Krishnamurti: The "feeling" of essence

The word to feel is misleading; it’s more than emotion, than a sentiment, than an experience, than touch or smell. Though that word is apt to be misleading, it must be used to communicate and especially so when we are talking of essence. The feel of essence is not through the brain nor through some fancy; it’s not experienceable as a shock; above all it’s not the word. You cannot experience it; to experience there must be an experiencer, the observer. Experiencing, without the experiencer, is quite another matter. It is in this ‘state’, in which there is no experiencer, no observer, that there is that ‘feeling’. It is not intuition, which the observer interprets or follows, blindly or with reason; it is not the desire, longing, transformed into intuition or the ‘voice of God’ evoked by politicians and religio-social reformers. It’s necessary to get away from all this, far away to understand this feeling, this seeing, this listening. To ‘feel’ demands the austerity of clarity, in which there is no confusion and conflict. The ‘feeling’ of essence comes when there is simplicity to pursue to the very end, without any deviation, sorrow, envy, fear, ambition and so on. This simplicity is beyond the capacity of the intellect; intellect is fragmentary. This pursuit is the highest form of simplicity, not the mendicant’s robe or one meal a day. The ‘feeling’ of essence is the negation of thought and its mechanical capacities, knowledge and reason. Reason and knowledge are necessary in the operation of mechanical problems, and all the problems of thought and feeling are mechanical. It’s this machinery of memory, whose reaction is thought, that must be negated in the pursuit of essence. Destroy to go to the very end; destruction is not of the outer things but of the psychological refuges and resistances, the gods and their secret shelters. Without this, there’s no journey into that depth whose essence is love, creation and death.