Religion - Jiddu Krishnamurti

Jiddu Krishnamurti was one of the most remarkable and interesting thinkers of the 20th century. Born in 1895 was made head of the international elite organization known as the Order of the Star. In 1929 he completely dumbfounded his followers “I have now decided to disband the Order. You can form other organizations and expect someone else. With that I am not concerned, nor with creating new cages, new decorations for those cages. My only concern is to set men absolutely, unconditionally free.”

• Truth is the understanding of what is from moment to moment without the burden or the residue of the past moment.
• You think according to your capacity, to your energy, your experience and knowledge; another thinks differently according to his experience and conditioning. This is a fact, indisputable and actual.
• Belief is a danger which must be totally avoided if one is to see the truth of what is.
• We should have a rational doubt, skepticism, because doubt cleanses the mind, it freshens the mind, it breaks down the old habits, the old conclusions, the arcane concepts. 
• To enquire very deeply into the nature of religion there must be total freedom, freedom from all orthodoxy, tradition, rituals, faith, symbols. That requires a deep sense of doubt, doubt of everything that man has put together through thought what he calls religion.
• To doubt requires sensitivity. If you doubt everything, then it becomes rather stupid. But to doubt with a light hand, with a quick mind, with subtlety, then that doubt brings about clarity, energy.
• If you look to a priest for your guidance as a teacher, he will become your destroyer or exploiter. If you accept whatever I am saying, I will also become your priest; therefore I will become your exploiter.
• To be in self-contradiction is to live in conflict and sorrow. The whole fabric of the self is the result of contradictory interests and values. When the inner contradiction becomes unbearable  we turn to organized religion, with its dogmas and rituals.
• Your ideals, your gods, your religions: they are the creation of the desire for escape into comfort. 
• Organized religion does produce a number of positive effects. Primarily there is the psychological solace that comes to the individual believer. No teacher has established these organized, exploiting religions. You yourselves, out of your insecurity, out of your confusion, out of your lack of comprehension, have created religions as your guides.
• We give significance, meaning, to a life that has no meaning, the way we live, and the significance, the meaning is what we call religion. Religion as the experience of some authority may bind a few people together but it will breed inevitably antagonism; the experience of another is not true, however great the experiencer may be.
• Religion, organized belief, has carefully maintained, cultivated the sense that you must toe the line, that you must not sin, that you must not commit ugly things.
• Without religion there is no culture, for religion is the unifying factor.
• Religion is merely mumbling words, going to the temple, or practicing a discipline – which is all repetitive, copying, imitative, habit forming. And what happens to your mind and to your heart when you are merely imitative? Only dullness, emptiness.
• As you ruthlessly seek economic security, out of which is born a morality suited for that purpose, so you have created religions all over the world. This morality, this discipline, is really based on egotism and the ruthless search for individual security.
• In the pursuit of gain you lose sight of the present. You don’t fully understand the immediate experience. Intrinsically, in that incompleteness of experience, in that memory, the ego has its roots. However much it may grow, expand, it will always retain the centre of selfishness.
• Religions, with their beliefs, dogmas and creeds, have become tremendous barriers between human beings, dividing man against man, limiting him and destroying his intelligence.
• Religion with its beliefs, its disciplines, its enticements, its hopes, its punishments, forces you towards righteous behaviour, towards brotherliness, towards love. Where there is belief, where there is a following of an ideal, there cannot be complete living.
• Our whole system of thought and action and living is based on individual aggrandizement and growth at the expense of others. That is a fact and so long as that fact in the world exists there must be suffering, there must be exploitation, there must be the division of classes; and no forms of religion can bring about peace, because they are the very creation of human cravings, they are the means of exploitation.
• You all want to be somebody in the state, which is based on possessiveness, possessions; and that has become moral, true, good, perfectly religious. It is the same thing. Now we call that morality.
• Religion is the false result of a false cause, and merely a means of escape from conflict. The more you develop and strengthen the sectarian divisions of religion, the less true brotherhood there will be; and the more you strengthen nationalism, the less will be the unity of man.
• We will have misery and tribulation so long as religion is organized to be part of the State. It helps to condone organized force as policy of the State; and so encourages oppression, ignorance and intolerance. 
• Organized religions have nothing to do with the sayings of the great teachers. The teachers have said do not kill, love your neighbor, but religions of vested interest encourage and support the slaughter of humanity. By encouraging nationalism, supporting a special class, with all its organized belief, religion participates in the killing of man. Religions throughout the world not only exploit through fear, but also separate man from man. Such organized religions cannot in any way aid man in the realization of truth.
