Jiddu Krishnamurti on Chastity and Liberation

Question: Is continence or chastity necessary for the attainment of liberation?
Jiddu Krishnamurti : The question is wrongly put. For the attainment of liberation, nothing is necessary. You cannot attain it through bargaining, through sacrifice, through elimination; it is not a thing that you can buy. If you do these things, you will get a thing of the marketplace, therefore not real.

Truth cannot be bought, there is no means to truth; if there were a means, the end would not be truth, because means and end are one, they are not separate. Chastity as a means to liberation, to truth, is a denial of truth. Chastity is not a coin with which you buy it. You cannot buy truth with any coin, and you cannot buy chastity with any coin. You can buy only those things which you know, but you cannot buy truth because you don't know it. Truth comes into being only when the mind is quiet, still; so the problem is entirely different, is it not?

Why do we think chastity is essential? Why has sex become a problem? That is really the question, isn't it? We shall understand what it is to be chaste when we understand this corroding problem of sex. Let us find out why sex has become such an extremely important factor in our life, more of a problem than property, money, and so on. What do we mean by sex? Not merely the act but thinking about it, feeling about it, anticipating it, escaping from it - that is our problem.

Our problem is sensation, wanting more and more. Watch yourself, don't watch your neighbor. Why are your thoughts so occupied with sex? Chastity can exist only when there is love, and without love there is no chastity. Without love, chastity is merely lust in a different form. To become chaste is to become something else; it is like a man becoming powerful, succeeding as a prominent lawyer, politician, or whatever else - the change is on the same level. That is not chastity but merely the end result of a dream, the outcome of the continual resistance to a particular desire.

So, our problem is not how to become chaste or to find out what are the things necessary for liberation but to understand this problem which we call sex. Because, it is an enormous problem, and you cannot approach it with condemnation or justification. Of course, you can easily isolate yourself from it, but then you will be creating another problem. This all-important, engrossing, and destructive problem of sex can be understood only when the mind liberates itself from its own anchorage. Please think it out, don't brush it aside.

As long as you are bound through fear, through tradition, to any particular job, activity, belief, idea, as long as you are conditioned by and attached to all that, you will have this problem of sex. Only when the mind is free of fear is there the fathomless, the inexhaustible, and only then does this problem take its ordinary place. Then you can deal with it simply and effectively; then it is not a problem. So, chastity ceases to be a problem where there is love. Then life is not a problem; life is to be lived completely in the fullness of love, and that revolution will bring about a new world.

Source - Jiddu Krishnamurti Second Talk in Colombo 1949/50

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