Jiddu Krishnamurti on fulfillment and aloneness

Question: How is man to fulfill himself if he has no ideals?
Jiddu Krishnamurti : Is there such a thing as fulfillment, though most of us seek fulfillment? We know we try to fulfill ourselves through family, through son, through brother, through wife, through property, through identification with a country or a group, or through pursuit of an ideal, or through the desire for continuity of the 'me'. There are various, different forms of fulfillment at different levels of consciousness.

Is there such a thing as fulfillment? What is the thing that is fulfilling? What is the entity that is seeking to be, in or through certain identification? When do you think of fulfillment? When are you seeking fulfillment?

As I said, this is not a talk at the verbal level. If you treat it at the verbal level, then go away; it is a waste of time. But if you want to go deeply, then pursue, then be alert and follow it because we need intelligence, not dead repetition, not repetition of phrases, words, and examples with which we are fed up.

What we need is creation, intelligent integrated creation; which means, you have to search it out directly through your own understanding of the mind process. So in listening to what I am saying, relate it to yourself directly, experience what I am talking about. And you cannot experience it through my words. You can experience it only when you are capable, when you are earnest, when you observe your own thinking, your own feeling.

When is desire to be fulfilled? When are you conscious of this urge to be, to become, to fulfill? Please watch yourself. When are you conscious of it? Are you not conscious of it when you thwart it? Are you not aware of it when you feel extraordinary loneliness, a sense of inexhaustible nothingness, of yourself not being something. You are aware of this urge for fulfillment only when you feel an emptiness, loneliness. And then, you pursue fulfillment through innumerable forms, through sect, through relationship with property, with trees, with everything at different layers of consciousness.

The desire to be, to identify, to fulfill, exists only when there is consciousness of the 'me' being empty, lonely. The desire to fulfill is an escape from that which we call loneliness. So our problem is not how to fulfill, or what is fulfillment because there is no such thing as fulfillment. The 'me' can never fulfill; it is always empty. You may have a few sensations when you are achieving a result; but the moment the sensations have gone, you are back again in that empty state. So you begin to pursue the same process as before.

So the 'me' is the creator of that emptiness. The 'me' is the empty; the 'me' is a self-enclosing process in which we are aware of that extraordinary loneliness. So being aware of that, we are trying to run away through various forms of identification. These identifications we call fulfillments. Actually, there is no fulfillment because mind, the 'me', can never fulfill; it is the very nature of the 'me' to be self-enclosing.

So what is the mind which is aware of that emptiness to do? That is your problem, is it not? For most of us, this ache of emptiness is extraordinarily strong. We do anything to escape from it. Any illusion is sufficient, and that is the source of illusion. Mind has the power to create illusion. And as long as we do not understand that aloneness, that state of self-enclosing emptiness - do what you will, seek whatever fulfillment you will - there is always that barrier which divides, which knows no completeness.

So our difficulty is to be conscious of this emptiness, of this loneliness. We are never face to face with it. We do not know what it looks like, what its qualities are, because we are always running away from it, withdrawing, isolating, identifying. We are never face to face, directly, in communion with it. We then are the observer and the observed. That is, the mind, the 'I', observes that emptiness, and the 'I', the thinker, then proceeds to free itself from that emptiness or to run away.

So, is that emptiness, loneliness, different from the observer? Is not the observer himself empty, and not that he observes emptiness? Because, if the observer was not capable of recognizing that state which he calls loneliness, there would be no experience. He is empty; he cannot act upon it, he can do nothing about it. Because, if he does anything whatever, he becomes the observer acting upon the observed, which is a false relationship.

So when the mind recognizes, realizes, is aware that it is empty and that it cannot act upon it, then that emptiness of which we are aware from outside has a different meaning. So far, we have approached it as the observer. Now the observer himself is empty, alone, is lonely. Can he do anything about it? Obviously, he cannot. Then his relationship to it is entirely different from that of the relationship of the observer. He has that aloneness. He is in that state in which there is no verbalization that "I am empty." The moment he verbalizes it or externalizes it, he is different from that. So when verbalization ceases, when the experiencer ceases as experiencing loneliness, when he ceases to run away, then he is entirely lonely. His relationship is in itself loneliness; he is himself that, and when he realizes that fully, surely, that emptiness, loneliness, ceases to be.

