Public Talk 7, New Delhi, 11 November 1964

Krishnamurti: We would like, this evening, to talk about what is a religious life and what is a religious mind; not that they are two separate things but to find out what is a religious life, one has to wander, explore rather extensively. And it seems to me that, as our life is so fragmentary, so broken-up into departments, into various forms of escapes and activities, unless one finds a central, all-covering activity, we shall not be able to live a coordinated life with passion, with intensity and with clarity.

And to find out what is a really, truly religious life, one has to be totally discontent. And that’s one of our great difficulties, to be totally, completely discontented, because we are so easily satisfied with a particular theory or a particular answer that satisfies a problem that can easily be resolved, or we think by joining a particular, political or economic pattern we have somewhat satisfied this discontent that most of us have. And to sustain this discontent and not find an easy answer — because most of us want an easy answer, a pill, a tranquiliser to put us to sleep, to guarantee us a certain way of life — we have to be very attentive and watchful, not to accept any form or theory or pattern or concept that will momentarily, or even for many years to satisfy us. So the first demand, it seems to me, is to be discontented; and it’s one of the most painful things in life to be discontented and not to be easily satisfied.

You know, it’s very easy to pile up words, listen to many talks, read innumerable books and we think we have understood something. And probably, most of you who have attended these meetings will think you have got something, little bit here and patches there. I’m afraid you will not have completely understood what has been said or what is going to be said if you take a particular field which appeals to you in these talks and be satisfied with the particular answer. We are concerned with the total answer, not with a particular answer. We are concerned with the total comprehension of life, not a particular comprehension of a particular part of life. So we have to take the whole of it or none of it, because what has been said and what is going to be said is related and not fragmentary.

So to find out what is a religious mind — and that is very important because religion is the only factor that can cover the whole of existence, and not fragmentary existence; the whole of our life can be contained in the inquiry and the understanding of what is a religious life. Because religion — not the things that we know as religion, which are all spurious and sheer unadulterated nonsense, but the real inquiry into what is a religious life — because without understanding what is a religious life and living it, actually not theoretically, we shall not be able to solve the many increasing and conflicting problems.

Because to me the religious life is the key, is the door to all our problems and therefore we have to understand it. It’s imperative — at least, I feel it is imperative — that human beings, who have lived for so long, who have not solved their problems, who are still living in fragments, with despair, with anxiety, with no love, broken-up, unrelated; and to bring about a harmonious cohesion in all our activities, through all our thoughts, it is imperative that we understand what is a religious life. And to understand what is a religious life, one must be discontented.

You know, most of us are discontented because we have not a good job, we are not so intelligent as somebody else, we don’t look so beautiful as that woman next door, we haven’t got a big car or a better house, a better job, or we haven’t fulfilled ourselves. And the moment you have a better house, a better car, a better refrigerator, we are satisfied, at least temporarily, till a better refrigerator is invented. So we are discontented with little things and are so terribly satisfied with little things. And one has to be extremely aware of the superficial gratification with petty things, petty answers, quoting innumerable so-called religious teachers. And we think we have understood when we quote the Gita, the Koran or the Bible or some other book; we think we have captured some spirit of a religious life — which, again, is utter nonsense. So we must be extremely alert not to be caught in superficial actions and to remain and to contain a total discontent with everything: with politics, with religion, with social… communists, any political party — totally discontent — and then only… then we can begin to inquire.

I hope, this evening at least, that you and I are in that state of mind that is not easily gratified, that is capable of intense passion, because it’s only when a mind is discontent totally there is passion, there is intensity. And you need this intensity, the energy of passion to find out what is a religious life. Otherwise, we remain petty, narrow, limited, functioning with a mind that is second-hand and therefore inefficient, never knowing something original. So discontent, total discontent, gives this passion. Because real passion has no motive; it is not urged by something objectively or subjectively. It’s only when you are completely dissatisfied with everything — with your relationships, with your wife, with yourself, with society, with every form of escape that man has offered or you have invented for yourself — it’s only then that you have this extraordinary energy. And you need this energy.

