Jiddu Krishnamurti - Can you tell us what God is?

Questioner: You have realized reality. Can you tell us what God is?

Krishnamurti: How do you know, if I may ask, that I have realized? If you are aware that I have realized, then you also must have realized. To know is to be a partaker in knowledge. You also must experience to have an understanding of the experience. Besides, what does it matter if I have or have not realized? Is not what I am saying the truth? Even if I have not realized, as you call it, am I not speaking the truth? A man who worships another, even though he has realized, is worshipping for his gain, and so he will not find reality; he who worships those who have realized is giving himself over to authority, which is ever blinding, and so he will never find reality. It is not at all important, for the purposes of understanding, who has and who has not realized, though tradition says to the contrary. All that you can do is to keep company with good men, which is difficult, for the good are rare. The good are those who are not after some personal gain, who are not seeking advantage, who neither possess nor are possessed. You idealize him who has realized in the hope of gain, which creates a false relationship, and communion is only possible where there is love. In all these talks and discussions, we do not love each other; you are on the defensive and so afraid, you want something from me - knowledge, an experience, and so on - which indicates that there is no love. The desire to gain breeds authority, which is not only blinding but becomes the means of exploitation. Where there is love there is understanding; where there is love it is of little significance who has or who has not realized.

Since your heart has withered, God, the idea, has become all-important. You want to know God as you have lost the song in your heart, and you pursue the singer. Can the singer give you the song of your heart? He may teach you how to sing but he cannot give you the song. You may know the steps of a dance, but if there is no dance in your heart, you move mechanically. You do not know love if you are pursuing a gain, if you are searching out a result, an achievement. A man who loves has no ideal, but the man who has an ideal or the desire to achieve an ideal has no love. Beauty is not an ideal, an achievement; it is the reality of the now, not of tomorrow. Love understands the unknown; then the supreme is. But concerning it there is no word, for no word can measure it.

Love is its own eternity. Without love, there is no happiness; if there were love, you would not seek happiness in things, in family, in ideals, and then these things would have their right value. Because we do not love, you seek happiness in God. It is an investment in God, in the hope of happy returns. You want me to tell you what reality is. Can the immeasurable be measured by words? Can you catch the wind in your fist? If you formulate that which is the real, is that the real? When the unknown is translated into the known, it ceases to be the eternal. Yet you hunger after it. You crave to know for the continuance of yourself. You do not allow yourself to be aware of what is - the turmoil, the strife, the pain, the degradation - but long to escape from what is. Why do you not give your whole attention to what is, be aware of it, without condemnation or identification? In understanding the knowable, there comes tranquillity, not induced or enforced, but that silence which is creative emptiness in which alone reality can come into being. The becoming is incapable of receiving the real. In understanding what is, there is being. Then reality is not in the distance, the unknown is not far off, it is in what is. As the answer is in the problem, the reality is in what is. In the awareness of what is, there is truth, and it is truth that liberates, and not your striving to be free. Reality is not far, but we give it distance as a means of self-continuity. The timeless is the now, and it cannot be understood by him who is caught in the net of time. Meditation is for thought to free itself from time. Complete action, and not continuous action, is meditation. When the mind understands the process of continuity, memory - memory which is not only the factual but the psychological - there comes into being creative freedom. In continuity there is death, and in ending there is renewal.

Read more of  Krishnamurti's Talks Madras India 1947  Here