Think on these things...

Questioner : What does it mean to be serious? I have the feeling that I am not serious.

Krishnamurti: Let us find out together. What does it mean to be serious – so that you are completely dedicated to something, to some vocation, that you want to go right to the end of it. I am not defining it, do not accept any definition. One wants to find out how to live quite a different kind of life, a life in which there is no violence, in which there is complete inward freedom; one wants to find out and intends giving time, energy, thought, everything, to that. I would call such a person a serious person. He is not easily put off – he may amuse himself, but his course is set. This does not mean that he is dogmatic or obstinate, that he does not adjust. He will listen to others, consider, examine, observe. He may in his seriousness become self-centred; that very self-centredness will prevent him from examining; but, he has got to listen to others, he has got to examine, to question constantly; which means that he has to be highly sensitive. He has to find out how and to whom he listens. So he is all the time listening, pursuing, inquiring; he is discovering and with a sensitive brain, a sensitive mind, a sensitive heart – they are not separate things – he is inquiring with the totality and the sensitivity of all that. Find out if the body is sensitive; be aware of its gestures, its peculiar habits. You cannot be sensitive physically if you over-eat, nor can you become sensitive through starvation or fasting. One has to have regard for what one eats. One has to have a brain that is sensitive; that means a brain that is not functioning in habits, pursuing its own particular little pleasure, sexual or otherwise.

- Impossible Question

Questioner: I have no energy to be aware of my problems and deal with them.

Krishnamurti: The gentleman says, ‘I have no energy to be aware of my problems and deal with them.’ You need energy, right? How do you have energy? That is the question, isn’t it? This is a really very, very complex problem. First of all, one has to understand what energy is. We have broken it up into many fragments—the energy that is needed to do business, the energy that is needed to write a poem, the energy that is needed to be a good, first-class, non-government scientist. You need energy to understand, and that understanding too has been broken up as intellectual understanding, verbal understanding. You have broken up your energy as sexual energy and moral energy. So energy is broken up. This is your problem, everybody’s problem, the problem of the artist who wants to fulfil and who thinks in terms of fulfilment, not in terms of the beauty of art, but of how he shall fulfil himself through art. So man has broken up this energy—human energy and cosmic energy. That is a fact, if you observe it in your life. You are one thing in the office, another at home. You say one thing, which you don’t mean, and do something else. If you are rich you want to be flattered. If you are poor you are frightened. So there is this constant breaking up of energy.

When you break up energy, there is conflict. Observe this in yourself. There is conflict when you break up your life as religious life, as business life, as a scientist, as a politician, as a cook, or whatever it is. When you break it up, there must be conflict. Don’t you see this? And where there is conflict, there is the ending of energy, there is the wastage of energy. When you resist, that is wastage of energy. When you run away from what is, that is wastage of energy. When you follow your guru who tells you what to do—all the hysterics, the circus that goes on in the name of religion—then between what should be and what you are, there is conflict. And wherever there is conflict, there is division and therefore struggle, pain, fear. Therefore where there is conflict, there is wastage of energy, and this conflict will inevitably arise when there is the breaking-up of energy. When you don’t live a totally harmonious life, there is wastage of energy. When you say that to find God, truth, you must lead a celibate life, there is a battle in you, with the desire, the sexual urge, the lust, being suppressed, held back, disciplined, controlled. In that, between what you think is the way to reality and what actually is, there is a contradiction, and in that contradiction there is conflict, and that conflict is a total waste of energy. So you have to find a way of living which is chaste, non-corrupt, in which there is no conflict whatsoever. Then you are full of energy.

Look, most of us have had sorrow, not only physical pain, but devastating sorrows in our life, deep, abiding sorrows, tears, aching hearts, despair. We have all had it, we all know it, and we run away from it. Do listen to this, please listen; it’s your life. You run away from it. You say, ‘It is my past karma’, or you try to find the cause of it. Or you try to escape from it by going to temples, churches, prayers, meetings—you know all the things you do to run away from this terrible thing called sorrow. So what happens? Sorrow is there, and you escape from it through radio, sex, God, whatever it is. And in that escape, in that flight away from what is, there is contradiction, and therefore there is conflict. In that there is waste of energy. Whereas if the mind remains alone with sorrow, not trying to run away, not trying to resist it, but remains with it completely, then you will see that out of that perception comes tremendous energy that transforms the sorrow into passion. Not into lust, but into passion, into intensity, into a tremendous energy which no book, no guru, no teacher can give. Therefore you have to learn, observe from yourself, and then you have the energy that is unending.

- The First Step is the Last Step

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