From a dialogue between J Krishnamurti and Swami Venkatesananda (“The awakening of intelligence”)
K: How do I know the highest? Because the sages have said it? I don’t accept the sages. They might be caught in illusion, they might be talking nonsense or sense. I don’t know, I am not interested. I find that as long as the mind is in a state of fear, it wants to escape from it, and projects an idea of the supreme, and wants to experience that. But if it frees itself from its own agony, then it is altogether in a different state. It doesn’t even ask to experience because it is at quite a different level.
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K: If Vedanta is the end of… which is by its own… the meaning of itself is the end of knowledge.
SV: Yes, it’s wonderful, I never thought of it before: the end of knowledge.
K: Freedom from knowing.
SV: Freedom from knowledge, yes. (Laughs)
K: Then why have they not kept to that?
SV: Their contention being that you have to pass through that in order to come out of it.
K: Pass through what?
K: Now wait a minute, sir. Then why must I acquire it? If Vedanta means the end of knowledge, which the word itself means that: the ending of Vedas which is knowledge, then why should I go through all the laborious process of acquiring knowledge, and then discarding it?
SV: Yes. Otherwise you wouldn’t be again in Vedanta. The end of knowledge is, having acquired this knowledge, coming to the end of it.
K: Why should I acquire it?
SV: Because otherwise it can’t be ended.
K: No, no. Why should I acquire it? Why shouldn’t I, from the very beginning, see what knowledge is and discard it?
SV: See what knowledge is.
K: And discard, discard all the… Never accumulate. Vedanta means the end of accumulating knowledge.
SV: Quite right. That’s right. That’s correct.