The Search - Part 6
Companion with the Breeze

by J. Krishnamurti

In order to attain liberation it is not necessary to join any organization, any religion, because they are binding, they are limiting, they hold you to a particular form of worship and belief. If you long for freedom you will fight, as I have fought, against authority of any kind, for authority is the antithesis of spirituality.

If I were to use authority today and you accepted my authority, it would not make you free, you would be merely following the freedom of another. In following the freedom of another, you are binding yourself more strongly to the wheel of limitation. Do not allow your mind or your hart to be bound by anything or by anyone. If you do, you will establish another religion, another temple. While destroying one set of beliefs you will establish another set of beliefs. I am fighting against all traditions that bind, all worship that narrows, all following that corrupts the heart. If you would find that freedom to which I would point the way, you will begin, as I began, by being discontented, by being in revolt, in inner dissent with everything about you. You frequently use the phrase "We will obey our leaders'. Who are your leaders? I never want to be a leader. I never want to have authority. I want you to become your own leaders.

Life is simple and magnificent, lovely and divine, but you want all the beauty and the freshness of the dawn and of the still night to be caught and held in a narrow circle so that you can worship it. Go down to the sea-beach of an evening when the fresh breezes are blowing and all the blades of grass are in motion and the particles of sand are flying about and the trees are waving their branches, and the waves of the sea are breaking over each other. You want to gather and bind all that beauty into a narrow temple. You need have no beliefs in order to live nobly. An yet you say, "I must worship gods, I must perform rites, I must go to shrines, I must follow this and do that". It is an eternal must. That way of living is not living at all.

Whatever you do, do not create another temple around me: I shall not be held within it. I want to be your companion with the freshness of the breeze. I want to free you from your own limitations, to encourage within you individual creation, individual perfection, individual uniqueness. The self can only be purified and truly transcended when it has developed its own individual uniqueness to perfection; not when it is held in limitations, bound by traditions, by forms, and by all the unnecessary paraphernalia which you think essential to your well-being.

I remember a story written by a Norwegian - the hero of that story in search for freedom and happiness joins one religion after another and worships one God after another, performs one ceremony after another, and still he cannot find what he seeks. At length he becomes a Buddhist and drops his physical body and enters Nirvana. He enters the Nirvana of the books and there he sees all the gods of all the religions seated and conversing with each other. They offer him a vacant seat. This hero appears as a flame, but this flame does not want to be caught, and while all the gods try to catch hold of him he disappears. The gods cannot follow him because even gods themselves are bound.

Do not be bound by me or by anyone. Happiness is within yourself.

I set out to find for myself the purpose of life and I found it without the authority of another. I have entered that sea of liberation and happiness in which there is no limitation or negation because it is the fulfilment of life.

Because after my long journey towards attainment and perfection I have attained that perfection and established it in my heart, and because my mind is tranquil and eternally liberated at the flame, I would give of that understanding to all.