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MA61T8 - The religious mind frees itself from the known
Madras (Chennai), India - 17 December 1961
Public Talk 8



0:00 This is J. Krishnamurti’s eighth public talk in Madras, 1961.
0:06 Krishnamurti: This is the last talk.
0:18 I would like, if I may, this evening, talk about the religious mind and the contemporary scientific mind.
0:48 To most of us, symbol has an extraordinary meaning. To the Christian, the cross, the image, the church, the cathedral, and so on. To the Hindu, the various gods with innumerable arms, the temple, the ancient walls around the temple, the stone.
1:26 The graven image, either by the hand or by the mind, have an extraordinary influence on us.
1:38 They shape our thinking; they limit our endeavour; they enclose the wandering spirit; they minimise suffering; they give innumerable satisfactory explanations.
2:11 And if we watch, observe our own thinking, we’ll see how easily a word, an explanation, a symbol, satisfies us.
2:30 A word, a phrase from the Gita, Upanishads, from the Bible, from the Koran, or whatever book you hold as sacred, somehow seems to alleviate the ache and the pain and the despair and the boredom of existence.
2:51 And symbol in any form seems to cover many of our difficulties, and in the name of a symbol we get very excited, we get very enthusiastic, as the Christians do, as the Hindus do, by words and by a phrase, by a symbol.
3:23 As I’ve been saying during all these talks, please don’t just listen to me, don’t just hear words.
3:36 One must go beyond words, beyond the name, beyond the symbol, to really find out, to search very deeply, to inquire without restraint, without limitation.
3:52 And I would suggest most earnestly, that is, if you care to and if you are serious enough, not merely to listen to an evening talk or a discussion of this kind but in the very act of listening to explore into oneself.
4:20 In the very act of listening, if one does listen with an awareness, without any effort, in that very act there is a strange miracle that does happen; it’s like penetrating into darkness. But that listening is not mere acceptance of propaganda, nor being hypnotized by a series of words.
4:57 Listening has importance only if in the very act of that you can go within yourself and uncover your own ways of thought, feeling; discover how one is slave to a symbol, to a word; actually, emotionally, directly experience that thing which is being talked about.
5:24 Then, it seems to me, what is being said will have significance, or otherwise what is said is mere ash, without much value. Because we’re concerned with the daily existence, with the daily torturing, boring, sorrowful events of our life, and how to bring about a real mutation in our life – not to worship symbols, not to become a devotee of some god or some idea, not to worship flags, which is the new religion all over the world, but to actually, if it is possible, to bring about a radical change in our thinking, in our feeling, in the way of our daily existence.
6:27 That is what is significant. And we can only become aware of it and bring about a deep uprooting only when we are capable of listening, not only to what is being said here but also to every minute of the day, to listen to the birds, to watch the trees, to the talk of your neighbour, of your wife, of your children, so every moment you’re learning and therefore dispelling the dullness, the weary spirit.
7:11 So in the same way, do listen so as to find out the workings of your own mind, the ways of your own heart, so that you know yourself, you know all about yourself, both the conscious and the unconscious, and all the influences, the inventions, the ideas, the traditions that one has accumulated through centuries.
7:46 I don’t see how one can go very far, either in thought or in deep affection, if one is caught in the daily turmoil, in the daily grind of misery, despair.
8:08 And yet we avoid that, we try to slur over it, cover it up, and get lost in some idea, in some belief, in some symbol.
8:28 So if you are listening at all, it seems to me that it is very important to listen rightly because, you see, if you do listen, then you are no longer influenced, no longer driven by circumstances, by your society; then you put all those aside and then perhaps you’ll be able to enter into what is really the religious mind.
9:16 Because the religious mind is the only mind that can solve our problems now, not the scientific mind at all.
9:29 But to understand what the religious mind is actually, not theoretically, one must investigate not only the symbol, question every symbol, and also go into the question of influence, how easily we are persuaded, how easily we become slaves to an idea, which is really propaganda, how easily our emotions get entangled with a new or a possibly new escape. So without understanding not only how slavish we are to symbols but also to all the influence of society, of tradition, of the family, of the name, of the occupation, the influence of papers, books, the influence of prominent people who are supposed to be awfully clever, who are supposed to be leaders; how easily and how disastrously we are influenced to think this way or that way, to act and to pursue a system of habit.
