To Destroy Is to Create

By: Jiddu Krishnamurti

The Painter At His Easel (c. 1870-75) by Honore Daumier

To be free, you have to examine authority, the whole skeleton of authority, tearing to pieces the whole dirty thing. And that requires energy, actual physical energy, and also it demands psychological energy. But the energy is wasted when one is in conflict.

So when there is the understanding of the whole process of conflict, there is the ending of conflict, there is abundance of energy.

Then you can proceed tearing the house that you have built throughout the centuries and that has no meaning at all.

You know, to destroy is to create.

We must destroy, not the buildings, not the social or economic system — this comes about daily — but the psychological, the unconscious and the conscious defenses, securities that one has built up rationally, individually, deeply, and superficially.

We must tear through all that to be utterly defenseless, because you must be defenseless to love and have affection. Then you see and understand ambition, authority, and you begin to see when authority is necessary and at what level.

Then there is no authority of learning, no authority of knowledge, no authority of capacity; no authority that function assumes and which becomes status.

To understand all authority – of the gurus, of the Masters, and others – requires a very sharp mind, a clear brain, not a muddy brain, not a dull brain…

There is no method of self-knowledge. Seeking a method invariably implies the desire to attain some result – and that is what we all want. We follow authority – if not that of a person, then of a system, of an ideology – because we want a result that will be satisfactory, which will give us security.

We really do not want to understand ourselves, our impulses and reactions, the whole process of our thinking, the conscious as well as the unconscious; we would rather pursue a system that assures us of a result. But the pursuit of a system is invariably the outcome of our desire for security, for certainty, and the result is obviously not the understand of oneself.

When we follow a method, we must have authorities – the teacher, the guru, the savior, the Master – who will guarantee us what we desire, and surely that is not the way of self-knowledge.

Authority prevents the understanding of oneself, does it not? Under the shelter of an authority, a guide, you may have temporarily a sense of security, a sense of well-being, but that is not the understanding of the total process of oneself.

Authority in its very nature prevents the full awareness of oneself and therefore ultimately destroys freedom; in freedom alone can there be creativeness. There can be creativeness only through self-knowledge.

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You can find this passage in Krishnamurti’s — The Book of life

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