The Teachings of U. G. Krishnamurti. U. G. Krishnamurti

      UG: Which they are not. This you will discover: they are not your questions at all.

      The questioner has to come to an end. It is the questioner that creates the answer; and the questioner comes into being from the answer, otherwise there is no questioner. I am not trying to play with words. You know the answer, and you want a confirmation from me, or you want some kind of light to be thrown on your problem, or you're curious — if for any of these reasons you want to carry on a dialogue with me, you are just wasting your time; you'll have to go to a scholar, a pundit, a learned man — they can throw a lot of light on such questions. That's all that I am interested in in this kind of a dialogue: to help you to formulate your own question. Try and formulate a question which you can call your own.

      I have no questions here at all. I come and sit here, and it's empty, but not in the sense in which you use the word 'emptiness'. Emptiness and fullness are not two different things; you cannot draw a line of demarcation between the void and the fullness. But there is nothing here — nothing — so I don't know what I'll say. I don't come prepared to say something. What you bring out of me is your own affair — this is yours, not mine — there is nothing here which I can call my own. ?This is your property because you have brought out the answer from me — it's not mine — I have nothing to do with the answer at all. This is not the answer. I am not giving you any answers at all.

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      It's like any other reflex action: You ask a question, so something comes out of it. How it is operating, I don't know. It is not a product of any thinking. Whatever comes out of me is not manufactured by thought — but something is coming out. You are throwing a ball and the ball is bouncing and you are calling that the 'answer'. Actually, what I am doing is only restructuring the question and throwing it back at you.

       Q: The question brings out the answer?

      UG: There is no answer to the question, so the question cannot remain there any more. In that sense I have no questions of any kind except the questions I need to function in this world — I have no other questions.

       Q: Your answer is only a reflection of the question?

      UG: It is not my answer, because the question does not stay there any more. The question becomes my question, as it were; since it has no answer, it is not waiting for any answers; the question burns itself out, and what is there is energy. You can't go on for nine or ten hours; I can. It is not sapping the energy, but adding to the energy all the time. The talking is energy itself: the talking is the expression of that energy.

       Q: Suppose I ask you about quantum mechanics, say?

      UG: There, I don't know — that's my answer — so the question in any case disappears. Whatever knowledge or information I have about quantum mechanics is there, and it comes out like an arrow, straight. Whatever is put in there comes out. But such questions as "Does God exist?" "Is life mere chance?" "Does perfect justice rule the world?" — there are no answers to those questions, so the question burns itself out.

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       Q: Who am I?

      UG: (Laughs) You know very well who you are.

       Q: What do you mean?

      UG: Is "Who am I?" really your question? Not at all; you picked it up somewhere. The questioner is the trouble, not the question. If you didn't pick up this question, you would pick up another. Even after forty years you will still be asking what the meaning of life is. A living man would never ask such a question. Obviously you see no meaning in life. You are not living; you are dead. If I tell you the meaning of life, where does that leave you? What can it mean to you?

       Q: Does the questioner exist?

      UG: He doesn't exist; what exists is only the question. All questions are the same — they are mechanical repetitions of memorized questions. Whether you ask "Who am I?" "What is the meaning of life?" "Does God exist?" or "Is there an afterlife?" all these questions spring only from memory. That is why I ask whether you have a question of your own.

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       Q: You say that the question "Who am I?" doesn't remain there when you really scrutinize it?

      UG: Because you cannot separate the question from the questioner. The question and the questioner are the same. If you accept that fact, it's a very simple thing: when the question disappears, the questioner also disappears with that. But since the questioner does not want to disappear, the question remains. The questioner wants

      an answer for the question. Since there is no answer to that question, the questioner remains there for ever. The questioners's interest is to continue, not to get the answer.

       Q: But still there is the attention to get the answer.

      UG: The attention is the questioner, the (what other words?) waiting is the questioner, the waiting for an answer, the hope that there is an answer to that question is the questioner. They're not different, you see; it has transformed itself into different tricky situations. The questioner first says he's attentive. He's very attentive because he wants the answer. He doesn't want the hints that he might not.... What will he do with this answer? He is attentive, he is waiting, he is hopeful — he is all those things — and why? (Pause) Because there is no answer to that question "Who am I?" — you have no way of knowing for yourself.

      It is the verb that links the 'who' and 'I'. So, the `I' and 'who' as if they are two different things, and what links these two things is 'am'. 'Am', the verb, is the continuity. When the verb is absent — if it is possible (Laughs) for the verb to disappear — there is no need for anything to link `who' and `I'; they are the same.

       Q: If the verb goes?

      UG: The question also goes with it. There cannot be a question without that. "Who I," you see — it is a meaningless thing. "Am" has got to be there — it creates the divisive movement there. And so you have created the question. And that question implies that there is an answer to that question; otherwise you would not put that question to yourself. All questions are there because you have a vague answer for the question: "There must be something other than what I am now," you see. I don't know if I make myself clear.

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       Q: Sir, what will happen after death?

      UG: All questions about death are meaningless — and especially for a young person like you. You have not even lived your life. Why do you ask that silly question? Why are you interested in that? A person who is living has no time to ask such questions. Only a person who is not living asks "What will happen after my death?" You are not living. First live your life, and when the time comes.... Let us leave it like that. I am not interested in that kind of philosophy.

      Nothing will happen. There is no such thing as death at all. What do you think will die? What? This body disintegrates into its constituent elements, so nothing is lost. If you burn it, the ashes enrich the soil and aid germination. If you bury it, the worms live on it. If you throw it into the river, it becomes food for the fishes. One form of life lives on another form of life, and so gives continuity to life. So life is immortal.

      But that is not going to help anybody who is caught up in the fear of death. After all, 'death' is fear, the fear of something coming to an end. The 'you' as you know yourself, the 'you' as you experience yourself — that 'you' does not want to come to an end. But it also knows that this body is going to drop dead as others do — you experience the deaths of others — so that is a frightening situation because you are not sure whether that (`you') will continue if this (body) goes. So then it