QUESTIONER: When you were young you wrote a book in which you said: "These are not my words, they are the words of my Master." How is it that you now insist upon our thinking for ourselves? And who was your Master?

KRISHNAMURTI : One of the most difficult things in life is not to be bound by an idea; being bound is called being consistent. If you have the ideal of non-violence, you try to be consistent with that ideal. Now, the questioner is saying in effect, "You tell us to think for ourselves, which is contrary to what you said when you were a boy. Why are you not consistent?"

What does it mean to be consistent? This is really a very important point. To be consistent is to have a mind that is unvaryingly following a particular pattern of thinking - which means that you must not do contradictory things one thing today and the opposite thing tomorrow. We are trying to find out what is a consistent mind. A mind which says "I have taken a vow to be something and I am going to be that for the rest of my life" is called consistent; but it is really a most stupid mind, because it has come to a conclusion and it is living according to that conclusion. It is like a man building a wall around himself and letting life go by.

This is a very complex problem; I may be oversimplifying it, but I don't think so. When the mind is merely consistent it becomes mechanical and loses the vitality, the glow, the beauty of free movement. It is functioning within a pattern. That is one side of the question.

The other is: who is the Master? You don't know the implications of all this. It is just as well. You see, it has been said that I wrote a certain book when I was a boy, and that gentleman has quoted from the book a statement which says that a Master helped to write it. Now, there are groups of people, like the Theosophists, who believe that there are Masters living in the remote Himalayas who guide and help the world; and that gentleman wants to know who the Master is. Listen carefully, because this applies to you also.

Does it matter very much who a Master or a guru is? What matters is life - not your guru, not a Master, a leader or a teacher who interprets life for you. It is you who have to understand life; it is you who are suffering, who are in misery; it is you who want to know the meaning of death, of birth, of meditation, of sorrow, and nobody can tell you. Others can explain, but their explanations may be entirely false, altogether wrong.

So it is good to be sceptical, because it gives you a chance to find out for yourself whether you need a guru at all. What is important is to be a light unto yourself, to be your own Master and disciple, to be both the teacher and the pupil. As long as you are learning, there is no teacher. It is only when you have stopped exploring, discovering, understanding the whole process of life, that the teacher comes into being - and such a teacher has no value. Then you are dead, and therefore your teacher is also dead.

Think on These Things, Ch-6.

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Marco Almeida

What is memory can unlock everything you doubt in life. Just asking the question of memory brings about choiceless awareness. To act if as you are not aware of all memory. Only emptying what you you were meant to fill. This is memory in action and awareness in itself. Being absent in my present state is how I do this, myself.