Questioner: Can you say something about laziness?
Krishnamurti: Laziness – first of all, what is wrong with laziness? Do not let us confuse laziness with leisure. Most of us, unfortunately, are lazy and inclined to be indolent, so we whip ourselves to be active therefore we become more lazy. The more I resist laziness the more I become lazy. But look at laziness, in the morning when I get up feeling terribly lazy, not wanting to do so many things. Why has the body become lazy? – probably one has overeaten, overindulged sexually, one has done everything the previous day and night to make the body heavy, dull; and the body says for God’s sake leave me alone for a little while; and one wants to whip it, make it active; but one does not correct the way of one’s life, so one takes a pill to be active. But if one observes, one will see that the body has its own intelligence; it requires a great deal of intelligence to observe the intelligence of the body. One forces it, one drives it; one is used to meat, one drinks, smokes, you know all the rest of it and therefore the body itself loses its own intrinsic organic intelligence. To allow the body to act intelligently, the mind has to become intelligent and not allow itself to interfere with the body. You try it and you will see that laziness undergoes a tremendous change.
There is also the question of leisure. People are having more and more leisure, especially in the well-to-do societies. What does one do with the leisure? – that is becoming the problem: more amusement, more cinemas, more television, more books, more chatter, more boating, more cricket: you know up and out, filling the leisure time with all kinds of activity. The Church says fill it with God, go to church, pray – all those tricks which they have done before, which is but another form of entertainment. Or one talks endlessly about this and that. You have leisure; will you use it to turn outwardly or inwardly? Life is not just the inward life; life is a movement, it is like the tide going out and coming in. What will you do with leisure? Become more learned, more able to quote books? Will you go out lecturing (which I do unfortunately), or go inwardly very deeply? To go inward very deeply, the outer must also be understood. The more you understand the outer – not merely the fact of the distance between here and the moon, technological knowledge, but the outward movements of society, of nations, the wars, the hate that there is – when you understand the outer then you can go very deeply inwardly and that inward depth has no limit. You do not say, ‘I have reached the end, this is enlightenment.’ Enlightenment cannot be given by another; enlightenment comes when there is the understanding of confusion; and to understand confusion one must look at it.