'You have no answer of your own' - Ug Krishnamurti

We are always talking about thought and thinking. What is thought? Have you ever looked at thought, let along controlling thought; let alone manipulating thought; let alone using that thought for achieving something material or otherwise? You cannot look at your thought, because you cannot separate yourself from thought and look at it. There is no thought apart from the knowledge you have about those thoughts -- the definitions you have. So if somebody asks you the question, "what is thought?" any answer you have is the answer that is put in there -- the answers that others have already given.

You have, through combinations and permutations of ideation and mentation about thoughts, created your own thoughts which you call your own. Just as when you mix different colors, you can create thousands of pastel colors, but basically all of them can be reduced to only seven colors that you find in nature. What you think is yours is the combination and permutation of all those thoughts, just the way you have created hundreds and hundreds of pastel colors. You have created your own ideas. That is what you call thinking. When you want to look at thought, what there is is only whatever you know about thought. Otherwise you can't look at thought. There is no thought other than what there is in what you know about thought. That's all that I am saying. So when that is understood the meaninglessness of the whole business of wanting to look at thought comes to an end. What there is is only what you know, the definitions given by others. And out of those definitions, if you are very intelligent and clever enough, you create your own definitions. That's all.

When you look at an object the knowledge you have about that object comes into your head. There is an illusion that thought is something different from objects, but it is you who creates the object. The object may be there, but the knowledge you have about that object is all that you know. Apart from that knowledge and independent of that knowledge, free from that knowledge, you have no way of knowing anything about it. You have no way of directly experiencing anything. The word "directly" does not mean that there is any other way of experiencing things other than the way you are experiencing things now. The knowledge you have about it is all that is there and that is what you are experiencing. Really, you do not know what it is.

In exactly the same way, when you want to know something about thought, or experience thought, it is the same process that is in operation there. There is no inside or outside. What there is is only the operation, the flow of the knowledge. So you cannot actually separate yourself from thought and look at it.

So when such a question is thrown at you, what should happen is [the realization] that none of the answers have any meaning, because all that is acquired and taught. So that movement stops. There is no need for you to answer the question. There is no need for you to know anything about it. All that you know comes to a halt. It has no momentum any more. It slows down, and then it dawns upon you that it is meaninglessness to try to answer that question, because it has no answer at all. The answers that others have given are there. So you have nothing to say on that thing called thought, because all you can say is what you have gathered from other sources. You have no answer of your own.

(Excerpts from the book: The Courage to Stand Alone (Conversation with the man called UG))