“Why do you want to be students of books instead of students of life? Find out what is true and false in your environment with all its oppressions and its cruelties, and then you will find out what is true.” (Location 69)
“The story of mankind is in you, the vast experience, the deep-rooted fears, anxieties, sorrow, pleasure and all the beliefs that man has accumulated throughout the millennia. You are that book.” (Location 72)
His vision was the whole broad observation of the human condition wherein every aspect of life is interconnected. (Location 78)
Krishnamurti, although shy and retiring, tirelessly gave thousands of talks, delivered without notes or preparation, essentially unfolding one seminal theme: Truth can be discovered by anyone, without the help of any authority and, as life is ever-present, in an instant. (Location 84)
Observing the depth and scope of our behavior, as it occurs in the moment, becomes the necessary action in transforming ourselves and our society. (Location 87)
Often, when he was asked a question, Krishnamurti responded, “Let us find out what we mean by …,” thus examining the question and opening it up for inquiry rather than immediately giving an answer. (Location 96)
“After all, the purpose of these talks is to communicate with each other, and not to impose upon you a certain series of ideas. Ideas never change the mind, never bring about a radical transformation in the mind. But if we can individually communicate with each other at the same time and at the same level, then perhaps there will be an understanding which is not merely propaganda … so these talks are not meant to dissuade or to persuade you in any way, either actually or subliminally.” (Location 101)
Krishnamurti spoke with extraordinary simplicity, and not as a guru or religious teacher with a derivative teaching, special vocabulary, or ties to any organization or sect. (Location 109)
Education and the Significance of Life, written under a large oak tree in Ojai, California, (Location 113)
Commentaries on Living were written between 1949 and 1955 in longhand on pages without margins and with no corrections or erasures. (Location 116)
The chapters in these books often open with a brief description of the landscape, climate, or nearby animals. From the simplicity of this natural world comes an easy transition to the inner landscape of confusion, anxiety, beliefs—the general and personal concerns people brought to their meetings with Krishnamurti. (Location 120)
Life Ahead and Think on These Things were edited by Krishnamurti’s friend Mary Lutyens in 1963 and 1964 and published by Harper & Row. These two books comprise a compendium of selected and edited questions and answers from talks with young people, and have been so well received that they have come to be regarded as religious and literary classics. (Location 124)
The really important thing is for the mind to be so effortlessly aware that it is in a state of understanding all the time. (Location 129)
asking ourselves seriously why life has become such a great problem, why, though intellectually we are very sophisticated, yet our daily life is such a grind, (Location 135)
If you can listen in this way, listen with ease, without strain, you will find an extraordinary change taking place within you, a change that comes without your volition, without your asking; and in that change there is great beauty and depth of insight. (Location 151)
If you listen through the screen of your desires, then you obviously listen to your own voice; (Location 157)
Is it not important to find out how to listen not only to what is being said but to everything—to the noise in the streets, to the chatter of birds, to the noise of the tramcar, to the restless sea, to the voice of your husband, to your wife, to your friends, to the cry of a baby? (Location 158)
Listening is an art not easily come by, but in it there is beauty and great understanding. (Location 164)
To listen there must be an inward quietness, a freedom from the strain of acquiring, a relaxed attention. (Location 166)
Words confuse; they are only the outward means of communication; (Location 167)
Those who love may listen; but it is extremely rare to find a listener. (Location 169)
Most of us are after results, achieving goals; we are forever overcoming and conquering, and so there is no listening. (Location 169)
To listen to something demands that your mind be quiet—not a mystical quietness, but just quietness. (Location 173)
When you look at a flower, you look at it, not naming it, not classifying it, not saying that it belongs to a certain species—when you do these, you cease to look at it. (Location 175)
It is only when you listen without the idea, without thought, that you are directly in contact; and being in contact, you will understand whether what he is saying is true or false; you do not have to discuss. (Location 178)
When you make an effort to listen, are you listening? Is not that very effort a distraction that prevents listening? (Location 182)
the very act of listening brings its own freedom. (Location 185)
But are you really concerned with listening, or with altering the turmoil within? (Location 185)
If you would listen … in the sense of being aware of your conflicts and contradictions without forcing them into any particular pattern of thought, perhaps they might altogether cease. (Location 186)
