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SA61T9 - It is only the religious mind that can be in a state of creation
Saanen, Switzerland - 13 August 1961
Public Talk 9



0:00 This is J. Krishnamurti's ninth public talk in Saanen, 1961.
0:10 This is the last talk of this gathering.
0:29 I think during these talks we have covered a great many subjects, and I think we should consider this morning what is a religious mind.
1:08 And I would like to go into it fairly deeply, because I feel only such a mind can resolve all the problems, not only the political, economic, but much more fundamental problems of human existence.
1:56 But before we go into that, I think we should repeat what we have already said.
2:07 A serious mind is a mind that goes to the root of things, doesn’t stop half way or be detracted through any consideration, that can go to the root of any problem and discover what is true and what is false in it.
2:43 And I hope this gathering has shown sufficiently that there are at least a few who are capable and earnest enough to go to the root of things.
3:02 We all know fairly well the world situation, the deceptions, the corruption, the social and economic inequalities, war, the constant threat of the East against the West, and so on.
3:41 We are all very familiar with all that. To understand all this confusion and bring about clarity, it seems to me, there must be a radical change in the mind itself—not a patch work reform, not a mere adjust¬ment, but a radical revolution in the mind, in the psyche itself.
4:29 And I think such a radical revolution is necessary to wade through this confusion not only outside but within us: the mounting tensions, the increasing demands—to grapple with all that one needs to have a different mind.
5:10 And to me revolution is synonymous with religion.
5:28 I do not mean by revolution merely the economic, social or immediate changes but the revolution in the psyche, in consciousness itself.
5:44 And that revolution is the way of religion, not the way of communism or any other form of revolution.
6:05 All such revolutions are merely reactionary.
6:12 But a revolution in the mind—the complete destruction of what has been, so that it is capable of seeing what is true without distortion, without illusion—is the way of religion.
6:40 But before we go into this question of what is the real, true religious mind . . . and I think such a mind does exist, can exist.
6:55 And if one has gone into it very deeply, one can discover such a mind for oneself—a mind that has broken down, destroyed, all barriers which society, religion, dogma, belief, lies have imposed upon it.
7:22 The breaking down and going beyond to discover what is true is the religious mind.
7:34 And, as I said, before we go into that I would like to go into the question of experience.
7:54 Our brains are the result of experience, of centuries.
8:05 It is the storehouse of memory. Without that memory, without that experience and the knowledge accumulated, we shan’t be able to function at all as human beings.
8:24 They are necessary at a certain level. And all experience based on that conditioning of knowledge, of experience, of memory, must be limited.
8:43 I think that’s fairly obvious. So experience is not the factor of liberation. I don’t know if you have thought about it.
9:00 Every experience is conditioned by the past experience, which is so . . . there is no new experience, it’s always coloured by the past.
9:21 In the very process of experiencing there is the distortion which comes into being from the past, the past being knowledge, memory, the various accumulated experiences not only of the individual but of the race, of the community.
10:02 So every experience is shaped by the past.
10:15 And, is it possible to deny all that experience?
10:24 I do not know if you have gone into the question of denial: to deny something.
10:49 To deny implies, does it not, to deny authority: the authority of knowledge, the authority of memory, the authority of experience—to deny—to deny the priest, to deny the church, to deny everything that has been in the psyche.
11:41 And either we deny out of reaction or out of knowledge.
11:48 Those are the only means of denial for most of us: either through knowledge—because you have studied, you have inquired, you have accumulated, and then you deny—or you deny out of a reaction.
12:11 You deny the church or the authority of the priest or the authority of the book.
12:21 Either you have studied, inquired, searched—and denial based upon knowledge—or you don’t like it.
12:41 Denial implies, does it not—the true denial implies, does it not—the denial not knowing what is going to happen, the denial without future hope.
13:02 “I don’t know what is true, but this is false, therefore, I deny.” That denial is not out of a calculated knowledge or reaction, but you the see the thing as being false—that is the only true denial.
