searching, you want to be free from the self, but whatever you are doing to free yourself from the self is the self. How can I make you understand this simple thing? There is no 'how'. If I tell you that, it will only add more momentum to that.... --U.G.

You can never understand this; you can only experience this in terms of your past experience. This is outside the realm of experience. The natural state is acausal: it just happens. No communication is possible, and none necessary. The only thing that is real to you is the way you are functioning; it is an act of futility to relate my description to the way you are functioning. When you stop all this comparison, what is there is your natural state. Then you will not listen to anybody.

Get this straight, this is your state I am describing, your natural state, not my state or the state of a God-realized man or a mutant or any such thing. This is your natural state, but what prevents what is there from expressing itself in its own way is your reaching out for something, trying to be something other than what you are.

You forget that everything you have around you is the creation of thought. You are yourself born out of thought, otherwise you would not be here at all. In that sense thought has a tremendous value, yet it is the very thing that will destroy you.

While you are living, the knowledge that is there does not belong to you. So, why are you concerned as to what will happen after what you call "you" is gone?

When thought is not there all the time, what is there is living from moment to moment. It's all in frames, millions and millions and millions of frames, to put it in the language of film.

If there is one [a person in the natural state], he won't be hiding somewhere. He will be there shining like the star. You can't keep such people under bushel.

To be yourself is very easy, you don't have to do a thing. No effort is necessary. You don't have to exercise your will, you don't have to do anything to be yourself. But to be something other than what you are, you have to do a lot of things.

Whenever such a thing [enlightenment] happened, it happened to those people who had given up completely and totally all their search. That is an absolute requisite for that kind of a thing.

You are trying to enforce peace through violence. Yoga, meditation, prayers, mantras, are all violent techniques. The living organism is very peaceful; you don't have to do a thing. The peacefully functioning body doesn't care one hoot for your ecstasies, beatitudes, or blissful states.

What I am trying to point out is simply that your spiritual and religious activities are basically selfish.

Thought can never capture the movement of life, it is much too slow. It is like lightning and thunder. They occur simultaneously, but sound, travelling slower than light, reaches you later, creating the illusion of two separate events.

Your constant utilization of thought to give continuity to your separative self is 'you'.There is nothing there inside you other than that.

Real silence is explosive; it is not the dead state of mind that spiritual seekers think. This is volcanic in its nature; it's bubbling all the time--the energy, the life--that is its quality.


What is here, this Natural State, is a living thing. It cannot be captured by me, let alone by you. It's like a flower. You can't preserve its perfume; whatever you preserve of this is only a synthetic, a chemical perfume, not the living thing.

This[Natural State] is a state in which questioning has stopped. It has stopped because those questions have no relation to the way the organism is functioning, and the way the organism is functioning leaves no room for questions.

To be yourself requires extraordinary intelligence. You are blessed with that intelligence; nobody need give it to you, nobody can take it away from you. He who lets that express itself in its own way is a natural man.

You do create me. I don't create you for the simple reason that I don't have any image of myself.

We never look at anything. It is too dangerous to look because that 'looking' destroys the continuity of thinking.

I may sound very cynical, but a cynic is really a realist. Cynicism will help you to have a healthy look at the way things are going on in the world.

The fact is that we don't want to be free. What is responsible for our problems is the fear of losing what we have and what we know. All these therapies, all these techniques, religious or otherwise, are only perpetuating the agony of man.


The whole purpose of a conversation or dialogue is only to convert the other man to your point of view. If you have no point of view, there is no way he can convince or convert you to his point of view.

We are not ready to accept the fact that thought can only create problems. That instrument cannot be of any help to us.

Anything that happens in space and time is limiting the energy of life. What life is I don't know; nor will I ever.

You are not ready to accept the fact that you have to give up. A complete and total surrender." It is a state of hopelessness which says that there is no way out... Any movement in any direction, on any dimension, at any level, is taking you away from yourself...

Food, clothing and shelter- these are the basic needs. Beyond that, if you want anything, it is the beginning of self-deception.

If you listen to me year after year, you are only clarifying your thoughts. It's useless.

Anything I do to help you would be adding to your misery--that's all. You add one more misery to those you already have by listening to me.

All our experiences, spiritual or otherwise, are the basic cause of our suffering.... The body is not interested in anything that you are interested in. That is the battle that is going on all the time... There seems to be no way out....

The talk of intuition and insight is another illusion. Every insight you have is born out of your thinking.

I don't have any thoughts which I can call my own--not one thought, not one word, not one experience.

Whatever we experience is thought-induced. What you don't know you can't experience. To experience a thing you have to know.

I am not out to liberate anybody. You have to liberate yourself, and you are unable to do that. What I have to say will not do it. I am only interested in describing this state, in clearing away the occultation and mystification in which those people in the 'holy business' have shrouded the whole thing. Maybe I can convince you not to waste a lot of time and energy, looking for a state which does not exist except in your imagination.

U G Krishnamurti

Han gick bort 22 Mars 2007 Vallecrosia i Italien