• Probably one of the few religions in the world that has not shed blood is Buddhism and perhaps after it Hinduism.
• An inner revolution is necessary so as to bring about right relationship between human beings; every other form of revolution brings about more misery. The question is how to bring about right relationship between man and man – not through force, not with bayonets, not through organized religions, not through ideologies – for these have all failed. So how is that revolution, that right relationship to take place?
• Religion is the search for truth, which is of no country, which is of no organized belief, which does not lie in any temple, church, or mosque. Religion is allowing truth to come into being. Religion is the understanding of the thinker and the thought, which means the understanding of action in relationship. Religion is not the worship of some idea, however gratifying, however traditional it is. Religion is understanding the beauty, the depth, the extensive significance of action in relationship. 
• Religion is the understanding of the thinker, not merely to be caught in a dogma of uncovering of the beauty of life, of existence, of truth. Religion is a total denial of everything which the mind has invented for its own security.
• Religion is not the acceptance of some dogma, tradition, or so-called sacred book. Religion is the inquiry to find the unknown. Religion is the urge, the intense pursuit of the sacred, if there is anything sacred, that is beyond the measure of time, it is not to be found within the field of the known.
• There is nothing sacred in the temples, in the mosques, in the churches. They are all the inventions of thought. So, when you discard all that, is there something sacred, that is nameless, timeless, something that is the outcome of great beauty and total order which begins in our daily life. When there is silence, there is immense, timeless space; then only is there a possibility of coming upon that which is the eternal, sacred.
• Where there is this emptiness and space there is vast energy. And that energy is sacred.
• We are brought up in the belief of God, thought is influenced, a habit is formed, from generation to generation. Both belief and non-belief in God prevent the understanding of God.
• God, Truth, or whatever you may choose to call reality, cannot be described. That which can be described is not the real. Memory is the residue of incomplete experiences; therefore, truth, or God, or what you will, is the unknown and it cannot be formulated.
• The function of education is to bring about a release of energy in the pursuit of goodness, truth, or God, which in turn makes the individual a true human being and therefore the right kind of citizen.
• In belief of God, there is great security, but that God, you have invented it. So you are seeking security in an illusion which you think is real and that gives you a great sense of security; that means you are neurotic in a belief which is your own invention.
• The moment I say there is God, the thinking about it is within the field of thought. The man who has not thought at all, to him there is no God.
• And where there is the ending of fear, there is no god. You understand? It is out of our fear, out of our desire, we invent the gods. When a man for him, in whom there is no fear, completely no fear, then he is totally a different human being and he needs no god.
• There must be complete freedom, and in that freedom there is a great, tremendous energy because there is an emptiness – not nothingness, emptiness. In that there is that which is beyond all time. This is meditation. This is religion.
• Meditation is the understanding of the whole of life, both external and inward, the understanding of your daily life, your relationships, freeing yourself from fear, and questioning what is the self, the ‘me’.
• The conflict in relationship creates the world in which we live every day – the misery, the poverty, the ugliness of existence. Life is a constant challenge, and when the response is inadequate, there is conflict; but to respond immediately to the challenge adequately, brings about a completeness. Therefore it is important to understand oneself, not in abstraction, but in actuality, in everyday existence.
• Religion is love; You can love, be compassionate, only in the present, in the immediate. We mean by religion absolute freedom, freedom from fear, freedom from conflict, freedom from problems, freedom from sorrow so that a mind, a brain that is completely free, it’s only then there is that quality of love and compassion. 
• Religion is a way of life: that is whole, that is not fragmentary, in which there is no conflict, contradiction of opposing desires, opposing ideas and demands, a total non-fragmentary life, a whole life, a total mind, a whole mind which doesn’t think one thing and do another, doesn’t say one thing and act contrary to what has been said.
• The real function of religion is to transform man totally, so that he lives in complete harmony, which means complete order and therefore righteous behavior. That is the total meaning of a religious mind.
• One religion is not going to conquer the rest of the world. They want to – the Hindus want it, the Christians. And the mechanical world is not going to bring about a new society, a new culture, only religion has always done it – not the present religion. So there needs to be a religion, of not faith, not belief, not rituals, not authority.
• The problem with reform is that it is merely a ‘redecoration of the walls of the prison.’  Then what shall the earnest man do? The relationship which has created this appalling society in which there are immensely rich people, and those who have absolutely nothing, both inwardly and outwardly – then what is he to do?