we are constantly trying to be this or that, to achieve a particular state, to capture one kind of experience and avoid another, so the mind is everlastingly occupied with something; it is never still to listen to the noise of its own struggles and pains. Be simple … and don’t try to become something or to capture some experience. (Location 187)
You will find that the more you listen to everything, the greater is the silence, and that silence is then not broken by noise. (Location 196)
It is only when you are resisting something, when you are putting up a barrier between yourself and that to which you do not want to listen—it is only then that there is a struggle. (Location 197)
If you are listening to the speaker, he becomes your leader, your way to understanding—which is a horror, an abomination, because you have then established the hierarchy of authority. (Location 203)
But if, as the speaker is speaking, you are listening to yourself, then out of that listening there is clarity, there is sensitivity; out of that listening the mind becomes healthy, strong. Neither obeying nor resisting, it becomes alive, intense—and it is only such a human being who can create a new generation, a new world. (Location 208)
We never actually listen to anything because our mind is not free; our ears are stuffed up with those things that we already know, so listening becomes extraordinarily difficult. (Location 214)
if one can listen to something with all of one’s being, with vigor, with vitality, then the very act of listening is a liberative factor, (Location 215)
When you give your whole being to mathematics, you learn; but when you are in a state of contradiction, when you do not want to learn but are forced to learn, then it becomes merely a process of accumulation. (Location 217)
So to learn about the leaf, the flower, the cloud, the sunset, or a human being, you must look with all intensity. (Location 221)
If you are to discover for yourself what is the new, it is no good carrying the burden of the old, especially knowledge (Location 226)
a man who is protecting himself constantly through knowledge is obviously not a truth-seeker…. (Location 229)
For the discovery of truth there is no path…. (Location 230)
When you want to find something new, when you are experimenting with anything, your mind has to be very quiet, has it not? (Location 230)
the difficulty for most of us is that the mind has become so important, so predominantly significant, that it interferes constantly with anything that may be new, with anything that may exist simultaneously with the known. (Location 231)
Doesn’t learning imply something new, something that I don’t know and am learning? If I am merely adding to what I already know, it is no longer learning. (Location 245)
Learning implies the love of understanding and the love of doing a thing for itself. (Location 251)
Most people think that learning is encouraged through comparison, whereas the contrary is the fact. Comparison brings about frustration and merely encourages envy, which is called competition. Like other forms of persuasion, comparison prevents learning and breeds fear. (Location 254)
Learning is one thing and acquiring knowledge is another. (Location 258)
Most of us gather knowledge as memory, as idea, store it up as experience, and from there act. (Location 259)
Learning is never accumulative; it is a constant movement. (Location 262)
You cannot store up learning and then from that storehouse act. You learn as you are going along. Therefore, there is never a moment of retrogression or deterioration or decline. (Location 263)
Knowledge and wisdom do not go together. (Location 268)
Learning is always in the active present; it has no past. The moment you say to yourself, “I have learned,” it has already become knowledge, and from the background of that knowledge you can accumulate, translate, but you cannot further learn. (Location 272)
Authority prevents learning—learning that is not the accumulation of knowledge as memory. (Location 287)
Memory always responds in patterns; there is no freedom. (Location 288)
A man who is burdened with knowledge, with instructions, who is weighted down by the things he has learned, is never free. (Location 288)
To be free, you have to examine authority, the whole skeleton of authority, tearing to pieces the whole dirty thing. (Location 293)
Face the Fact and See What Happens … (Location 905)
There is a vast distinction between intellect and intelligence. Intellect is merely thought functioning independently of emotion. When intellect, irrespective of emotion, is trained in any particular direction, one may have great intellect, but one does not have intelligence, because in intelligence there is the inherent capacity to feel as well as to reason; in intelligence both capacities are equally present, intensely and harmoniously. … (Location 1533)
It is only the dull, sleepy mind that creates and clings to habit. A mind that is attentive from moment to moment—attentive to what it is saying, attentive to the movement of its hands, of its thoughts, of its feelings—will discover that the formation of further habits has come to an end. (Location 1849)
mind is a living thing, it is not dead. (Location 1946)
