Jiddu Krishnamurti on Attaining Truth and Marriage

Questioner: In order to attain truth, must one abstain from marriage and procreation?
Jiddu Krishnamurti: Now, truth is not an end, a finality that can be attained through certain actions. It is that understanding born of continual adjustment to life, which demands great intelligence; and because most people are not capable of this self-defenseless adjustment to the movement of life, they create certain theories and ideals which they hope will guide them.

So man is held in the frame of traditions, prejudices, and binding moralities, dictated by fear and the desire for self-preservation. This has come about because he is unable to discern continuously the significance of life in constant movement, and so he has developed certain ''musts'' and ''must nots.''

A complete and a rich living, by which I mean a most intelligent life, not a self-protective, defensive existence, demands that the mind shall be free of all taboos, fears, and superstitions, without ''must'' and ''must not,'' and this can only be when the mind wholly understands the significance and the cause of fear. For most people there is conflict, suffering, and a ceaseless adjustment in marriage, and for many the desire to attain truth is but an escape from this struggle.

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

Now, to most people, religion, God, and immortality are simply 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 nonbeliever 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.


Questioner: Are you against the institution of the family?
Jiddu Krishnamurti : I am, if the family is the center of exploitation, if it is based on exploitation. (Applause) Please, what is the good of merely agreeing with me? You must act to alter this. The desire for perpetuation creates a family, which becomes the center of exploitation. So the question is really: can one ever live without exploiting? Not whether family life is right or wrong, not whether having children is right or wrong, but whether family, possessions, power are not the result of the desire for security, self-perpetuation. As long as there is this desire, family becomes the center of exploitation.

Can we ever live without exploitation? I say we can. There must be exploitation as long as there is the struggle for self-protection; as long as the mind is seeking security, comfort - through family, religion, authority, or tradition - there must be exploitation. And exploitation ceases only when the mind discerns the falseness of security and is no longer ensnared by its own power of creating illusions. If you will experiment with what I say, you will then understand that I am not destroying desire, but that you can live in this world richly, sanely, a life without limitations, without suffering. You can discover this only by experimenting, not by denying, not through resignation, nor by merely imitating. Where intelligence is functioning - and intelligence ceases to function when there is fear and the desire for security - there can be no exploitation.

Most people are waiting for a change to take place that will miraculously alter this system of exploitation. They are waiting for revolutions to realize their hopes, their unfulfilled longings; but in so waiting they are slowly dying. For I think that mere revolutions do not change the fundamental desires of man. But if the individual begins to act with intelligence, without compulsion, irrespective of present conditions or of what revolutions promise in the future, then there is a richness, a completeness whose ecstasy cannot be destroyed.

Source- Jiddu Krishnamurti Second Talk in Sao Paulo April 24, 1935