SpiritWeb

Extracted from Bombay 1st Public Talk 12th February, 1950

Question: What is self-knowledge? The traditional approach to self-knowledge is the knowledge of Atman as distinct from the ego. Is that what you mean by self-knowledge?

Krishnamurti: Look Sirs you are all well-read, aren't you? You have read all the religious books, and that is how you know about the Atman; otherwise you do not know anything about it. You have read it in the books and you like the idea, so you accept it; but you don't really know whether it exists or does not exist. You want permanency, and the Atman guarantees it. Now, suppose you had not read a single religious book about the Atman, the Super - Atman, and all the rest of it, what would you do? You might invent; but if you had no previous knowledge, what would be your approach? And that is my approach - I have not read a single religious or psychological book, because I do not want them. Not that I am conceited; but since the whole business is inside you, you can discover it for yourself - but not by looking outside. Otherwise, how do you know that Sankaracharya, Buddha, or the very latest authority, is not wrong?

So, to discover truth, there must be freedom; freedom, not at the end, but at the very beginning. Freedom is not at the end, liberation is not an end product; it must be at the beginning, otherwise you cannot discover. Therefore, there must be freedom, freedom from the past - and that is what you and I are going to find out. You want to know what is self knowledge. It is not of the ego, not of the Atman - you do not know what that means. All that you know is that you are here, an entity in relationship with another, with your wife and children, with the world - that is all you know. That is the actual fact. Whether the Atman exists or not is merely a theory, a speculation, and speculation is a waste of time; it is for the sluggish, the thoughtless.

Now, what am I? That is all that matters: what am I? I am going to find out what I am; I am going to see how far I can go in that direction and find out where it leads. Because, that is the fact - not the Atman, not the ego, not the super-super-super. I do not think about those things, even though Buddha and Christ and everybody may have talked about them. What I can know is my relationship with property, with people, with ideas. So, the beginning of self knowledge lies in the understanding of relationship, and that relationship plays on all levels, not on one particular level only. I have to find out what my relationship is with my wife, with my children, with property, with society, with ideas. Relationship is the mirror in which I see myself as I am, and to see myself as I am is the beginning of wisdom. Wisdom is not something that you can buy in books or go to a guru to acquire; that is mere information, and wisdom is not information. Wisdom is the beginning of self-knowledge, and that wisdom comes when you understand relationship.

Now, to understand relationship, to see very clearly in relationship the fact of what you are, there must be no condemnation or justification - you must look at the fact with freedom. How can you understand something if you condemn it, or wish it to be something other than it is? Through your understanding of relationship there comes the discovery from minute to minute of the ways of your thinking, the structure of your mind; and as long as the mind does not understand its total process, both the conscious and the unconscious, there can be no freedom. So, through the relationship of everyday contacts, of everyday action, you come to a point when you see that the thinker is not different from thought. When you say the Atman is different from the ego, it is still within the field of thought; and without understanding the process, the functioning of thought, it is utterly futile to talk of reality and the Atman, because they have no existence, they are merely the prejudices of thought. What we have to do is to understand the thought process, and that can be understood only in relationship. Self-knowledge begins with the understanding of relationship - which we shall discuss later.

Then there is the question of the thinker and the thought, the experiencer and the experienced, with which we are familiar. Is there a thinker as an entity separate from thought? Surely there is no separate entity; there is only thought, and it is thought that has created this separate entity called the thinker. Thought is the response of memory, both the conscious as well as the unconscious, the hidden and the open; memory is experience, and experience is response to a challenge, which becomes the experienced - that is the total process of our consciousness, is it not? There is memory, then experience, which is the response to challenge, then the naming process, which further cultivates memory. Memory responds as thought in relationship, and this whole process of thought, this cycle of memory, challenge, response, experience and naming, which becomes further memory, is what we call consciousness. That is all I am, that is all I know. So, I see that my mind functions within the field of time, within the field of the known; and can it function beyond that field? I see now the whole process of my thinking, which leads me to the question, can the mind go beyond thought, which is the result of the known? Obviously not; be cause, when thought seeks to go beyond, it is pursuing its own projection. Thought cannot experience the unknown, it can only experience that which it has projected, which is the known. Thought is the mind, which is the result of time, the result of the past; and I want to know if the mind can go beyond itself. Obviously it cannot, because the `beyond' is the unknown, it is not of time. So, the mind must come to an end - which means, the mind must be still, meditative. Meditation is not the becoming of something, but the understanding of the total process of relationship, which is self-knowledge. It is only when the mind is still, not compelled to be still, that there is a possibility of experiencing the un known.

So, then, can the mind, which is the result of experience, which is memory - can such a mind experience the unknown? Do you under stand the problem? Can the mind, which is memory, the product of time, experience the timeless?It is the function of the mind to remember; and is truth a matter of experience and remembrance? We will discuss all this further as we go along; but just listen to what is being said, go with it, play with it, do not resist it. The point is: the mind is the result of time, time being me- mory, and memory says, `I have experienced or have not experienced'. Is truth, the unknown, the immeasurable, a matter of experience, which means something to be remembered? If you remember some thing, it is already the known, is it not? So, is it not possible to experience something which is not in terms of time - which means experiencing in the sense of seeing the truth from moment to moment? If I remember truth, it is no longer truth; because memory is a matter of time, of continuity, and truth is not of time, truth is not a continuity. The truth of the Buddha is not the truth which you discover today. Truth is never the same, it has no continuity; it is only from moment to moment, it cannot be remembered. There is truth only when mind is completely silent. Truth is not something to be sought after, experienced, held and worshipped. There can be the experiencing of the timeless only when the mind is free from all conditioning. So, self-knowledge is the understanding of conditioning.

What is important is to under stand the total process of the mind. We will discuss it later; but we will have to see that truth is not some thing to be remembered. That which is remembered is of time, it is a thing of the past, and truth can never be of the past or of the future; truth can only be in the present, in that state where there is no time. Time is the process of the mind, the mind is thought, and thought is the response of memory. Memory is the experience of challenge and response, and because the response is inadequate it creates the problem in relationship. So, the understanding of the total process of the self lies in the understanding of relationship in daily life; and that understanding frees the mind from time, and there fore it is capable of experiencing reality from moment to moment, which is not a process of remembering - it can no longer be termed `experience', it is quite a different state altogether. That state of being is bliss, it is not something that you learn in books and repeat like gramophone records. Such a man is happy, he does not repeat, for him life has no problem. It is only the mind that creates problems.