13:29 Because if you knew what was to be, the denial of what is is merely an exchange, it’s a thing of the market, therefore, it’s not denial at all.
13:47 I think one has to understand this a little bit, go into it rather deeply because I want to explore, through denial, what is the religious mind, through negation, to find out what is true.
14:07 You cannot find out what is true by assertion. You must sweep the slate completely clean before you can find out.
14:31 So, we are going to inquire what is the religious mind through denial, that is, through negation, that is, through negative thinking.
14:57 And there is no negative thinking or negative inquiry if there is a denial through knowledge, through reaction.
15:12 I hope I am making this clear.
15:19 If I deny the authority of the priest or of the book or of tradition because I don’t like it, as a reaction, it’s not a denial because I’m looking for something else.
15:42 Or, if I deny because I see how corrupt, how stupid, how absurd it is for anyone to assume the control of the mind of another because I have sufficient knowledge, facts and all the rest of it, and I deny, it is not a denial.
16:17 But there is a denial which is not the outcome of reaction or knowledge: the seeing of the fact, seeing the thing as it is; and the denial that comes from that observation is true denial because then it leaves the mind cleansed of all assumptions, illusions, authorities, desires.
16:53 So, is it possible to deny authority—I don’t mean the authority of the policeman, law, country, and all that; if we do, we’ll end up in a jail; that’s not the point, that’s silly and absurd, immature—but to deny the authority imposed by society on the psyche, on the consciousness, deep down, and to deny the authority of all experience, of all knowledge, so that the mind is in a state of not knowing what will be but knowing what is not true.
18:12 You know, if you have gone into it so far, it gives you an astonishing sense of being integral, a sense of integration not between conflicting, contradictory desires, but seeing what is true, what is false, or seeing the true in the false, gives you a sense of perception, a clarity.
19:12 And so the mind then is in a position, having destroyed everything, all the securities, all the fears, all the ambitions, vanities, purposes, visions, envies, such a mind then is completely alone, uninfluenced.
19:54 Surely, to find reality or God—or whatever name you may like to give it, which is unimportant—the mind must be alone, uninfluenced.
20:15 The mind, when it is alone in such [a] state, such a mind is a pure mind, such a mind can then proceed.
20:41 Before that, before complete destruction of the things it has created within itself as security, as hope, and the resistance against hope, against despair, and so on and so on, when there is the complete destruction of all that, then there comes, surely, a fearless state in which there is no death.
21:38 A thing that is alone is completely living, and in that living there is dying every minute and, therefore, to that mind there is no death.
22:05 It is really extraordinary if you have gone into that thing. You will discover for yourself, if you have gone that far, there is no such thing as death.
22:19 There is only that state of pure austerity of the mind which is alone.
22:35 This aloneness is not isolation; it is not escape, escapism into ivory tower; it is not loneliness—all that has been left behind, forgotten, dissipated, and destroyed.
23:00 So, such a mind knows what is destruction.
23:18 And we must know destruction, otherwise we can’t find anything new.
23:31 How frightened we are to destroy everything that we have accumulated.
23:47 You see, if I may say something here: I was told of a Sanskrit saying that ideas are the children of barren women.
24:10 Ideas are the children of barren women.
24:20 And most of us indulge in ideas.
24:28 You may treat these talks that have taken place here as exchange of ideas, or accepting and denying new ideas and discarding old ideas.
24:45 We are not dealing with ideas, we are dealing with facts. And when we are concerned with facts there is no adjustment.
24:59 You understand? There is no adjustment to a fact. You either accept it or you deny it. You can’t adjust to it.
25:13 You can say, “I don’t like those ideas, I prefer the old ideas, and I’m going to live in my stew,” or you go with the fact.
25:24 You cannot adjust, you cannot compromise. So, destruction is not adjustment.
