Free To Discover Reality

Questioner: If all ambitions are stupid, then how can man progress?

KRISHNAMURTI: Do you know what progress is? Now, have patience and let us go into it slowly. What is progress? Have you ever thought about it? Is it progress when you can get to Europe in a few hours by airplane instead of talking a fortnight to get there by boat? The invention of faster means of transportation and communication, the development of bigger guns, bigger ways of destroying each other, wiping out thousands of people with a single atomic bomb instead of shooting them seeks to become moral, respectable. The truly religious individual is he who discovers, who directly experiences what God is, what truth is. That direct experiencing is never possible through any form of belief, through any ritual, through any following or worshipping of another. The truly religious mind is free of all gurus. You as an individual, as you grow and live your life, can discover the truth from moment to moment, and therefore you are capable of being free.
      Most people think that to be free from the material things of the world is the first step towards religion. It is not. That is one of the easiest things to do. The first step is to be free to think fully, completely and independently, which means not being bound by any belief or crushed by circumstances, by environment, so that you are an integrated human being, capable, vigorous and self-reliant. Only then can your mind, being free, unbiased, unconditioned, find out what God is. Surely, that is the basic purpose for which any educational centre should exist: to help each individual who comes there to be free to discover reality. This means not following any system, not clinging to any belief or ritual, and not worshipping any guru. The individual has to awaken his intelligence, not through any form of discipline, resistance, compulsion, coercion, but through freedom. It is only through the intelligence born of freedom that the individual can discover that which is beyond the mind. That immensity__the unnamable, the limitless, that which is not measurable by words and in which there is the love that is not of the mind__must be directly experienced. The mind cannot conceive of it; therefore the mind must be very quiet, astonishingly still, without any demand or any desire. Only then is it possible for that which may be called God or reality to come into being.