Kinfonet Quote of the Day: Both the believer and the non-believer in God and immortality are wrong, because the mind cannot comprehend reality until it is completely free of all illusions.

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Krishnamurti Quote of the Day

São Paulo, Brazil | 2nd Public Talk 24th April, 1935

Question: You deny religion, God and immortality. How can humanity become more perfect, and so happier, without believing in these fundamental things?

Krishnamurti: It is because with you it is only a belief in God, in immortality, it is because you merely believe in these things, that there is so much misery, suffering and exploitation. You can discover whether there is truth, immortality, only in the completeness of action itself not through any belief whatsoever, not through the authoritative assertion of another. Only in the fullness of action itself is reality concealed.

Now to most people, religion, God and immortality are simply a means of escape. Religion has merely helped man to escape from the conflict, the suffering of life, and therefore from understanding it. When you are in conflict with life, with its problems of sex, exploitation, jealousy. cruelty, and so on, as you do not fundamentally desire to understand them - for to understand them demands action, intelligent action - and as you are unwilling to make the effort, you unconsciously try to escape to those ideals, values, beliefs which have been handed down. So immortality, God and religion have merely become shelters for a mind that is in conflict.

To me, both the believer and the non-believer in God and immortality are wrong, because the mind cannot comprehend reality until it is completely free of all illusions. Then only can you affirm, not believe or deny, the reality of God and immortality. When the mind is utterly free from the many hindrances and limitations created through self-protectiveness, when it is open, wholly naked, vulnerable in the understanding of the cause of self-created illusion, only then all beliefs disappear, yielding place to reality.

Tags: aetheism, belief

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