11:20 And to be able to discern every influence, to be aware of them, and yet not be entangled in them is intelligence. To be aware of the influence of a book as you are reading, to be aware of the pressures and the strains of the family, to be aware of the culture in which you are brought up, because there are innumerable influences all the time penetrating into the very delicate mechanism of the mind.
12:26 Every word that is being said now is influencing you.
12:35 To be aware of it and yet not to be caught in it, because the clothes you wear, the food you eat, the climate you live in, the books you read and the tortuous years, fifty or thirty or forty years of business life or office life, how it distorts, corrupts, makes petty the mind – to be aware of all that, all the influences, subtle, conscious and unconscious influences, specially the unconscious influences, because there... a people that are old, they’ve inherited so much influence, so many traditions, so many ways and habits of thinking, so deeply embedded in the unconscious.
13:47 To be aware of that, to pull them out and examine them, question them, tear them to pieces so that not a single influence is left which you have not completely, totally understood.
14:15 Because, you see, that which is real has no influence; that which is true only liberates you from the false; it doesn’t influence; you can leave it or take it.
14:37 But to understand it, to go with it, to wander with it the face of the earth, to penetrate it deeply, you must be aware of the limiting, destructive influences that exist in the conscious mind as well as in the unconscious mind, because most of our consciousness is made up of influence.
15:09 It is influence if you examine it, the influence of the Buddha, the Krishnas, the Shankaras, the political leaders, which is really propaganda, and it’s there, deeply embedded.
15:37 And most of us are not aware of them, we’re not even concerned.
15:44 All that we are concerned with mostly is to earn a livelihood, to beget a few children, and to amuse ourselves round them and to go on, to carry on with the monotonous, rather silly, stupid life.
16:06 It’s only when there is trouble, then we awaken for a few minutes, try to solve it, know that we cannot solve it, and go back to sleep again – that’s our life.
16:26 And to be aware of the many influences is necessary to liberate the mind, because without a free mind there is no discovery.
16:41 You can’t discover anything new unless... if you’re tied, tethered to some form of an idea, of a belief, of a dogma, of a family, of the innumerable attachments that one cultivates, gathers as one lives.
17:05 And also there is not only the symbol, the influence, but also there is that peculiar thing called knowledge.
17:22 It’s strange how we worship knowledge.
17:32 Knowledge implies, doesn’t it, the past.
17:42 Knowing is always in the present and knowledge is always in the past, like experiencing is in the present and experience is always in the past.
18:01 And to us the past has extraordinary significance, the past which is knowledge. Knowledge is necessary at the technical level, mechanical level, and the more you have knowledge, the better – how to go to the moon, how to build a house, how to beautify a garden, enrich the earth.
18:42 But knowledge also becomes an impediment to deep discovery because most of our lives are lived in the past.
19:11 All that we know is the past. Do watch your own thinking, your own life, and you will see this is so simple, as a very simple thing, how knowledge corrupts.
19:31 The knowledge of where you live is important, otherwise you’d have amnesia, but that very knowledge limits, creates fear, so that you don’t want to go away from that which you have known.
19:54 So the mind which is held in knowledge is always anxious, guilty, fearful to inquire, to go into the unknown, and so we’re always living in the past, and therefore the present is only a passage to the future or the past.
20:35 And so we live in a vicious circle, always in the field of the known and therefore always...
20:46 never discovering something new, fresh, young, innocent.
21:01 You may know how to go to the moon, how to drive a car, the extraordinary... the building a bridges, but that is not creation, that’s merely the functioning of mechanical knowledge, and that knowledge can be extensively added year after year, century after century, but that’s not creation; that doesn’t open the door to something immense.
21:44 So, symbol, influence and knowledge which are so important in our daily life do corrupt, destroy the right inquiry, right questioning.
22:13 If that is clear to each one of us, then we can begin to inquire what is a religious mind, and what is a scientific, modern, twentieth-century mind.
22:39 The really scientific mind and the really religious mind are the only two minds that can exist in the twentieth century, not the superstitious, believing, temple-going, church-worshipping mind.
