A Small Jiddu Krishnamurti Quote That Carries the Wisdom of All Scriptures

Comprehending “The thinker is the thought”

The understanding of something of such a profound depth requires us to first be aware of small events and our reaction to them in daily living. The simple acts are so deeply knitted in everyday life that we fail to recognize the patterns. We are programmed to mark occurrences outside of us, for matters of “inside” our understanding is deeply biased and heavily conditioned.

Our daily living is full of contradictions — between thoughts and action, conscious demands, urges, and the unconscious hidden demands, secret desires and pursuits. The craving for pleasure drives our actions and it is riddled with contradictions.

Let’s first understand the relationship between pleasure and joy and also its relationship to thought.

He who binds to himself a joy Does the winged life destroy He who kisses the joy as it flies Lives in eternity’s sunrise-William Blake

To see a beautiful morning is a sheer joy but to try to hold on to that feeling is in the realm of pleasure. Joy is divine but pleasure is the beginning of suffering as Krishnamurti puts it.

The joy becomes a prison when we wish it to continue forever. Obviously, it doesn’t, and there we begin with misery. So, is suffering a product of our projection of “how things should be”? Or is there something original about it?

Pain is real. Suffering is psychological. If you don’t have food at home or you are out on road on a cold night — that’s pain — and if you think you need more respect at the office or you don’t like your job and you call it suffering then it’s an upgrade from the position of pain. The beauty is that the person in pain can be elevated with financial or social security. Pain is entirely not an individual phenomenon, our government and society are partly responsible.

Suffering, however, is purely individualistic. If I am burning with anger or greed no policy or law can rescue me. You can’t transform pain but the energy which is trapped in suffering is psychological and can be transformed.

The Root of Contradiction

Some 100 million years ago there was no man and hence no mankind or anything, whatsoever, linked to man. 5 billion years back there was no planet earth, so everything that is of our planet came afterwards. In the same syllogistic line of logic — without the thought, there is no thinker.

Thought breeds the thinker, not the opposite.

A beautiful sunrise is not a thought, but trying to hold it for continuation is the demand for pleasure which is the movement of thought. Till the time there was no thinker, there was a joy to behold a wonderful morning, then the thinker came and the whole movement of contradiction began — between the present and the desire to hold it for the future.

Let’s say the thought of greed came to my mind, now either I support this thought and build on it, or I say — it’s not good, I must get away from it — either way I am consumed by greed. I am working within the same sphere of greed.

If I’m a meditator and I try and observe greed as our gurus teach us. Then also I’m observing my greed, there is a thinker here who is thinking about greed. The centre is me who is thinking about greed — either trying to run away from it or trying to understand or transcend it, through effort and time. In this case, the entity which felt greed — the thinker — has become the super-entity in the whole process of observation.

Separation is the root of contradiction. “I’m different from my greed” — the I is the separator. Who Am I? This is the question that many seekers ask, whatever answer that seeker will come up with for this question will be based on his limited knowledge of the past. The holder of that knowledge is the ‘thinker’, who is trying to come to an answer. That answer is a borrowed thought, it will only perpetuate the identity of the ‘thinker’.

You can never know something original with knowledge and memory, as K always maintains. He says, our sacred books are a product of thought, they are mere words. A realization can only be experienced, can’t be put in words or be gathered from words.

The word water is not the water.

The root of contradiction is the division between the thinker and the thought. For most of us there is this wide gap between the thinker and the thought, or the centre which experiences and the thing which is experienced. There are two, there is an interval, a gap, a time lag.

For example, human will or willpower is highly glorified. In reality, willpower is a form of resistance to reality and hence is inherently a contradiction. This is the reason why willpower alone doesn’t last long. We do affect some permanent changes in our life through willpower because somewhere down the line we start to enjoy the change. If we don’t fall in line with the change then willpower depletes soon enough.

Any emotion or thought which breeds contradiction is far from source energy and hence fades away.

The Thinker Is the Thought

Thinker: One with the conditioning of the past.

Thought: Processing of gathered information. Has two dimensions in time — past and future. Past involves a psychological attempt to change what has happened, the future may be the projection of desire.

I: The tethering of impressions, memories, biases, conditioning, education, self-interest (even when not necessary), religion, culture.

Time: Movement of thought in past and future.

Effort: To deny “what is” in order to achieve or become something. Effort breeds conflict.

In continuation of the course of greed, whatever I will or can think about greed is already conditioned by the thought pattern which is centred around greed because at that moment I’m greed. The thinker has come upon a theory on greed or a theory to defeat greed. None of them is but the construct of thoughts, so how can he observe without bias, disinterest or equanimity!

Then the question come up — Is there no value to counter-views, thoughts, conflicts and judgements and if not then how can we survive in this world without these everyday realities of life?

In physical reality, it does have value to improve worldly knowledge and daily affairs but in the psychological world, these are drains on our energy source. If my mother is seriously ill, will I think of taking her to the hospital or will I immediately rush? Or if my house is on fire, I see immediate danger and run for my life. I don’t argue with fire or cry for the burning house.

And that very observation of that, of ‘what is’, brings energy, which is an action. Energy and action are not separate.

The man who achieved great results like Steve Jobs, Abraham Lincoln or Elon Musk quickly accept the outcome and plan their next move. They don’t spend time fretting or fantasizing.

And when there is no contradiction, that is, when the observer is no longer acting as a censor — you know what I mean by the word ‘censor’ — who condemns, who denies, who says this is right and wrong, this is good and bad. Which doesn’t mean that you live a most superficial life. On the contrary, to come to that point you have to understand the whole conditioning. Then we will see that when there is no censor — which is not an assertion, one has to understand this, one has to work at it — then you will see that the mind becomes merely an observer. But that mind now is no longer in a state of contradiction and therefore has tremendous energy.

Krishnamurti says the observation is the revelation. The exposure of this very truth is transcendental. As per him — It gives birth to a new kind of silence which is the essence of intelligence.