But it is only the innocent mind, the mind unclouded by experience, totally free from the past—it is only such a mind that can perceive what is reality. (Location 3362)
You perceive something only when your mind is silent, (Location 3399)
it is only the innocent mind, the mind that has experienced vastly and yet is free of knowledge and experience—it is only such a mind that can discover that which is more than brain and mind. (Location 3413)
You must come to something new with a fresh mind, and a mind is not fresh when it is occupied, consciously or unconsciously. (Location 3517)
There is only renunciation when you drop something not knowing what is going to happen. (Location 3533)
Experiences are always of the past, operating on the present, being modified by the present and continuing into the future. (Location 3536)
It has its usefulness in mechanical living only. (Location 3537)
In the very action of the individual changing, surely, the collective will also change. (Location 3543)
For me, a deliberate change, a change that is compulsory, disciplinary, conformative, is no change at all. Force, influence, some new invention, propaganda, a fear, a motive compels you to change—that is no change at all. (Location 3547)
I assure you that to fathom the actual nature of change without a motive is quite extraordinary. (Location 3549)
change within the field of thought is no change at all. One idea or set of ideas has merely been substituted for another. (Location 3555)
A radical change can take place only outside the field of thought, (Location 3559)
and the mind can leave the field only when it sees the confines, the boundaries of the field, and realizes that any change within the field is no change at all. (Location 3559)
A change is possible only from the known to the unknown, not from the known to the known. (Location 3563)
In the change from the known to the known, there is authority, there is a hierarchical outlook of life—You know, I do not know. Therefore, I worship you, I create a system, I go after a guru, I follow you because you are giving me what I want to know, you are giving me a certainty of conduct that will produce the result, the success and the result. (Location 3564)
a change, a transformation, must begin at a level that the mind, as the conscious or the unconscious, cannot reach, because my consciousness as a whole is conditioned. (Location 3590)
Can my mind, the conscious as well as the unconscious, be free of society?—society being all the education, the culture, the norm, the values, the standards. (Location 3592)
can my mind be free from the given culture in which I have been brought up? (Location 3596)
When the thinker and the thought are one, only then is there silence, (Location 3613)
In that silence there is no experiencer who is experiencing, and only then is there a psychological revolution that is creative. (Location 3614)
The problem arises when I have to do something about a particular habit, when the habit becomes a disturbance. (Location 3627)
Now, can I look at the problem free of condemnation, justification, or suppression? Can I look at my smoking without any sense of rejection? (Location 3630)
our whole tradition, our whole background, is urging us to reject or to justify rather than to be curious about it. (Location 3631)
Instead of being passively watchful, the mind always operates on the problem. (Location 3632)
If the present is burdened with the experience of yesterday there can be no renewal. (Location 3636)
only freedom from the accumulation of memory brings renewal, (Location 3637)
The mind can understand the present only if it does not compare, judge; (Location 3638)
If you have lived an experience fully, completely, have you not found that it leaves no traces behind? (Location 3640)
We consider the present as a means to an end, so the present loses its immense significance. (Location 3642)
As each experience arises, live it out as fully and deeply as possible; think it out, feel it out extensively and profoundly; be aware of its pain and pleasure, of your judgments and identifications. (Location 3644)
We must be capable of living the four seasons in a day; to be keenly aware, to experience, to understand and be free of the gatherings of each day. (Location 3646)
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. (Location 3650)
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. (Location 3651)
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. (Location 3652)
is good to hide your brilliance under a bushel, to be anonymous, to love what you are doing and not to show off. (Location 3654)
It is good to be kind without a name. (Location 3655)
You are just a creative human being living anonymously, and in that there is richness and great beauty. (Location 3656)
You may be perfect in playing the piano, and not be creative; you may play the piano most brilliantly, and not be a musician. (Location 3659)
Creation comes first, not technique, and that is why we are miserable all our lives. (Location 3662)
We are first class machines; we know how to operate most beautifully, but we do not love a living thing. (Location 3664)
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…. (Location 3666)
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. (Location 3669)