25:43 Putting on a pair of trousers, a shirt, is not an adjustment to society.
25:53 But if I adjust myself to live in a state of ambition, be envious, partially envious, partially not envious, see the truth that envy is ugly, stupid, and yet be envious—that adjustment is not destruction.
26:25 One must destroy envy, ambition, greed, and all the absurdities that society has built into us.
26:35 So destruction is not adjustment any more than love is adjustment.
26:44 Love never adjusts. It’s only desire, fear, hope that adjusts.
26:57 So love is a destructive thing because it refuses to adapt itself or conform itself to a pattern.
27:13 So, we begin to discover that destruction of all the authority that man has created for himself in his desire to be secure inwardly, when that is destroyed there is creation.
27:47 Destruction is creation. Then, if you have abandoned idea and are not adjusting to what the speaker is saying, adjusting your own pattern of existence to a new pattern which you think the speaker is creating, if you have abandoned and gone that far, you will find that the brain can, must, function only with regard to outward things.
28:55 It must respond to outward demands.
29:05 And when you have gone that far inwardly, the brain becomes completely quiet, which means, the authority of its experiences has come to an end, therefore, it is incapable of creating illusion, and that is essential to find out what is true.
29:43 The power to create illusion in any form must come to an end.
29:57 And the power to create illusion is the power of desire, is the power of ambition, wanting to be this and not wanting to be that.
30:09 So, the brain must function in this world with reason, sanity, clarity, but inwardly it becomes completely quiet.
30:30 We are told by biologists that it has taken many, many million years for the brain to develop to its present stage, and it will take many, many million years to develop further.
30:58 Now, the religious mind does not depend on time for its development.
31:07 I hope, I wish, you could follow this because when the brain, which must function in its responses in the outward existence, becomes quiet inwardly, is no longer the means, the machinery of accumulating experience, knowledge and, therefore, completely quiet but fully alive, then it can jump the million years.
31:59 So, to the religious mind there is no time.
32:12 Time only exists in that sense of a continuity to a further continuity and achievement.
32:32 When the religious mind has destroyed the authority of the past—the tradition, the values imposed upon it, denies it, destroys it inwardly, the past—then it is capable of being without time, then it is fully developed, completely.
33:25 Because, after all, when you deny time you have denied all development—development through time and space.
33:51 Please, this is not an idea, this is not a thing to be played with it.
34:06 Either you have gone through it, you know what it is, you are in that state, or you can’t merely pick up these ideas and play with them.
34:21 So you will find destruction is creation; and in creation there is no time; and creation is that state when the brain is completely quiet, destroying, having destroyed, all the past and, therefore, a state when there is no time or space in which to grow, to become, or to express.
35:16 Then you will find, if you have gone still further, that when there is no time and space and only creation—not the creation of a few gifted people as painters, musicians, writers, architects: they are not in a state of creation— it is only the religious mind that can be in a state of creation.
36:11 Not the religious mind that belongs to some church, to some belief, to some dogma—those are not religious minds at all, they’re conditioned minds.
36:25 Willing to believe and denying belief in order to accept other forms of belief, going to church every morning, worshipping this and that, doesn’t make you a religious person.
36:44 You are respectable in a society which says you are religious. That you go to the mass every morning, or three times a week, or what . . . but that doesn’t make you a religious person.
37:00 What makes a religious person is this total destruction.
37:12 So, in this creation there is a sense of beauty—beauty that is not the thing put together by man, that beauty which is beyond thought and feeling.
37:56 After all, thought and feeling are reaction, but there is a beauty which is not reaction—it is beyond thought and feeling.
38:14 And a religious mind has that beauty, not the mere appreciation of nature, the lovely mountains and the roaring stream, but quite a different sense of beauty.
38:40 And with it obviously goes love. I don’t think you can separate beauty and love.
38:53 You know, for us love is a painful thing because it always comes with hate and jealousy, with acquisitive, possessive instincts.