Because to find out what is a religious life is not to find out the pattern of a religious life: what to do, what to wear, what to think and how to control, to be a bachelor and all that stupid stuff; but one has to have this energy without a motive, without a direction, and that comes only when there is this deep, unresolved, unsatisfiable discontent. When that is clear — I hope we are communicating or communing with each other non-verbally, because then, if we are in a state of communion with each other, then we can begin to inquire what is not a religious life. Because, you know, the highest form of thinking is negative thinking; and when you begin to discard, so that your mind is not cluttered up with so-called positive assertions of so many teachers, of your priests or politicians or your gurus or what you have read. It’s only when the mind discerns, sees clearly the truth in the false, which is the negative thinking. Then, out of that negative process of observation, looking, observing, attention, then you’ll find out what is true.

Therefore, to find out what is true in the false is the origin of discontent; not only in what the speaker is saying, but in everything, what every politician says, to see the falseness of it, and the truth in the false; what your guru, your books, your party leaders… To see what is false and to see the truth in the false, and to see the truth as truth can only come about when the mind is in that state of negation, and therefore the capacity to discern, to look, to observe, to see. And that’s what we are going to do this evening together, so that our mind is made free to observe, so that it’s not cluttered up with innumerable ideas, formulas, concepts. After all, a savage, a very primitive man is so frightened about every little thing: he is frightened of the winds, the stars, the sky, the beauty of a tree at a night, the thunder. And we too, the so-called sophisticated, educated people are frightened too; and so they’re cluttered with their mind with so many things.

So to think negatively is the beginning of intelligence. And you need this intelligence to inquire what is true and what is false in the things which man has learnt from childhood as religion, as dogma, as belief, whether it is the belief of the communist with his priests, with his gods — the Marx, the Lenins, the Trotsky… you know, the whole gang of them and the whole gang on the other side. To question, to inquire, to find out what is true for yourself; not to be told what is true by another — then you remain a second-hand entity, suffering, anxious, constantly in conflict.

So we are going together commune over the things that are called religion. I am not attacking religion, so you don’t have to defend it. I am not attacking or asking you to be convinced of something else, but together we are going to examine the mind that gives life a religious significance.

First of all, any belief in any pattern of life — in any pattern of life, whether it is a communist pattern, a socialist pattern or the religious pattern, a belief — impedes the mind from clear perception. You have innumerable beliefs, obviously, because you’re a Hindu, a Sikh, a Muslim, God knows what else; and they are beliefs, and you live or try to live along a certain pattern of that belief. If you are a communist, you have certain ideas, certain concepts, and that becomes the pattern of your existence, and therefore your mind is never free to inquire, to look, to observe, to be passionate. So we have beliefs because we are frightened. You believe in God or you believe in Marx or you believe in somebody else, because we are frightened of existence, of life. Please observe yourself; don’t listen to my words only. Please observe the innumerable beliefs that you have and discover for yourself the origin of those beliefs. And you will find at the root of it, fear, despair, the desire to escape from the daily monotony, daily loneliness, the insufferable insufficiency of existence; therefore we have these ideas, beliefs, dogmas, rituals, *pujas*, banners, nationalities.

So a mind that is religious has no belief. It is only concerned with facts and not beliefs or opinions about the fact. You know, then life becomes very simple; you deal with facts, with *what is*, in yourself and outside you. Then, if you have no opinions, prejudices, conclusions about the fact, then you can deal with the fact sanely, rationally and with capacity. But if you approach the fact with a lot of opinions, conclusions, what people have said and so on, you approach that fact with confusion and therefore you never understand that fact. So a mind that is inquiring into the religious life finds that it has no belief, only facts. The moment you discover that for yourself, you have the energy of freedom; then you can deal unemotionally, without any sentiment, the fact. But the moment you have sentiment, emotion about the fact, then you are completely lost.

So that’s the first thing to realise, that a mind that is religious has no belief of any kind, at any time; then it is facing facts from moment to moment, and those facts change and therefore your mind has to be tremendously alert to move with the fact. So there is no position which you take about the fact and therefore you’re always in a state of inquiry and therefore in a state of tremendous discontent. And you will see, in inquiring about the fact, that all religions are based on belief: ‘I believe in God. I believe in salvation. I believe in Jesus. I believe in this and that,’ and round that belief, you can organise.

I do not know if you ever thought about what is true cooperation. You know, one can’t live in this world if there is no cooperation; you can live in conflict, not as a total human being who willingly cooperates. And therefore, because he’s capable of real cooperation, he’s also capable of not cooperating. Because for most of us, cooperation is based on either the compulsion of authority — please observe your own life; you will see what we are talking about, as fact, not as an opinion given to you by the speaker; as fact — either compelled by reward or punishment, or what you’re going to gain out of it, or circumstances force you to do this, and so cooperate; cooperate round an idea: as the communist idea or the religious idea or the idea of nationalism, and we call that cooperation. But whereas true cooperation has no authority; it’s not based on reward or punishment; it’s based on the realisation of the fact and not on theory.