23:08 The scientific mind is the mind that pursues fact and that... to pursue the materialistic, the fact which is discovered under the microscope, the atom, and so on, needs immense accumulated knowledge.
23:41 And such a scientific mind is the product of the twentieth century.
23:50 So one begins to see that a scientific mind, the so-called educated mind, the mind that has learned a certain technique, thinks rationally with knowledge, and moves from the known to the known, from fact to fact, such a mind is necessary, absolutely necessary, because it can reason logically, sanely, rationally, precisely.
24:38 But such a mind cannot obviously free itself to inquire into what is, beyond the accumulated knowledge, which is the function of religion.
24:59 So what is the religious mind?
25:07 You know, there is a way of thinking which is negative, which is the only highest form of thinking. The highest form of thinking is still limited thinking, negative thinking; that is, to see what is false, not what is true.
25:32 You can’t, because we’re all trained to think positively, which is to think imitatively, think according to tradition, to what has been known, following a particular method, a system, always projecting from the past, which is what is called positive thinking, whereas there is a negative thinking, which is to see the false which is the positive, and from there proceed. And that’s what we are going to do, to find out what is the religious mind: seeing what is false and denying it totally, not accepting one breath of it.
26:40 And you cannot deny totally if you already know that you will gain in denying the false.
27:03 To deny something totally, if you knew the future, you would not be denying, would you?
27:15 If I denied all religious organizations as being false, without any foundation, and I knew that I deny because there is... I find hope in some other organization, then that is not a denial.
27:45 I can only deny, not knowing the next step, and that is real denial, that’s real renunciation, not knowing but knowing that which is false. That’s negative thinking.
28:04 So we are going to inquire into what is the religious mind, negatively.
28:13 First, the religious mind obviously is not the believing mind because belief is based on the desire to be secure, to be safe, and so belief in any form prevents right inquiry, right questioning.
28:53 If I believe in nationalism, then I cannot possibly investigate how to be truly brotherly with another.
29:10 I must deny nationalism, then I shall find out what it is to live with another amicably, in a brotherly spirit.
29:27 But most of our religions are beliefs. You believe that there is a God because you have been told for ten thousand years through propaganda that there is a God, that there is an atman, all kinds of verbal statements, spinning theories and words.
29:59 And you believe that because you’ve been brought up with it, educated. And you go to the other end of the world, Russia and other parts, they don’t believe in it, they have been brought up not to believe. There isn’t much difference between the one who believes in God and the one who does not believe in God because they are both slaves to propaganda, one for ten thousand years and the other for forty years.
30:31 I know you will laugh, I know you think it is quite funny, but you will still believe.
30:45 And a man who would really inquire if there is or if there is not, obviously must wipe totally away all his conditioning, all his belief in God.
31:06 So, the religious mind is not the mind which believes, not the mind which goes to the temple. You’re going to the temple every day, repeating certain phrases, doing mantra – you know? – all the rest of it doesn’t indicate you’re a religious man at all.
31:32 It may indicate that you’re a superstitious man, that you’re caught in a habit which society has passed on to you.
31:43 You may substitute religious rituals to parades, to attending footballs, cricket, sitting by the hour by the radio – it is all the same thing.
32:02 So the ritualistic mind, the mind that goes to the temple, church, and that worships a symbol is not the religious mind at all.
32:21 Why does one do it? Why do you do it?
32:28 For various obvious reasons. First, that you have been trained, this has been instilled into you, to believe, to seek shelter in an idea.
32:47 If you haven’t a God, you have the state to worship, Mr Lenin or some other Marx with their priests.
33:02 We all want security because we are frightened of life; we are troubled – someone dies, we lose the job, something happens to us; we don’t face it, we do not go into it factually with a scientific mind, break through it, and so we turn easily, quietly and darkly to something that we hope will give us security, some peace.
33:41 And it does give peace, it does give security. A belief does give security, but that security is just a word, is empty because it has no psychological significance... ...the whole religious structure in which you have been brought up with all the authority involved in it.
34:18 So the temple, the church, the symbol which is used to excite and organize man to worship God is not a religious mind at all.
34:36 To deny that, to deny the whole structure, the whole religious structure in which you have been brought up with all the authority involved in it – the Shankaras, the Buddhas, the gurus, the Gitas, the Bible – to deny all that totally is the beginning of the religious mind, which doesn’t mean that it becomes sceptical or accept other authority.
