Theos-Talk Archives (January 1997 Message tl00896)

With the New Age fad, Gurus are in great demand. The average newbee looks to
a Guru more like a spiritual consultant. Here is a discussion that took
place long time ago and in it K discusses the issue of Guru. Hope some of
you will find it interesting.

MKR


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GURUS

Question: Why should we not follow gurus, who teach the method of
independent thinking?

Krishnamurti: I know I have discussed with so many people throughout the
world this idea of following a guru, a teacher, a master. I am not dogmatic.
I know the consequences of all that I am saying. I have been through that -
following systems, gurus, and all that myself, and only when I freed my mind
from all sense of gurus, conformities, and systems, only then was there a
living reality, not until then. It is only when through understanding you
completely free yourself from all conformity, will you know that living
reality, which cannot be explained, which is incommunicable, which cannot be
found through any path or system. This is not rhetoric. I shall explain to
you why. To follow a guru is destructive. Please let me add here, I know
almost all of you, a vast majority of you, are seeking a guru. Most of you
have gurus. So you are here to find out what I think and know. If you think
you are going to realize that Godhead of understanding, please go ahead. I
have nothing to say, but the moment you come to me and ask me, "Is a guru
necessary for understanding?" then I say, "No." On the contrary it is
destructive. It is not just an idea of mine. This is not an intellectual
thing-it is a living reality. Until you feel these things, words have no
meaning. You can attend hundreds of meetings and even then you will still
remain slavish to a guru.

Do you know what creates conflict, both in the world of spirituality and in
the world of action? Take an example and then you will see. If I know the
right value of money, then money loses its attractiveness, its glory, its
potential power. As most of us want power, comfort, possession, authority,
we run after money.

Now, so long as there are false values, there must be conflict, and no guru,
no system, no method except your own clarity, your perception, is ever going
to free your mind from false values. You want a house, you want power. It is
no good going to a guru, for example, and saying, "Please teach me how to
find out right values." You go to a guru and ask him to teach you spiritual
things and yet continue with your daily mundane activities, your daily
acquisitions. That is, spiritually you live in a cloud with your ideas and
so on, and in this world of action, you exploit others for your own
security. Naturally, there is a split, there is a division in your life. No
guru can bring about right harmony of living except your own perspective of
right values. Now, to find out right values, you cannot say, "Please teach
me." You cannot ask the way to find right values. Right values depend on
countries, climate, position, and so on, depending upon the individual. You
cannot lay down one eternal law. So to discover right values is not to
comply with a system but to find out what prevents your clarity of
perception. Please understand this. Now we want to be told what right values
are, whether we need money or not, how many clothes, how many meals we
should eat, at what time to get up and so on, and to learn them by heart.
This is an absurd way of looking at life. Whereas to find out the subtlety
of it, try to find out what prevents you from discovering right values. Then
you will see that what prevents you is this continual wanting, craving, the
desire to possess. Then you will know how to free yourself from craving,
when you are really up against it. Now you are merely sitting back and
looking at that part of your being that is wanting possessions and then
saying separately, I must not have it." Find out for yourself through
continued awareness, alertness of mind and heart, what are the causes that
prevent you from perceiving things in their right proportion, in their right
beauty. The guru who teaches you the method of independent thinking does not
exist. Do not say, "My particular guru teaches me that." That is an absurd
way of getting out of it. There is no method, no system; there is no guru
who can liberate you. I know this is contrary to your sacred literature, to
all your ways of thinking. I know it, and knowing it, I still assert that it
is impossible other than your finding out for yourself, in your aloneness,
the true right values of all things; and in that aloneness alone comes the
ecstasy of eternal pleasure, not through following or by allowing yourself
to be guided by another, or by a system. Please understand this. Where there
is shaping, where there is conformity to a pattern or to an ideal, there
cannot be understanding.

Please let me explain it again. Most of you are trained as Hindus or Muslims
or in some religious sect. Your mind has been trained from childhood on
certain definite lines, and your mind is prejudiced. And with that
prejudice, with that religious inclination, you have all your principles and
prejudices, all your ideas of religion, of God, of ceremonies; and so you
meet me always at an angle, you see me with your religion. So we meet under
experiences partly completed. So we never understand, so we never follow the
significance of every experience, we never take to ourselves the full
perfume of the flower.

Your minds are so suffocated with ideas which are mostly false that no
method can free you from past tradition, because the method becomes another
cage in which you will be caught. So to free the mind, never allow your past
traditions, your upbringing, your social laws, your religious edicts, to
penetrate your thinking. The moment you do not allow them to penetrate your
thinking, you will be free.

You know, it is tragic to see how we waste our energy. Our struggle now is
to conform to an ideal. We establish an ideal and then try to adjust
ourselves to those ideals, systems, and ideas - establish a pattern and then
struggle to conform. I say, do not do that, but free the mind of all sense
of conformity, which does not mean that you should do exactly what you like.

Karachi, Pakistan. Third Public Lecture, Feb. 13, 1933