Questioner: The question of what is truth is an ancient one, and nobody has answered it finally. You speak of truth, but we do not see your experiments or efforts to achieve it, as we saw in the lives of people like Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Besant. Your pleasant personality is all that we see. Will you explain why there is such a difference between your life and the lives of other seekers of truth. Are there two truths?
Krishnamurti: Do you want proof? And by what standard shall truth be judged? There are those who say that effort and experiment are necessary for truth; but is truth to be gained that way, through trial and error? There are those who struggle and make valiant efforts, who strive spectacularly, either publicly or quietly in caves; and shall they find truth? Is truth a thing to be discovered through effort? Is there a path to truth, your path and my path, the path of the one who makes an effort, and the path of the one who does not? Are there two truths, or has truth many aspects?
Now, this is your problem: You say, ‘Certain people—two or several or hundreds—have made efforts, have struggled, have sought truth, whereas you do not make an effort, you lead a pleasant, unassuming life’. So, you want to compare; that is, you have a standard, you have a picture of your leaders who have struggled to achieve truth; and when someone else comes along who does not fit into your frame, you are baffled, and so you ask, ‘Which is truth?’ You are baffled—that is the important thing, not whether I have truth or someone else has truth. What is important is to find out if you can discover reality through effort, will, struggle, striving. Does that bring understanding? Surely, truth is not something distant, but is in the little things of everyday life, in every word, every smile, every relationship, only we do not know how to see it; and the man who tries, struggles valiantly, disciplines, controls himself—will he see truth? The mind that is disciplined, controlled, narrowed down through effort—shall it see truth? Obviously not.
It is only the silent mind that will see the truth, not the mind that makes an effort to see. If you are making an effort to hear what I am saying, will you hear? It is only when you are quiet, when you are really silent, that you understand. If you observe closely, listen quietly, then you will hear; but if you strain, struggle to catch everything that is being said, your energy will be dissipated in that effort. So you will not find truth through effort, it does not matter who says it, whether the ancient books, the ancient saints, or the modern ones. Effort is the very denial of understanding; and it is only the quiet mind, the simple mind, the mind that is still, that is not overtaxed by its own efforts—only such a mind shall understand, shall see truth. Truth is not something in the distance; there is no path to it, there is neither your path nor my path; there is no devotional path, there is no path of knowledge or path of action, because truth has no path to it. The moment you have a path to truth, you divide it, because the path is exclusive; and what is exclusive at the very beginning will end in exclusiveness. The man who is following a path can never know truth because he is living in exclusiveness; his means are exclusive, and the means are the end, are not separate from the end. If the means are exclusive, the end is also exclusive.
So there is no path to truth, and there are not two truths. Truth is not of the past or the present, it is timeless; the man who quotes the truth of the Buddha, of Shankara, of Christ, or who merely repeats what I am saying, will not find truth, because repetition is not truth. Repetition is a lie. Truth is a state of being that arises when the mind that seeks to divide, to be exclusive, that can think only in terms of results, of achievement, has come to an end. Only then will there be truth. The mind that is making effort, disciplining itself in order to achieve an end, cannot know truth, because the end is its own projection, and the pursuit of that projection, however noble, is a form of self-worship. Such a being is worshipping himself, and therefore cannot know truth.
Truth is known only when we understand the whole process of the mind, that is, when there is no strife. Truth is a fact, and the fact can be understood only when the various things that have been placed between the mind and the fact are removed. The fact is your relationship to property, to your wife, to human beings, to nature, to ideas; and as long as you do not understand the fact of relationship, your seeking God merely increases the confusion, because it is a substitution, an escape, and therefore it has no meaning. As long as you dominate your wife or she dominates you, as long as you possess and are possessed, you cannot know love; as long as you are suppressing, substituting, as long as you are ambitious, you cannot know truth. It is not the denial of ambition that makes the mind calm, and virtue is not the denial of evil. Virtue is a state of freedom, of order, which evil cannot give; and the understanding of evil is the establishment of virtue.
The man who builds churches or temples in the name of God with money he has gathered through exploitation, through deceit, through cunning and foul play, will not know truth; he may be mild of tongue, but his tongue is bitter with the taste of exploitation, the taste of sorrow. He alone will know truth who is not seeking, not striving, not trying to achieve a result. The mind itself is a result, and whatever it produces is still a result. But the man who is content with what is shall know truth. Contentment does not mean being satisfied with the status quo, maintaining things as they are—that is not contentment. It is in seeing a fact truly and being free of it, that there is contentment, which is virtue. Truth is not continuous, it has no abiding place, it can be seen only from moment to moment. Truth is always new, and therefore timeless. What was truth yesterday is not truth today, what is truth today is not truth tomorrow. Truth has no continuity. It is the mind that wants to make the experience that it calls truth continuous, and such a mind will not know truth. Truth is always new; it is to see the same smile, and see that smile newly, to see the same person, and see that person anew, to see the waving trees anew, to meet life anew.
Truth is not to be had through books, through devotion, or through self-immolation; it is known when the mind is free, quiet. And that freedom, that quietness of the mind, comes only when the facts of its relationships are understood. Without understanding its relationships, whatever the mind does only creates further problems. But when the mind is free from all its projections, there is a state of quietness in which problems cease, and then only the timeless, the eternal comes into being. Then truth is not a matter of knowledge, it is not a thing to be remembered, it is not something to be repeated, to be printed and spread abroad. Truth is that which is. It is nameless, and so the mind cannot approach it.