So all religions are man-made, organised by the priests because they want to give some kind of hope to man — because man’s life is utter misery, his life is transient, he lives in agony — and so man invents the priest and the god. And the more it is organised, as it is in the West, whether it is the organisation of the church as it is called Christian, or the organisation of the church as it is called communism, are exactly the same. Because one hopes for a utopia, the perfect state and the other, well-organised, well-established, with tremendous authority of tradition, property and status and so on, so on, also offers escape from life, through rituals, through dogma, through belief.

So when you see this, see the fact; not that there is a God or that there is no God, but the fact that you want to escape from life. And therefore, when you realise that, see the fact, then you do not belong to any religion; you’re no longer a Hindu, a Buddhist, a Christian, a Muslim or whatever it is, nor a communist; you’re no longer caught in the net of beliefs. So you begin to see what is true in the false, the false being what man has created through centuries-upon-centuries, as the religious pattern or the social pattern or the pattern of the family. And when you see that fact, then you are free from all the religious concepts of life; which doesn’t mean that you become a materialist, which you are. What you are really concerned in life is money, position, sex and the enjoyment of a few things; and over that you cover up… you put a lot of words, as the spiritual life and all the rest of it.

So seeing the fact is the beginning of a religious life. Not the fact as you want it, not the fact as you hope that it will be. Seeing the fact; that is, seeing the fact of death, for example, and not having a theory about it. Then you can understand what that extraordinary thing must be. Then you can give your whole energy to it. In the same way, to find out; find out, not repeat endlessly the stupid books that one does repeat — the Gita, the Upanishads and the Bible, you know, all the rest of it — but to find out for yourself if there is or if there is not something beyond the measure of man, beyond the things that thought has created. And to find out, one must be free of all the religious entanglements, of all the authority of religion, of all the books which the teachers have put upon you, so that your own mind — your own mind, not somebody else’s mind — is capable to find out if there is something sublime.

And to find out, your mind must be free; otherwise you can’t. If your mind is afraid, if your mind is greedy, ambitious, trivial, frightened, broken-up into its own nationalities, into its own compartments, how can such a mind be free to inquire? So the religious conditioning must be totally broken down, so that out of that breaking down of that conditioning you see the truth in the false and thereby liberate the mind from its own encrustations, from its own fears. So a religious mind has no belief at all, which does not mean that it is atheistic — which is again the other form: you believe and somebody else doesn’t believe; they are both the same; whereas an inquiring mind is not caught in these two.

Then you will find a religious mind does not conform. Because most of us are so eager to conform. You observe yourself, how inwardly we conform to the pattern of social life, the pattern of present-day existence, of greed, envy, the psychological structure of a society. To that we conform very easily, and so we are caught in conformity. I’m not talking of putting on a sari or a coat or superficial things, but the deep inner demand to conform. Because in conformity we find satisfaction; and in conformity there is a certain sense of security. In conformity there is no fear of losing a job, or losing your wife or husband. In conformity you follow the pattern, day-after-day, so that your mind becomes mechanical and you don’t have to think at all, question, ask, demand. So most of us are so eager to conform.

And this conformity expresses itself in a so-called religious life. The conformity laid down by the religious pattern that to attain God you must be a *sannyasi* or a monk, you must lead a certain kind of life, you must be a bachelor, you must live by yourself; you know, the whole pattern established through centuries of what is called a religious life. The so-called religious life of the *sannyasi*, the monk and all the rest of it, is an escape from life; the denial of life. He has created that pattern of what he considers, or somebody has told him what they consider the pattern which will ultimately — through pain, suffering, sacrifice, discipline, control and all the rest of it — will lead him to God. You must have a fresh mind and not a tortured mind. You must have a clear mind, not a mind that is shoddy, so disciplined, so controlled, so broken-up that it becomes a useless thing.

So the religious man, or the religious life, the religious mind doesn’t escape from life; life being hunger, sex, greed, ambition, joy and all the travails of life. You can’t escape from them through any form of mysticism. The mystic escapes through some fancy, through some experience, or mesmerises himself in a certain state. And the religious man is not a mystical man; he doesn’t go into trances or project something in the future which hypnotises him in the present. And when you have done all this, you will find that you are completely alone.