But loneliness is entirely different from aloneness. That loneliness must be passed to be alone. Loneliness is not comparable with aloneness. The man who knows loneliness can never know that which is alone. Are you in that state of aloneness? Our minds are not integrated to be alone. The very process of the mind is separative. And that which separates knows loneliness.

But aloneness is not separative. It is something which is not the many, which is not influenced by the many, which is not the result of the many, which is not put together as the mind is; the mind is of the many. Mind is not an entity that is alone, being put together, brought together, manufactured through centuries. Mind can never be alone. Mind can never know aloneness.

But being aware of the loneliness when going through it, there comes into being that aloneness. Then only can there be that which is immeasurable. Unfortunately most of us seek dependence. We want companions; we want friends; we want to live in a state of separation, in a state which brings about conflict. That which is alone can never be in a state of conflict. But mind can never perceive that, can never understand that; it can only know loneliness.

Question: You said that truth can come only when one can be alone and can love sorrow. This is not clear. Kindly explain what you mean by being alone and loving sorrow.
Jiddu Krishnamurti : Most of us are not in communion with anything. We are not directly in communion with our friends, with our wives, with our children. We are not in communion with anything directly. There are always barriers - mental, imaginary, and actual. And this separativeness is the cause, obviously, of sorrow. Don't say, "Yes, that we have read, that we know verbally." But if you are capable of experiencing it directly, you will see that sorrow cannot come to an end by any mental process. You can explain sorrow away, which is a mental process, but sorrow is still there, though you may cover it up.

So to understand sorrow, surely you must love it, must you not? That is, you must be in direct communion with it. If you would understand something - your neighbor, your wife, or any relationship - if you would understand something completely, you must be near it. You must come to it without any objection, prejudice, condemnation, or repulsion; you must look at it, must you not? If I would understand you, I must have no prejudices about you. I must be capable of looking at you, not through barriers, screens of my prejudices and conditionings. I must be in communion with you, which means I must love you.

Similarly, if I would understand sorrow, I must love it, I must be in communion with it. I cannot do so because I am running away from it through explanations, through theories, through hopes, through postponements, which are all the process of verbalization. So words prevent me from being in communion with sorrow. Words prevent me - words of explanations, rationalizations, which are still words, which are the mental process - from being directly in communion with sorrow. It is only when I am in communion with sorrow, I understand it.

The next step is: Am I who is the observer of sorrow different from sorrow? Am I, the thinker, the experiencer, different from sorrow? I have externalized it in order to do something about it, in order to avoid, in order to conquer, in order to run away. Am I different from that which I call sorrow? Obviously not. So I am sorrow, not that there is sorrow and I am different - I am sorrow. Then only is there possibility of ending sorrow.

As long as I am the observer of sorrow, there is no ending of sorrow. But when there is the realization that sorrow is the 'me', the observer himself is the sorrow, which is an extraordinarily difficult thing to experience, to be aware of, because for centuries we have divided this thing; when the mind realizes it is itself sorrow - not when it is observing sorrow, not when it is feeling sorrow - it is itself the creator of sorrow, it is itself the feeler of sorrow, it is itself sorrow, then there is the ending of sorrow.

This requires not tradition or thinking but very alert, watchful, intelligent awareness. That intelligent, integrated state is aloneness. When the observer is the observed, then it is the integrated state. And in that aloneness, in that state of being completely alone, full, when the mind is not seeking anything, neither seeking reward nor avoiding punishment, when the mind is truly still, not seeking, not groping, only then, that which is not measured by the mind comes into being.

Source - Jiddu Krishnamurti talk - February 3, 1952

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