Krishnamurti on Craving and The Word

"There is no entity separate from craving; there is only craving, there is no one who craves. Craving takes on different masks at different times, depending on its interests. The memory of these varying interests meets the new, which brings about conflict, and so the chooser is born, establishing himself as an entity separate and distinct from craving. But the entity is not different from its qualities. The entity who tries to fill or run away from emptiness, incompleteness, loneliness, is not different from that which he is avoiding; he is it. He cannot run away from himself; all that he can do is to understand himself. He is his loneliness, his emptiness; and as long as he regards it as something separate from himself, he will be in illusion and endless conflict. When he directly experiences that he is his own loneliness, then only can there be freedom from fear. Fear exists only in relationship to an idea, and idea is the response of memory as thought. Thought is the result of experience; and though it can ponder over emptiness, have sensations with regard to it, it cannot know emptiness directly. The word loneliness, with its memories of pain and fear, prevents the experiencing of it afresh."

I found the above quote from Krishnamurti on this blog.  There's a lot in that short paragraph and it has to be read many times. I felt that it connects to what I was recently reading in Ouspensky's The Fourth Way about fear. He is answering a question about Gurdjieff's concept of identification and says, "Identification is a state. You must understand that many things you ascribe to things outside you are really in you. Take for instance fear. Fear is independent of things. If you are in a state of fear, you can be afraid of an ash-try....You are afraid, and then you choose what to be afraid of. This fact makes it possible to struggle with these things, because they are in you."

Comments

[Ian]

Hi Ann, glad you liked the quote. You can find that and a whole lot more by Krishnamurti along that same line of thought here:

http://buddha.co.il/article_kji01.htm

I really like that Oespensky quote as well.
(mind if I use it?) ;)
It points to the cause of so much suffering in the world. We have these things inside us that we can't face, so we project them outwards, and then battle with our own demons through that projection. I think it works, too, to a limited sense, in that we can work out our problems this way. It's just not the most sociable way of doing so, if you get my meaning...

The Krishnamurti quote also brings to mind Gurdjieff's saying: "The chief means of happiness in this life is the ability to consider externally always, internally never". To consider is to choose, to pick between this or that. There is no picking internally, its all already there and must be responded to as consciously as possible. I think that's what K's getting at in this quote as well.

And yet, even though we are all these things, they are not us. ;)

[Ann Seeker]

Hi Ian,

Thanks for the thoughtful comment and link. You can certainly use the Ouspensky quote. If you want to read his whole answer it is on page 124 of The Fourth Way.

Ann