One has to be alone; not isolated, not put into a corner by life. Because to be alone means that you are free from fear, from greed, from the corrupting influences of envy. You’re alone; you’re no longer tortured by your loneliness. And it’s only the mind that is alone — which is a tremendous thing; it is not an easy thing, because a mind is so easily influenced by what it reads, by what it thinks, by the environment. And one has to be aware of the influences of the environment and walk through them diligently, without being caught in any one of those influences. Then you are alone.

I do not know if you ever realised or asked yourself what is beauty. Probably you haven’t had the time or the occasion. Because here, in this country, simple life is considered a loincloth, having one meal a day, and not looking at the mountains, the rivers, the flowers, the birds and the heavens that are full of light. You deny beauty. Look at your own life, sir; do consider it; don’t push aside what is being said; do consider your own life and watch it. Have you ever looked at a tree? Looked at it, enjoyed it, see the shape of it, the dark colour, the leaf in the sun, sparkling, dancing? Have you ever watched the river go by and communed with the river? Have you ever watched the face of another, to look at a woman or a man, see the beauty in the face? Because for most of us, beauty is associated with sex, with pleasure, and so the religious mind says, ‘Don’t look at beauty, cut it away from your life. A woman is a disgrace’ — you know, all the nonsense they talk about — and so we deny beauty.

And we think beauty or… we think that a simple life — that is, the loincloth, one meal a day; that’s called the simple life. Inside you may be boiling; inside you, you’re burning with a desire, with lust, with the desire to dominate, to have power, to be regarded, to be popular, to be saluted as a great man; but outwardly, you have the symbol of simplicity; which again, look what it… see the falseness… see the truth in the false. Simplicity is within, not without. That may follow or may not follow. So a religious mind knows what true simplicity is. Not the disciplined austerity, because to be really, inwardly simple, you must be austere. Because simplicity implies a mind that can be alone, that doesn’t depend for its happiness, comfort, for its security on something outside. And it is only the simple being inwardly that is capable of being alone; and it’s only the simple, religious mind that’s capable of seeing beauty. And without beauty, you have no religious life.

You know, beauty, which means sensitivity: sensitivity to dirt, to squalor, to disorder, and also sensitivity to beauty of a tree, of a person, of a gesture, of a word, of a feeling. And if you have no beauty — which is to be sensitive — how can you be sensitive to reality? Because reality is beauty; not the images carved out by the mind or by the hand. So a religious mind is sensitive and therefore capable of seeing that which is true in the squalor and seeing that which is beautiful. And it can only see beauty when there is passion. You know, you can look at a tree, you can look at a beautiful face of a man or a woman or a child, but you cannot see the beauty of it if there is no passion behind it. I don’t mean [by] passion lust or sexual desire, but just to see the rich man go by in a car, to see the bird on the wing, to see a leaf fall down by the road. To see, you must have passion; otherwise you are merely looking.

So a religious man, a religious life, a religious mind sees the fact and therefore is in a state of sensitivity. Then it’s only the religious mind that knows what emptiness of the mind is. You know, it’s only the empty mind, mind that is not empty in the sense of void, but a mind that is astonishingly aware, attentive, a mind that is highly sensitive, therefore a mind that has no centre and thereby creates space. It is only the mind that has no centre that has the space of immensity; and it is only the religious mind that is creative mind.

Because we don’t know what it is to be creative; we can invent. We can invent a new machine, a new way of talking, a new concept of life, but you cannot… there cannot be creation without understanding love; because love, death and creation go hand-in-hand. Because love is not memory, is not an idea, is not a concept. Love is neither profane nor divine. But love is not sympathy, sentiment, emotion. Sympathy, emotion are involved in jealousy, hatred. But when hatred, jealousy, envy, greed, ambition, the desire for power ceases, because one sees the truth in the false, then out of that perception love comes into being. And love cannot exist if there is no death of yesterday and of the minute passed; then it’s merely a continuity of what has been.

So a religious mind is a creative mind. Not writing a poem, a prose or putting paint on a canvas — that is not a creative mind at all. A creative mind is the mind in which a total mutation has taken place. And then only in this extraordinary state — which is not mystical, which is not an escape from life — then only one can find… then only is it possible for the eternal to be. And such a mind alone can solve the problems of man.