He said he had gone into the question very thoroughly and was convinced that there were Masters in different parts of the world. They did not show themselves physically except to their special disciples, but they were in communication with others through other means. They guided the unaware leaders of the world’s thought and action, and they brought about revolution and peace. He had known several pupils of the Masters -- at least they had told him they were, he added guardedly. Was it possible to have direct experience, direct contact with them?
How still the river was! Two brilliant little kingfishers were flying close to the bank and just above the surface and a fisherman’s boat lay in the middle of the stream. The trees along the river were thick with leaves, and their shadows were heavy and dark. In the fields the newly planted rice was a vivid green. It was a very peaceful scene, and it seemed a pity to talk over our petty little problems.
We are an odd people; we wander in search of something in far-off places when it is so close to us. Beauty is ever there, never here; truth is never in our homes but in some distant place. We do not understand the common things of life, the everyday struggles and joys, and yet we attempt to grasp the mysterious and the hidden. We do not know ourselves, but we are willing to serve or follow him who promises a reward, a hope, a utopia. We know all this, and yet our desires, our cravings are so strong that they drive us into illusions and endless miseries.
Belief in the Master creates the Master, and experience is shaped by belief. Belief in a particular pattern of action, or in an ideology, does produce what is longed for; but at what cost and at what suffering! If an individual has capacity, then belief becomes a potent thing in his hands, a weapon more dangerous than a gun.
The desire to gain, individually or for a group, leads to ignorance and illusion, to destruction and misery. This desire is not only for more and more physical comforts, but also for power: the power of money, of knowledge, of identification. The craving for more is the beginning of conflict and misery. We try to escape from this misery through every form of self-deception, through suppression, substitution and sublimation; but craving continues, perhaps at a different level.
Craving at any level is still conflict and pain. One of the easiest of escapes is the guru, the Master. Some escape through a political ideology with its activities, others through the sensations of ritual and discipline, and still others through the Master. Then the means of escape become all-important, and fear and obstinacy guard the means. Then it does not matter what you are; it is the Master who is important. You are important only as a server, whatever that may mean, or as a disciple. To become one of these, you have to do certain things, conform to certain patterns, undergo certain hardships. You are willing to do all this and more, for identification gives pleasure and power. In the name of the Master, pleasure and power have become respectable. You are no longer lonely, confused, lost; you belong to him, to the party, to the idea. You are safe.
After all, that is what most of us want: to be safe, to be secure. To be lost with the many is a form of psychological security; to be identified with a group or with an idea, secular or spiritual, is to feel safe.
The craving for individual or group security brings on destruction, and to be safe psychologically engenders illusion. Our life is illusion and misery, with rare moments of clarity and joy, so anything that promises a haven we eagerly accept.As belief shapes experience, the Masters become an inescapable reality.
But reality cannot be experienced. It is. If the experiencer thinks he experiences reality, then he knows only illusion. Knowledge or experience must cease for the being of reality.
Excerpt from Commentaries on Living I by Jiddu Krishnamurti