Truth is a pathless land. Man cannot come to it through any organization, through any creed, through any dogma, priest or ritual, nor through any philosophic knowledge or psychological technique. He has to find it through the mirror of relationship, through the understanding of the contents of his own mind, through observation and not through intellectual analysis or introspective dissection ... Jiddu Krishnamurti

Wars: Causes and Consequences

• War is the spectacular and bloody projection of our everyday life.
• War is merely an enlargement of our daily action. It is the collective result of our individual activities. 
• We are responsible for war and what can we do to stop it, is by transforming ourselves.
• Impending war cannot be stopped by anyone, because it is already in movement. 
• But we, seeing that the house is on fire, can understand the causes of that fire, can go away from it and build in a new place with different materials that are not combustible, that will not produce other wars. That is all that we can do.
• In order to save ourselves from wars, we have to cease to be greedy, cease piling up wealth, seeking power, domination, and be morally simple in our thoughts and feelings and in our relationships. 
• If circumstances are too powerful for you to alter, then you are responsible for the war and destruction. Circumstances can be controlled by us, because we created them.
• Society is the product of relationship. Societal changes merely relying on legislation for the transformation of outward society, while remaining inwardly corrupt, while continuing inwardly to seek power, position, domination, is to destroy the outward, however carefully and scientifically built. That which is inward is always overcoming the outward.
• What causes war – religious, political or economic? Obviously belief, either in nationalism, in an ideology, or in a particular dogma. If we had no belief but goodwill, love and consideration between us, then there would be no wars. 
• But we are fed on beliefs, ideas and dogmas that breed discontent. What causes war is the desire for power, position, prestige, money; also the disease called nationalism, the worship of a flag; and the disease of organized religion, the worship of a dogma. 
• If you as an individual belonging to organized religions, greedy for power, envious, you are bound to produce a society which will result in destruction. So it depends upon us, not on the leaders.
• How quickly we could bring an end of all these wars, is an appalling misery! But we are indifferent. We have three meals a day, we have our jobs, we have our bank account, The higher up we are, the more we want security, permanency, tranquility, the more we want to be left alone, to maintain things fixed as they are; but they cannot be maintained as they are, because there is nothing to maintain.
• We may talk about peace, have conferences, sit round a table and discuss, but inwardly, psychologically, we want power, position, we are bound by beliefs, by dogmas, for which we are willing to die and destroy each other.
• To have peace, we must be peaceful; to live peacefully means not to create antagonism. Peace is not an ideal which is merely an escape, an avoidance of a contradiction. But to have peace, we will have to love, we should not to live an ideal life, but to see things as they are and act upon them, transform them.
• We seek psychological security, which does not exist; and we seek it through power, through position, through titles, names – all of which is destroying physical security. This is fact.
• To bring about peace in the world, to stop all wars, there must be a revolution in the individual. Economic revolution without this inward revolution is meaningless. We will not win peace because we will not give up our position, our authority, our money, our properties, our stupid lives.
• To rely on others for  peace is futile. No leader is going to give us peace, no government, no army, no country. What will bring peace is inward transformation which will lead to outward action. There can be right action only when there is right thinking and there is no right thinking when there is no self-knowledge. Without knowing yourself, there is no peace.
• To put an end to outward war, you must begin to put an end to war in yourself. The world miseries and wars are not going to be stopped by your casual assent. They will be stopped only when you realize the danger, when you realize your responsibility, when you do not leave it to somebody else.
• If you realize the suffering, if you see the urgency of immediate action and do not postpone, then you will transform yourself; peace will come only when you yourself are peaceful, when you yourself are at peace with your neighbor.

In war there are no winners, but all are losers.
War is an unmitigated disaster. There is nothing good about it.
The two most powerful warriors are patience and time ... Leo Tolstoy
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength ... George Orwell
Mankind must put an end to war before war puts an end to mankind ... John F. Kennedy

My View:

In a war one country might win, but soldiers from both sides will perish. While winning country celebrates, the families of deceased soldiers will suffer loss of their family member forever. The economies of both warring countries will suffer severe setbacks. An example is Iraq. Prior to 1992 Kuwait wars, Iraqis were leading high end lifestyle. Post war their life is miserable. Prior to Iraq war in 2003, USA's national debt was under $1 trillion. The war costs are estimated at $800 billion and continued costs of the war are about $6 trillion. Today USA's national debt is $9 trillion, mainly due to Iraq war impact and some other reasons as well. Finally, wars were never between people or soldiers of the warring countries, but due to ego clash of their national leaders.

Source: 1948, Second public talk; Collected Works of Jiddu Krishnamurti