JDK

 YOUR DAILY LIVING, when you look at it very deeply, has no meaning. You are striving, wanting money, position, prestige, and when you do have it, what is it? You have not found out for yourself if life has real meaning. You ask what the purpose or goal of life is, rather than the meaning. The purpose can be invented by clever people, or you can invent purpose out of your misery, confusion and conflict. But the purpose is not the meaning. The meaning is to find out for yourself by looking at yourself, the depth of your heart, the depth of your feelings, the depth of your thought.

So, when you look at your life, the petty quarrels, the shallow mind, argumentative, brutish, narrow, when you look at all that, do you not feel shattered and shocked? Don’t you feel the life you are living daily, going to work from morning till night for forty or fifty years, coming home, quarrelling, tired out, sleeping with your wife or husband, has really no meaning? So, can you look at it without getting depressed, without wanting to change it? If you want to change it, you will change it to another pattern which will be equally confusing. When your mind is confused and out of that confusion you choose, what you choose must be the result of your confusion. This is your life, your daily travail, your anxieties, your hurts, your pain. Just look at it.

Krishnamurti in Bangalore 1974, Talk 3

Audio: Can Thought Reveal the Meaning of Life?

The Cessation of All Search

MOST OF US have many problems. The solution to these problems lies not in searching for the solution but in listening to the actual content of the problem. We are all seeking happiness at different levels; we want permanency, security, someone to take us to the other side, to a permanent state of bliss. We are searching for something, and that is our life, moving from one object of search to another, never satisfied. Consciously or unconsciously, we are pursuing and searching. The background of this search, if we go into the process, is the urge to find satisfaction, permanency or happiness. We have made searching as inevitable as breathing, and we say life has no meaning if we do not seek. So we are everlastingly pursuing, looking for something at different levels.

We have made searching as inevitable as breathing.

As long as we are seeking, we must create authority; we must follow or have a following. It seems to me that this is one of the most crucial points: whether there is anyone – a saviour, a master, an enlightened one, it doesn’t matter who it is – who can lead us to reality. That is what each one of us is seeking, and we have accepted the search as inevitable. Without seeking, we say life has no meaning, but we never go behind that word to find out the whole significance of this urge to seek. You have been told that if you seek, you will find. But your search, if you go into the process of it, is the outcome of a desire to find security, hope or fulfilment, a bliss, a continuity in which there is no frustration. As long as you are seeking, you must create authority, the authority that will take you over, that will lead you and give you comfort.

Is it not important to ask ourselves if there is anyone, any authority who can give us that truth which we think will be satisfactory? We have never asked ourselves what the state of mind is if all search ceases. Search implies a process of time, so we use time as a means of understanding something which is beyond time. Search implies continuity, and continuity means time, a series of experiences which we hope will lead us to truth. If those experiences do not take us to that which we are seeking, we turn to somebody else; we disregard the old and take on a new leader, teacher or saviour.