Krishnamurti: The First Step is the Last Step

K: And we think that the first chapter must inevitably lead to the last chapter; we feel that all practices lead to a finality, to an unfoldment — all that is horizontal reading. Our minds, eyes and attitudes are conditioned to functioning along the horizontal, at the end of which there is finality — the book is over. You ask if truth or enlightenment is a final achievement, a final point beyond which there is nothing?

Q: A point from which there can be no slipping back. I might for an instant touch the quality of that. A little later, thought arises again, and I say to myself: I am back in the old state. I question whether that touching had any validity at all. I put a distance, a block between myself and that state and say: If that were true, thought would not arise.

K: I perceive something that is extraordinary, something that is true; I want to perpetuate that perception, to give it a continuity so that that perception continues throughout my daily life. I think that is where the mistake lies. The mind has seen something true. That is enough. That mind is a clear, innocent mind which has not been hurt. Thought wants to carry on that perception right through daily life. The mind has seen something very clearly. Leave it there. The next step, the leaving of it, is the final step. Because my mind is already fresh to take the next, the final step in the daily movement of life, it does not carry over; the perception has not become knowledge.

Q: The self as the agent in relation to thought and in relation to seeing has to cease.

K: Die to the thought that is true. Otherwise it becomes memory, which then becomes thought, and thought asks: How am I to perpetuate that state? If the mind sees clearly, and it can only see clearly when the seeing is the ending of it, then the mind can start a movement where the first step is the last step. In this there is no process involved at all; there is no element of time. Time enters when, having seen it clearly, having perceived it, there is a carrying over and an applying of it to the next incident.

Q: The carrying over is the not-seeing or the not-perceiving.

K: So, all the traditional approaches which offer a process must have a point, a conclusion, a finality. It is like saying that there are many roads to the station. The station then is a fixed point. But anything that has a finality — a final point — is not a living thing at all. Is truth a finality? Does it mean that once I am on the train, nothing can happen to me, that the train will carry me to my destination? That is, having once achieved truth, is everything else — your anxieties, your fears and so on — over? Or, does it work in a totally different way? .

A process implies a fixed point. Systems, methods, practices all offer a fixed point, and promise man that when he achieves the end all his troubles will be over. Is there something which is really timeless? A fixed point is in time. It is in time because you have postulated it, because it has been thought over; and the thinking is time. Can one come upon this thing which must have no time, no process, no system, no method, no way?

Can this mind which is so conditioned horizontally, knowing that it lives horizontally, perceive that which is neither horizontal nor vertical? Can it perceive for an instant? Can it perceive that the seeing has cleansed, and end it? In this is the first and the last step, because the mind has seen anew. Your question: Is such a mind ever free of trouble? is a wrong question. When you put that question, you are still thinking in terms of finality, you have already come to a conclusion, and so are back again in the horizontal process.