39:28 So this love of which I am talking, we are talking about, is not, has no smoke—it is a state of the flame without the smoke.
39:57 So, the religious mind knows this complete, total destruction, what it means to be in a state of creation—which is not communicable.
40:20 And with it there is the sense of beauty and love which are indivisible.
40:27 Love is not divisible as divine love and physical love—it is love.
40:41 And with it goes, naturally, without saying, a sense of passion.
40:58 One cannot go very far without passion—passion being intensity—not to alter, to do; or that intensity which has a cause and when you remove that cause intensity disappears.
41:19 It is not a state of enthusiasm.
41:27 Beauty can only be when there is passion which is austere.
41:48 And you will find, a religious mind having, is, in all this state, has a peculiar quality of strength.
42:01 You know, for us strength is the result of will: many desires woven into a rope which we call will.
42:25 That will is resistance with most of us—to resist; or to say, “I want that,” and pursue that, and during the process of acquiring that developing will.
42:41 And that will is generally called strength. But the strength which we are talking about has nothing whatever to do with will—it is a strength without cause.
43:08 It cannot be utilized but without it nothing can exist.
43:18 So, if one has gone so deeply and discovers for oneself what is the religious mind—and such a mind does exist.
43:45 It doesn’t belong to any individual. It’s the mind, it’s a religious mind apart from all human endeavours, demands, individual urges, compulsions, and all the rest of it.
44:06 It’s only such a mind in its totality—we’re only describing the totality of that mind which may appear divided by using different words, but it’s a total thing in which all this is contained—and therefore such a religious mind can receive that which is not measurable by the brain, that thing which is unnameable, which no temple, no priest, no church, no dogma can hold.
45:06 On the contrary, they prevent.
45:14 And the denial of all that and to live in that state is the true religious mind.
45:35 Do you want to discuss or ask questions?
46:23 Questioner: (inaudible) KRISHNAMURT

I: The lady wants to know something about meditation, if the religious mind can be acquired through meditation.
47:04 You cannot acquire it. That’s the first thing to understand. You cannot get it; it isn’t to be bought through meditation. Do please understand, you can’t buy this thing, no virtue will buy it, no sacrifice, no meditation.
47:31 Nothing on earth, or whatever you can buy this.
47:41 This sense of attaining, achieving, gaining, buying must totally cease for that to be.
47:53 You cannot use meditation. What I have been talking about is meditation.
48:05 Meditation is not a way to something. To discover in daily life, in every moment of the day, what is true, what is false, is meditation.
48:19 Nothing, something to which you escape, which is self hypnosis, in which you get visions and all kinds of thrills, which is all immature, childish.
48:36 But to watch every moment of the day to see how your thought is operating—the machinery of defence, the fears, the ambitions, the greeds, the envies—to watch that, to inquire into it all the time, that is meditation.
49:01 At least that’s a part of meditation. And without laying the foundation—as we discussed the other day about meditation—and the laying the foundation is to be free of ambition, greed, envy, and all the things that we have created for our self defence.
49:29 And nobody . . . you don’t have to go to anybody to be told what is meditation, or given a method, which is too immature.
49:42 I can find out very simply by watching myself how ambitious I am, or not.
49:53 I don’t have to be told by another. I know. And to eradicate that, the root, the trunk, and the fruit of ambition, to totally destroy it—that is necessary; you can’t go far without these things.
50:18 You see, we want to go very far without taking the first step.
50:34 And you’ll find if you take the first step that’s the last step—there is no other step.
50:42 What were you going to say, sir?
50:54 Questioner: (inaudible) KRISHNAMURT

I: Sir, you have to be brief.
51:06 I have to repeat. Make your question short, sir. Questioner: I think that we cannot use reason to discover anything.
51:21 KRISHNAMURT

I: The gentleman asks, Is it true that we cannot use reason to discover what is true?
