|
|
Jiddu Krishnamurti on Attaining Truth and
Marriage
Questioner: In order to attain truth, must one abstain
from marriage and procreation?
Jiddu Krishnamurti: Now, truth is not an end, a finality that can be
attained through certain actions. It is that understanding born of
continual adjustment to life, which demands great intelligence; and
because most people are not capable of this self-defenseless adjustment
to the movement of life, they create certain theories and ideals which
they hope will guide them.
So man is held in the frame of traditions, prejudices,
and binding moralities, dictated by fear and the desire for
self-preservation. This has come about because he is unable to discern
continuously the significance of life in constant movement, and so he
has developed certain ''musts'' and ''must nots.''
A complete and a rich living, by which I mean a most
intelligent life, not a self-protective, defensive existence, demands
that the mind shall be free of all taboos, fears, and superstitions,
without ''must'' and ''must not,'' and this can only be when the mind
wholly understands the significance and the cause of fear. For most
people there is conflict, suffering, and a ceaseless adjustment in
marriage, and for many the desire to attain truth is but an escape from
this struggle.
Questioner: You deny religion, God, and immortality. How can humanity
become more perfect, and so happier, without believing in these
fundamental things?
Jiddu Krishnamurti : It is because with you
it is only a belief in God, in immortality, it is because you merely
believe in these things that there is so much misery, suffering, and
exploitation. You can discover whether there is truth, immortality, only
in the completeness of action itself, not through any belief whatsoever,
not through the authoritative assertion of another. Only in the fullness
of action itself is reality revealed.
Now, to most people, religion, God, and immortality are simply means of
escape. Religion has merely helped man to escape from the conflict, the
suffering of life, and therefore from understanding it. When you are in
conflict with life, with its problems of sex, exploitation, jealousy,
cruelty, and so on, as you do not fundamentally desire to understand
them - for to understand them demands action, intelligent action - and
as you are unwilling to make the effort, you unconsciously try to escape
to those ideals, values, beliefs which have been handed down. So
immortality, God, and religion have merely become shelters for a mind
that is in conflict.
To me, both the believer and the nonbeliever in God and immortality are
wrong, because the mind cannot comprehend reality until it is completely
free of all illusions. Then only can you affirm, not believe or deny,
the reality of God and immortality. When the mind is utterly free from
the many hindrances and limitations created through self-protectiveness,
when it is open, wholly naked, vulnerable in the understanding of the
cause of self-created illusion, only then all beliefs disappear,
yielding place to reality.
Questioner: Are you against the institution of the family?
Jiddu Krishnamurti : I am, if the family is
the center of exploitation, if it is based on exploitation. (Applause)
Please, what is the good of merely agreeing with me? You must act to
alter this. The desire for perpetuation creates a family, which becomes
the center of exploitation. So the question is really: can one ever live
without exploiting? Not whether family life is right or wrong, not
whether having children is right or wrong, but whether family,
possessions, power are not the result of the desire for security,
self-perpetuation. As long as there is this desire, family becomes the
center of exploitation.
Can we ever live without exploitation? I say we can. There must be
exploitation as long as there is the struggle for self-protection; as
long as the mind is seeking security, comfort - through family,
religion, authority, or tradition - there must be exploitation. And
exploitation ceases only when the mind discerns the falseness of
security and is no longer ensnared by its own power of creating
illusions. If you will experiment with what I say, you will then
understand that I am not destroying desire, but that you can live in
this world richly, sanely, a life without limitations, without
suffering. You can discover this only by experimenting, not by denying,
not through resignation, nor by merely imitating. Where intelligence is
functioning - and intelligence ceases to function when there is fear and
the desire for security - there can be no exploitation.
Most people are waiting for a change to take place that will
miraculously alter this system of exploitation. They are waiting for
revolutions to realize their hopes, their unfulfilled longings; but in
so waiting they are slowly dying. For I think that mere revolutions do
not change the fundamental desires of man. But if the individual begins
to act with intelligence, without compulsion, irrespective of present
conditions or of what revolutions promise in the future, then there is a
richness, a completeness whose ecstasy cannot be destroyed.
Source- Jiddu Krishnamurti Second Talk in Sao Paulo April 24, 1935
Related Article -
J Krishnamurti - Is
continence or chastity necessary for the attainment of liberation
^Top
Back to Counseling |
|
