Spirituality is the invention of the mind, and the MIND IS A MYTH - U.G Krishnamurti

Q: If the holy men and saviors have been wrong about man's proper place in the scheme of things, surely they have been at least partially right in pointing towards a higher unity, God, if you will.

U.G.: What I am trying to put across is that there is no such thing as God. It is the mind that has created God out of fear. Fear is passed on from generation to generation. What is there is fear, not God. If you are lucky enough to be free from fear, then there is no God. There is no ultimate reality, no God -- nothing. Fear itself is the problem, not "God". Wanting to be free from fear is itself fear.

You see, you love fear. The ending of fear is death, and you don't want THAT to happen. I am not talking of wiping out the phobias of the body. They are necessary for survival. The death of fear is the only death.

Q: Until we somehow find the courage to die to our fears we continue to ...

U.G.: ... hope, pray, practice virtues. The man who practices virtue is a man of vice. Only such a man, a man of vice, would practice virtue. There is not a virtuous man in the world. All men will be virtuous TOMORROW, until then they remain men of vice. Your virtue only exists in the fictitious future. Where is this virtue you are talking of? It is no good hoping to be virtuous in a future life either; there is no guarantee that there is any future life, much less that you will be free in it.

Q: I think I am beginning to see what ...

U.G.: You are blind. You see nothing. When you actually do see and perceive for the first time that there is no self to realize, no psyche to purify, no soul to liberate, it will come as a tremendous shock to that instrument. You have invested everything in that--the soul, mind, psyche, whatever you wish to call it--and suddenly it is exploded as a myth. It is difficult for you to look at reality, at your actual situation. One look does the trick; you are finished.

Q: It is radical, and perhaps a little dangerous, to call the spirit, the soul, and God the shoddy inventions of frightened minds, is it not?

U.G.: I don't care. I am ready to go. I don't see anything other than the physical activity of the body. Spirituality is the invention of the mind, and the MIND IS A MYTH. Your traditions are choking you. But, unfortunately, you don't do anything. You actually love being choked. You love the burden of the cultural garbage-sack, the dead refuse of the past. It has to drop away naturally. It just drops. You don't depend upon knowledge anymore, except as a useful tool to function sanely in this world. Wanting has to go.

Wanting to be free from something that is not there is what you call "sorrow". Wanting to be free from sorrow is sorrow. There is no other sorrow. You don't want to be free from sorrow. You just think about sorrow, without acting. Your thinking endlessly about being free from sorrow is only more material for sorrow. It (thinking) does not put an end to sorrow. Sorrow is there for you as long as you think. There is actually no sorrow there to be free from. Thinking about and struggling against "sorrow" is sorrow. Since you can't stop thinking, and thinking is sorrow, you will always suffer. There is no way out, no escape ...
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(Excerpts taken  from book: Mind Is A Myth; Page: 31)

Wanting and Thinking ! They are not separate - U.G Krishnamurti

Q: Are you saying then that we are what we are already?

U.G.: You don't want to accept that fact, but you want to know what you are. That's the problem. You have no way of knowing it at all. Knowing what is there is impossible. That is always related to what you want to be. What you see here is the opposite of what you would like to be, what you want to be, what you ought to be, what you should be. What do you see here? You want to be happy, so you are unhappy. Wanting to be happy creates the unhappiness. What you see here is the opposite of your goal of becoming happy, of wanting to be happy. Wanting to have pleasure all the time creates the pain here. So, wanting and thinking, they always go together. They are not separate. Anything you want creates pain, because you begin to think. Wanting and thinking. If you don't want a thing in this world, there is no thinking. That does not mean thoughts are not there.

Whether you want to achieve material goals or spiritual goals, it really doesn't matter.  I am not saying anything against wanting. Want means the fulfillment of the want or nonfulfillment of the want is possible only through thinking.

So, the thinking has really created the problem for you. What I am suggesting is that all the problems we have cannot be solved on psychological and ethical levels. Man has tried for centuries to solve them, but he has failed. What keeps him going is the hope that one day, by doing more and more of the same, he will achieve. But the body, as I was saying, has a way of resolving these problems, because, you see, it cannot take them. The sensitivity of the sensory perceptions is destroyed by whatever you are doing to free yourself from whatever you want to be free from. It is destroying the sensitivity of the nervous system here.


The nervous system has to be very alert for the survival of this living organism. It has to be very sensitive. Your sensory perceptions have to be very sensitive. Instead of allowing them to be sensitive, you have invented what is called the "sensitivity" of your feelings, the sensitivity of your mind, the sensitivity towards every living thing around you, sensitivity to the feelings of everybody that is there. And this has created a
neurological problem.

So all the problems are neurological. Not psychological and not ethical. That's the problem of the society.

Society is interested in the status quo, it doesn't want to change. The only way it can maintain the status quo or the continuity is through this demand, the demand that everybody should fit into this structure. Whereas every individual is unique, physically speaking.

Nature is creating something unique all the time. It is not interested in a perfect man; it is not interested in a religious man.

We have placed before man the goal or the ideal of a perfect man, a truly religious man. So anything you do to reach that goal of perfection is destroying the sensitivity of this body. It is creating violence here. It [the body] is not interested in that.

Whatever the dead man experiences -- self-awareness, self- consciousness -- he has sown the seeds of the total destruction of man. All those religions have come out of that divisive consciousness in man. All the teachings of those teachers will inevitably destroy mankind. There is no point in reviving all those things and starting revivalistic movements. That is dead, finished.

Anything that is born out of this division in your consciousness is destructive, is violence. It is so because it is trying to protect not this living organism, not life, but the continuity of thought. And through that it can maintain the status quo of your culture, or whatever you want to call it, the society. The problems are neurological. If you give a chance to the body it will handle all those problems. But if you try to solve them on a psychological level or on an ethical level, you are not going to succeed.
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(Excerpts taken from book: The Courage To Stand Alone; pages: 35&36)