Questioner: Often we feel abandoned by you. We know you have not accepted us as disciples, but need you shirk your responsibility towards us completely? Should you not see us through?
Krishnamurti: This is a roundabout way of asking, ‘Why don’t you become our guru?’ (laughter). Now, the problem is not abandoning or seeing you through, because we are supposed to be grown-up people. Physically we are grown-up; mentally we are the age of fourteen and fifteen; and we want a glorified somebody, a saviour, a guru, a master, to lead us out of our misery and confusion; to explain our chaotic state to us; to explain it, not to bring about a revolution in our thinking, but to explain it away. That is what we are concerned with.
When you put this question, you want to find a way out of confusion, to be free from fear, from hatred, from all the pettiness of life; and you look to somebody to help you. Other gurus have perhaps not succeeded in putting you to sleep with a dose of opium, an explanation, so you turn to this person and say, ‘Please help us through’. Is that our problem—the substitution of a new guru for an old one, of a new master for an old one, of a new leader for the old? Please listen to this carefully. Can anybody lead you to truth, to the discovery of truth? Is discovery possible when you are led to it, have you experienced it? Can anybody—it does not matter who—lead you to truth? When you say you must follow somebody, does it not imply that truth is stationary, that truth is there for you to be led to, for you to look at and take?
Is truth something that you are led to? If it is, then the problem is very simple; you will find the most satisfying guru or leader and he will lead you to it. But surely the truth of that something you are seeking is beyond the state of explanation. It is not static, it must be experienced, be discovered, and you cannot experience it through guidance. How can I experience spontaneously something original if I am told, ‘This is original, experience it’? Hatred, meanness, ambition, and pettiness are the problems, and not the discovery of what truth is. You cannot find what truth is with a petty mind. A mind that is shallow, gossiping, stupid, ambitious—such a mind can never find what truth is. A petty mind will create only a petty thing, it will be empty, it will create a shallow God. So our problem now is not to find, to discover what God is, but first to see how petty we are.
Look, if I know that I am petty, miserable, unhappy, then I can deal with it. But if I say, ‘I must not be petty, I must be great’, then I am running away—which is pettiness.
What is important is to understand and discover what is, not to transform what is into something else. After all, a stupid mind, even if it is trying to become very cunning, clever, intelligent, is still stupid because its very essence is stupidity. We do not listen. We want somebody to lead our pettiness to something bigger and we never accept, never see, what is, what actually is. The discovery of what is, the actuality, is important; it is the only thing that matters. At any level—economic, social, religious, political, psychological—what is important is to discover exactly what is, not what should be.