Why this everlasting struggle to be perfect, to achieve perfection, as the machines are? The idea, the example, the symbol of perfection is something marvellous, ennobling, but is it? Of course there's the attempt to imitate the perfect, the perfect example. Is imitation perfection? Is there perfection or is it merely an idea, given to man by the preacher to keep him respectable?
In the idea of perfection there's a great deal of comfort and security and always it is profitable both to the priest and to the one who's trying to become perfect. A mechanical habit, repeated over and over again can eventually be perfected; only habit can be perfected. Thinking, believing the same thing over and over again, without deviation, becomes a mechanical habit and perhaps this is the kind of perfection everyone wants. This cultivates a perfect wall of resistance, which will prevent any disturbance, any discomfort. Besides, perfection is a glorified form of success, and ambition is blessed by respectability and the representatives and heroes of success. There's no perfection, it's an ugly thing, except in a machine. The attempt to be perfect is, really, to break the record, as in golf; competition is saintly. To compete with your neighbour and with God for perfection is called brotherhood and love. But each attempt at perfection leads only to greater confusion and sorrow which only gives greater impetus to be more perfect.
It's curious, we always want to be perfect in or with something; this gives the means for achievement, and the pleasure of achievement, of course, is vanity. Pride in any form is brutal and leads to disaster. The desire for perfection outwardly or inwardly denies love and without love, do what you will, there's always frustration and sorrow. Love is neither perfect nor imperfect; it's only when there's no love that perfection and imperfection arise. Love never strives after something; it does not make itself perfect. It's the flame without the smoke; in striving to be perfect, there's only greater volume of smoke; perfection, then, lies only in striving, which is mechanical, more and more perfect in habit, in imitation, in engendering more fear. Each one is educated to compete, to become successful; then the end becomes all important. Love for the thing itself disappears. Then the instrument is used not for the love of the sound but for what the instrument will bring, fame, money, prestige and so on.
Being is infinitely more significant than becoming. Being is not the opposite of becoming; if it's the opposite or in opposition, then there is no being. When becoming dies completely, then there's being. But this being is not static; it's not acceptance nor is it mere denial; becoming involves time and space. All striving must cease; then only there is being. Being is not within the field of social virtue and morality. It shatters the social formula of life. This being is life, not the pattern of life. Where life is there's no perfection; perfection is an idea, a word; life, the being, is beyond any formula of thought. It is there when the word, the example, and the pattern are destroyed.
- Jiddu Krishnamurti
From ‘Krishnamurti’s Notebook’,
26 August 1961, Gstaad, Switzerland
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