Krishnamurti on Creativity

Anonymous Creativity

Have you ever thought about it? We want to be famous as a writer, as a poet, as a painter, as a politician, as a singer, or what you will. Why? Because we really don't love what we are doing. If you loved to sing, or to paint, or to write poems, if you really loved it you would not be concerned with whether you are famous or not. To want to be famous is tawdry, trivial, stupid, it has no meaning; but, because we don't love what we are doing, we want to enrich ourselves with fame. Our present education is rotten because it teaches us to love success and not what we are doing. The result has become more important than the action.
You know, it is good to hide your brilliance under a bushel, to be anonymous, to love what you are doing and not to show off. It is good to be kind without a name. That does not make you famous, it does not cause your photograph to appear in the newspapers. Politicians do not come to your door. You are just a creative human being living anonymously, and in that there is richness and great beauty.

-J. Krishnamurti, The Book of Life


Empty Techniques

You cannot reconcile creativeness with technical achievement. You may be perfect in playing the piano, and not be creative; you may play the piano most brilliantly, and not be a musician. You may be able to handle color, to put paint on canvas most cleverly, and not be a creative painter. You may create a face, an image out of a stone, because you have learned the technique, and not be a master creator. Creation comes first, not technique, and that is why we are miserable all our lives. We have technique -how to put up a house, how to build a bridge, how to assemble a motor, how to educate our children through a system we have learned all these techniques, but our hearts and minds are empty. We are first class machines; we know how to operate most beautifully, but we do not love a living thing. You may be a good engineer, you may be a pianist, you may write in a good style in English or Marathi or whatever your language is, but creativeness is not found through technique. If you have something to say, you create your own style; but when you have nothing to say, even if you have a beautiful style, what you write is only the traditional routine, a repetition in new words of the same old thing.
So, having lost the song, we pursue the singer. We learn from the singer the technique of song, but there is no song; and I say the song is essential, the joy of singing is essential. When the joy is there, the technique can be built up from nothing; you will invent your own technique, you won't have to study elocution or style. When you have, you see, and the very seeing of beauty is an art.

-J. Krishnamurti, The Book of Life


Creatively Empty

What is important, surely, is for you to find out. And, to find out, your mind must be in a state of creative experience, must it not? Your mind must be capable of discovering, which means it must be completely free from all knowledge as to whether there is an ultimate reality or only a series of ever more extensive and significant experiences. But, your mind is crammed with knowledge and information, with experience, with memories; and with that mind you try to find out. Surely, it is only when the mind is creatively empty that it is capable of finding out whether there is an ultimate reality or not. But, the mind is never creatively empty; it is always acquiring, always gathering, living on the past or in the future, or trying to be focused in the immediate present: it is never in that state of creativeness in which a new thing can take place. As the mind is a result of time, it cannot possibly understand that which is timeless, eternal.
So, our job is to inquire not if there is an ultimate reality, but whether the mind can ever be free from time, which is memory -from this process of accumulation, the gathering of experiences, living on the past or in the future- that is, can the mind be still? Stillness is not the outcome of discipline, of control. There is stillness only when the mind is silently aware of this whole complex problem, and it is such a mind that can understand if there is an ultimate reality or not.

-J. Krishnamurti, Collected Works, Vol. VII,31