35:19 It denies authority of any religious or any teacher and therefore of all the books and of all the temples and churches.
35:41 To deny it is very difficult, because you might lose your job; there is your mother who cries, and you yourselves are so frightened.
36:01 Can you deny such gods who have been worshipped for so many centuries?
36:08 Who are you to deny them? You know, the inventions, the tricks we play upon ourselves, and to deny and to remain in that denial.
36:25 That’s the beginning of the real religious mind, because when you deny what is false, your mind becomes very sensitive.
36:36 When you deny the false, you have energy. You know, you need a great deal of energy to inquire and to discover and to live in that religious mind; energy, as you have energy when you eat; you need energy, an abundance of it, but you cannot have that energy if you’re in conflict, conflict with the fact of what you are and what you should be, which is the ideal.
37:25 Therefore the religious man has no ideal; he’s only facing the facts from moment to moment. And virtue is in facing the fact, and out of that facing the fact you have an uncontrolled discipline, not the deadly practice of what you call discipline which is habit, a resistance, a suppression.
38:15 So a mind which is inquiring into the quality and into the nature of the religious mind is a mind that is free from the ordained, rigorous, religious, traditional discipline, but it has its own extraordinary unsuppressed, uncontrolled discipline which comes into being when you look at the fact.
38:51 You know, to look at a fact requires a great deal of energy.
38:58 You can only look at a fact when you’re not in conflict with the fact, the fact being what you are at a given moment; the fact that you may be jealous, ambitious, greedy, envious, ruthless, heartless – to face that fact, to look at it, requires energy.
39:22 You cannot live with that fact if you’re in conflict with that fact; and when you look at that fact without conflict, that very fact releases energy which brings about its own discipline.
39:43 And such discipline does not distort the mind because there is no suppression.
39:57 All our disciplines are a means of suppressing what the fact is, because we worship and escape to the ideal, which is a non-fact.
40:15 So if you are listening – which I hope you are – not merely listening to words, which are very cheap and in abundance, if you’re observing yourself through what is being said, you are bound to see the fact.
40:44 And if you are not in conflict with ‘what is’ actually – which is yourself, not your atmans, and all the rest of it, which has no meaning at all – then you will see as you’re watching the fact, the ‘what is’, out of that comes a strange discipline, because to watch something very clearly you do not condemn, you have no judgment, like a scientific mind watching something dispassionately.
41:37 So a religious mind has no authority and therefore a religious mind is not an imitative mind.
42:03 And you will see also the religious mind is not caught in time.
42:17 It doesn’t think in terms of evolution, growth, gradualism – that is the animalistic mind, because the brain, some... a part of the brain is evolved, grown out of the animalistic instinct.
42:51 The rest of the brain is still to be developed, and if it develops according to the animalistic instincts, experiences, it will still remain in time, and therefore a religious mind never thinks in terms of growth, evolution; it is always jumping out of time. I think you will understand this, which may be rather new and strange to you, because that’s what I mean by mutation.
43:45 A changing mind, a changing brain, is always moving from the known to the known, but a religious mind is always freeing itself from the known so that it will know... it is experiencing the unknown.
44:11 The unknown is out of time, the known is in time.
44:19 And so the religious mind – if you have gone very deeply into it, you will see – is not slave to time. If it is aware that it is ambitious or jealous or fearful, it doesn’t think in terms of ideals, of postponement; it ends it immediately, on the instant, and the very ending of it is the beginning of that extraordinary subtle, sensitive discipline which is uncontrolled, which is free.
45:07 So the religious mind is really the real revolutionary mind, not the revolution which is the reaction of what has been; like communism is a revolution, it’s only a reaction to capitalism and therefore it is not a revolution at all. No reaction is a revolution and therefore it cannot bring about a mutation. It’s only the religious mind, it’s only the mind that is inquiring into itself, aware of its own movements, its own activities, which is the beginning of self-knowledge, it’s only such a mind that is a revolutionary mind, and a revolutionary mind is the mutating mind, which is the religious mind.
