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.

Breathing apparatus

 You see when you seek out silence you are creating disorder. And that disorder you call silence. Order is born out of... it comes into being when disorder ends. Right? To find out disorder first, not seek order, why our lives are in disorder, and to go into it, find out, and so on. When there is that comprehension completely of disorder there is naturally order. Now when you don't separate sound from silence there is order, complete order - like the universe, it is everlastingly in order - sun rising, sun setting, the stars, the beauty of a new moon, the full moon, the whole universe is in order, it is only human beings who are in disorder because they have lost their relationship with nature, they have no beauty. You understand?⁠

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So the end of the matter is when there is no self, self-centredness, there is something which is totally orderly and that order is silence and sound, and then there is that thing that man has sought, which is timeless. Unless you do this, all that is verbal nonsense. Unless you put your mind and heart to understand your own life, why you live this way, why you have to go to the office day after day, why you have to quarrel with your wife and husband, the jealousy. All that destroys love, and without love there is no order. And where there is love there is compassion. And where there is compassion there is supreme intelligence. Not the artificial intelligence of a computer, nor the artificial intelligence or powerful intelligence of thought. But when there is that quality of the brain, which has understood the whole business of conditioning and is free, and silence is part of that enormous sound of the universe, and where there is the end of sorrow, there is passion. Compassion is that passion, and it is that intelligence, and then beyond that there is total nothingness.⁠

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J. Krishnamurti⁠

Public Talk 4 Madras (Chennai), India - 06 January 1985⁠

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