Ojai, California | 8th Public Talk 14th July, 1940
Questioner: You talk of meditative awareness but you never talk of prayer. Are you opposed to prayer?
Krishnamurti: In opposition there is no understanding. Most of us indulge in petitionary prayer and this form of prayer cultivates, strengthens duality, the observer and the observed, which are a joint phenomenon. Only when this duality ceases is there the whole. However much you may petition your answer will be according to your demand, but it will not be of the real. The answer to a desire is in the desire itself. When the mind-heart is utterly still, utterly silent, then only is there the whole, the eternal.
Some time ago I saw a person who said he had been praying to God and one of his petitions was for a refrigerator. Please do not laugh. And he had acquired not only a refrigerator but also a house, so his prayers were answered and God was a reality, he asserted.
When you ask you will receive but you will have to pay for it; according to your demands you are answered but there is a price for it. Greed replies to greed. When you ask out of greed, out of fear, out of want, you will have an answer but you must pay for it and you pay for it through wars, strife and misery. The centuries of greed, cruelty, ill will, ignorance manifest themselves when you call upon them. So to indulge in prayer without self-knowledge, without understanding, is disastrous. The meditative awareness of which I have been speaking is the outcome of self-knowledge in which alone there is right thinking, and it is this that frees the mind-heart from the dual process of the observer and the observed, for they are a joint phenomenon, a joint occurrence. The observer is ever conditioning the observed and it is extremely difficult to go beyond the observer and the observed, to go beyond and above the created. The thinker and his thought must cease for the Eternal to be. I have been trying to explain in my talks how to clarify the confusion that exists between the observer and the observed, the thinker and his thought, through self-knowledge and right thinking. For without self-clarification, the observer is ever conditioning the observed and so can not go beyond himself and becomes imprisoned. He is caught in his own delusion. For the realization of that which is not created, not made up, thought-feeling must transcend the created, the result, the self; thought-feeling must cease to demand, cease to acquire, cease to be distracted by any form of ritualism and memory. If you will experiment you will discover how extremely difficult it is for thought to be wholly free from its own chattering and creation. Only when it is so free, only when the observer and the observed have ceased, is there the Immeasurable.
Tags: duality, greed, illusion, will
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