46:14 So, you see, our problem is, and the challenge of present time – and it’s the challenge of every instant if you are at all awake – is to respond totally to something that is new. I mean by responding totally – totally – with all your mind, with all your brain, with all your heart, your body, everything, the totality of your whole being responding, not just intellectually or emotionally or sentimentally.
47:25 I wonder if we do ever respond to anything so completely.
47:35 You see, when we do respond so completely, there is the absence of self-centred activity.
47:50 When we respond to something totally, you will find at that moment, at that second, the self with all its activities, its fears, its ambitions, its cruelties, its envies have gone and therefore you can respond totally.
48:13 And you do respond totally when there is sensitivity which is love.
48:24 So you find a religious mind is aware of what love is; not the love that we know, that we say is love – the family, the carnal love, the spiritual love, the love that is so divided, and shared, and mutilated, spoilt, corrupt.
48:55 When you love, you love, one and the many; it’s not ‘Do you love all or the one?’ – you love.
49:07 So the religious mind has no nationality, no religion as belief and organized dogma.
49:22 And a religious mind is the mind which has humility – you understand? – to be humble.
49:37 And humility is not to be acquired, is not to be cultivated; only the vain cultivate humility.
49:51 But you have humility when you’re facing ‘what is’, the fact; and virtue is that humility, for, after all, virtue is order, order, and nothing more than that, as you keep your room in order, tidy, clean.
50:23 The function of virtue is that which arises from humility.
50:30 But that order is to be maintained from moment to moment. You can’t say, ‘I have order’.
50:41 You have to watch it, clean it, and that cleansing, that virtue can only come when there is humility.
50:53 So you begin to see that the religious mind is always freeing from the known, freeing itself from the known, which is knowledge, which is experience, which is the thing that has been accumulated, which is the past.
51:21 Don’t say it is only reserved for the few – it’s not.
51:28 But if you have inquired, questioned deeply into yourself, that is, when you are watching yourself, your thoughts, your emotions, your ways of eating, talking to the servant, your attachment to the family, to your son, to your daughter, despising others and respecting others, bending your knee to the symbol and kicking somebody else, when you watch all this, aware of all this choicelessly, then you will find your mind, your brain, becomes very quiet, still, alive, sensitive.
52:20 Though it knows, it must function in knowledge, it is free of knowledge, and that’s absolutely essential to find out if there is a reality or not.
52:39 The mind must be totally free, completely, from the known, which is all the knowledge, all the experiences, all the traditions, the authority, the scratches of misery, the frustrations, the sorrow that one has accumulated which creates the illusion – all that must go.
53:15 Then only you are beginning to understand what a religious mind is.
53:26 Then you will find, if you have gone so far, that meditation is not the repetition of words, sitting in some dark corner, looking at your own projection and images and ideas, but meditation then is the unravelling of the known and freeing itself from the known.
54:04 Then you have the energy, that extraordinary energy which is needed – not the energy created by being a bachelor, eating one meal, putting on one loin cloth, going away by yourself into a mountain and hiding yourself behind the monastery walls, assuming a false name or a number; that doesn’t give you energy; that denies energy.
54:44 But knowing all the dangers of it, being aware of all that, and therefore denying it; cutting with a knife, as a surgeon cuts, all that, all the cankerous, false things of life, then out of that you will find, if you have gone that far, your brain being very still and yet very sensitive – it’s only a very still thing that is sensitive; then you are beginning to understand what beauty is. You must have beauty – which is not good taste; good taste is personal, it’s a personal reaction, good taste, and that must go too, the personal good taste; then you will know what beauty is.
55:52 Beauty is not something that’s put together by man, either on a canvas, on a page or on a stone.
56:07 Beauty is not a mere response of a feeling which the artist has.
56:16 It’s something far beyond all that, and when you have gone so far and further, then you will see that there is creation.
56:30 Creation which is not... can never be put into words; creation is not invention; universe is not made of invention.
56:50 So the religious mind is that creative mind because it has understood what living is and therefore free from all the pettiness of daily existence.
57:17 The daily existence is not living; it’s a torture, and when that torture stops, then you begin to live.
57:32 And it is only such a religious mind that can live and therefore, that very living is the invitation – not invitation – is the door through which the immeasurable, the unknowable can come into being. Right, sirs.