51:32 Sir, what do we mean by reason?
51:40 Reason is organized thought, is it not, like logic, organized idea.
51:53 And thought, however wise, however clever, however wide, however well informed, is limited.
52:03 All thought is limited. You can observe it yourself, this is not something new, you can find out for yourself—thought can never be free.
52:15 Thought is a reaction, a response of memory, it’s a mechanical process.
52:24 It can be reasonable, it can be sane, logical. It’s like the computers, electronic computers. But thought can never discover what is true. It’s only when the brain, which has accumulated through centuries of experience, memory, responses, when that thing thinks, it cannot discover.
52:59 But when that brain is quiet, it has understood the whole process of reasoning, inquiring, thinking—understood, not denied, understood—then it becomes quiet.
53:18 Then that state of quietness can discover what is true—not reason.
53:31 Sir, reason tells you that you must have leaders.
53:39 You’ve had leaders: from Hitler, Mussolini, Churchill and the Popes, you know, all the way down and all the way forward—they haven’t led you anywhere, they have led you to more misery, wars, destruction, corruption.
54:22 Questioner: (inaudible) KRISHNAMURT

I: The question is, One realizes the absurdity of condemning but one keeps on condemning not only the outward things but inwardly.
54:55 And condemnation doesn’t lead anywhere, it doesn’t clarify.
55:05 How to get out of this vicious circle? Right, sir? Questioner: Yes. KRISHNAMURT

I: When we say, “I see that I mustn’t condemn,” what do we mean by that word ‘seeing’?
55:34 How do you see that you mustn’t condemn? Please follow this a little slowly. I’ll go into it. What do we mean by seeing? What do we mean by saying, “ I understand that I mustn’t condemn”? I’m looking, examining that word ‘seeing’. Now, what do we mean by that? How do we see a thing? Do we see a thing, the fact, through words?
56:18 Please go with me a little bit. When I say, “I see condemnation is absurd,” do I see, understand, that condemnation is absurd because of the word that I mustn’t condemn?
56:40 You understand? The phrase I mustn’t condemn—I see that, but I don’t see the fact, the true fact that condemnation doesn’t lead anywhere.
56:53 I don’t know if I’m making myself clear. Isn’t it? You know, the word is not the thing, right?
57:05 The door is not the word: that is so, isn’t it?
57:12 The word door is not the door; the word is not the thing.
57:20 Now, if we confuse the thing with the word, then we don’t see it.
57:28 But if the word is not the thing, then we look at the thing and not get confused with the word.
57:47 If I see the whole implication of Catholicism, Hinduism, Communism, see the thing, not the word, then I’ve understood it.
57:58 I’ve finished with it. But if I cling to the word and not see the thing, then the word is an impediment to seeing.
58:11 Right? So, to see, the mind must be free of the word but see the fact.
58:24 Right? See the fact that condemnation of any kind inwardly prevents the mind seeing the fact.
58:41 If I condemn ambition, I don’t see the whole anatomy, the structure, of ambition.
58:51 But if I want to, if the mind wants to, understand ambition, there must be the cessation of condemnation, which is not acceptance of ambition.
59:03 I want . . . There is the perception, the seeing of the fact, and therefore no resistance against the fact, no denying of the fact, but seeing the fact.
59:26 Then the seeing the fact has its own action. The mind hasn’t to do anything about the fact. If I see the fact of the whole structure of ambition, the fact itself reveals to the mind the absurdity, the callousness, the brutality, the infinite destructive, brutal existence of ambition, and it drops away—I don’t have to do a thing about it.
1:00:07 If I see that authority of any kind inwardly, the full significance of it, study it, watch it, go into it, never denying, never accepting, then it drops away.
1:00:31 Have I made myself clear? All right, sir. It’s twelve o’clock and I’m afraid we’ll have to stop, and I hope some of us will be able to meet here next year.
1:01:04 In the meantime a pleasant journey.