Questioner: How can our limited brain grasp the unlimited, which is beauty, love, and truth? What is the ground of compassion and intelligence? Can it really come upon each one of us?
Krishnamurti: How can our limited brain grasp the unlimited? It cannot, because it is limited. Can we grasp the significance, the depth of the quality of the brain and recognize the fact, the fact and not the idea, that our brains are limited by knowledge, by specialities, by particular disciplines, by belonging to groups, by nationalism, which is camouflaged, hidden, self-interest? The limitation comes into being essentially when there is self-interest. When I am concerned with my own happiness, with my own fulfilment, with my own success, that very self-interest limits the quality of the brain and the energy of the brain.
The speaker is not a specialist in the brain, though he has talked to several professional people about it. But the brain is the brain, not just their brains, but yours and mine. That brain has evolved through millions of years, in time and thought. It has evolved. Evolution means a whole series of events in time. It has taken two and a half million years, more or less. To put all the religious rituals together needs time. So the brain has been conditioned, limited by its own volition, seeking its own security, keeping to its own backyard, saying, ‘I believe, I don’t believe, I agree, I don’t agree, this is my opinion, this is my judgement’—by self-interest. Whether it is in the hierarchy of religion or among the politicians, or in the man who seeks power through money, or the professor with his tremendous scholastic knowledge, or all the gurus who are talking about goodness and peace, it is part of self-interest. Face all this.
So our brain has become very, very, very small—not in its shape or size, but we have reduced the quality, the immense capacity, of it. It has improved technology, and also it has immense capacity to go inwardly, very, very deeply, but self-interest limits it.
To discover for oneself where self-interest is hidden is very subtle. It may hide behind an illusion, in neuroticism, in make-believe. Uncover every stone, every blade of grass to find out. Either you take time to find out, which again becomes a bondage, or you see the thing, grasp it, have an insight into it instantly. When you have a complete insight it covers the whole field.
So the questioner says, how can the conditioned brain grasp the unlimited, which is beauty, love, and truth? What is the ground of compassion and intelligence, and can it come upon each one of us? Are you inviting compassion? Are you inviting intelligence? Are you inviting beauty, love, and truth? Are you trying to grasp it? I am asking you. Are you trying to grasp the quality of intelligence, compassion, the immense sense of beauty, the perfume of love and that truth which has no path to it? Is that what you are grasping? Wanting to find out the ground upon which it dwells? Can the limited brain grasp this? You cannot possibly grasp it, hold it. You can do all kinds of meditation, fast, torture yourself, become terribly austere, having one suit, or one robe. All this has been done. The rich cannot come to the truth, neither the poor. Nor the people who have taken a vow of celibacy, of silence, of austerity. All that is determined by thought, all put together sequentially in order to. This is all the cultivation of deliberate thought, of deliberate intent. As someone said to the speaker, ‘Give me twelve years and I’ll make you see God’.
So as the brain is limited, do whatever you will, sit cross-legged in the lotus posture, go off into a trance, meditate, stand on your head or on one leg—whatever you do, you will never come upon it. Compassion doesn’t come to it.
Therefore, one must understand what love is. Love is not sensation. Love is not pleasure, desire, fulfilment. Love is not jealousy, hatred. Love has sympathy, generosity, and tact, and so on. But these qualities are not love. To understand that, to come to that, requires a great sense and appreciation of beauty. Not the beauty of a woman or a man, or a cinema star. Beauty is not in the mountain, in the skies, in the valleys, or in the flowing river. Beauty exists where the self is not. You can see a great old tree, see the majesty of that tree, and say, ‘How marvellous!’ but the self hides behind that tree. So beauty exists only where there is love. And beauty, love, is compassion. There is no ground for compassion, it doesn’t stay at your convenience. That beauty, love, truth, is the highest form of intelligence. When there is that intelligence there is action, clarity, a tremendous sense of dignity. It is something unimaginable. And that which is not to be imagined, the unlimited, cannot be put into words. It can be described: Philosophers have described it, but the philosophers who have described are not that which they have described.
So to come upon this great sense there must be the absence of the me, the ego, egocentric activity, the becoming. There must be the great silence in one. Silence means emptiness of everything. In that there is vast space. Where there is vast space there is immense energy, not self-interested energy, but unlimited energy.