There is bound to be this kind of revolt so long as our education is concerned only with training youth to fit into society—that is, to get a job, to earn money, to be acquisitive, to have more, to conform. (Location 3686)
But through right education we could perhaps bring about a different understanding by helping to free the mind from all conditioning—that is, by encouraging the young to be aware of the many influences which condition the mind and make it conform. (Location 3690)
Clever people will go on inventing what the purpose of life is. (Location 3695)
If I am confused, I can only receive an answer that is also confused. (Location 3698)
if my mind is not beautiful, quiet, whatever answer I receive will be through this screen of confusion, anxiety, and fear; therefore, the answer will be perverted. (Location 3699)
what is important is not to ask, “What is the purpose of life, of existence?” but to clear the confusion that is within you. (Location 3700)
It is like a blind man who asks, “What is light?” If I tell him what light is, he will listen according to his blindness, according to his darkness; but suppose he is able to see, then he will never ask the question, “What is light?” It is there. (Location 3701)
all that you have to do is to be free from those causes that bring about confusion. (Location 3704)
Is it not possible to live in this world without ambition, just being what you are? (Location 3708)
One can live very happily when no importance is given to the self; and this also is part of right education. (Location 3710)
The whole world is worshipping success. (Location 3711)
You are fed on the glorification of success. (Location 3712)
With achievement of great success there is also great sorrow; but most of us are caught up in the desire to achieve, and success is much more important to us than the understanding and dissolution of sorrow. (Location 3712)
If you had only one hour to live, what would you do? (Location 3716)
Your body grows old—and so does your mind when it is burdened with all the experiences, miseries, and weariness of life; and such a mind can never discover what is truth. (Location 3723)
The mind can discover only when it is young, fresh, innocent; but innocence is not a matter of age. (Location 3725)
The mind must experience, that is inevitable. It must respond to everything—to the river, to the diseased animal, to the dead body being carried away to be burned, to the poor villagers carrying their burdens along the road, to the tortures and miseries of life—otherwise it is already dead; but it must be capable of responding without being held by the experience. (Location 3726)
The mind that dies every day to the memories of yesterday, to all the joys and sorrows of the past—such a mind is fresh, innocent, it has no age; (Location 3730)
To end the fear of death we must come into contact with death, not with the image that thought has created about death, but we must actually feel the state. (Location 3734)
The organism, through usage, through disease, will eventually die. (Location 3737)
It’s not a morbid desire, because perhaps by dying we shall understand living. (Location 3738)
The everyday going to the office, the repetition of pleasure, with its pains, the anxiety, the groping, the uncertainty—that’s what we call living. We have become accustomed to that kind of living. We accept it; we grow old with it and die. (Location 3739)
One must end the image that one has built up about oneself, about one’s family, about one’s relationship, the image that one has built through pleasure, through one’s relationship to society, everything. That is what is going to take place when death occurs. (Location 3742)
Why are you afraid of death? Is it perhaps because you do not know how to live? (Location 3747)
you cannot understand what it is that causes fear and be free of it, then it does not matter very much whether you are living or dead. (Location 3752)
Physical pain is a nervous response, (Location 3759)
psychological pain arises when I hold on to things that give me satisfaction, for then I am afraid of anyone or anything that may take them away from me. (Location 3760)
As medical knowledge helps to prevent physical pain, so beliefs help to prevent psychological pain, and that is why I am afraid of losing my beliefs, though I have no perfect knowledge or concrete proof of the reality of such beliefs. (Location 3764)
When we talk of a spiritual entity, we mean by that something that is not within the field of the mind, (Location 3768)
thought is essentially a product of time. (Location 3771)
“I” is not free of time, therefore it is not spiritual—which is obvious. (Location 3772)
the “I,” the “you” is only a process of thought; (Location 3773)
death, when it comes, does not argue with you. To meet it, you have to die every day to everything: to your agony, to your loneliness, to the relationship you cling to; you have to die to your thought, to die to your habit, to die to your wife so that you can look at your wife anew; you have to die to your society so that you, as a human being, are new, fresh, young, and you can look at it. (Location 3782)
A mind that is frightened has no love—it has habits, it has sympathy, it can force itself to be kind and superficially considerate. But fear breeds sorrow, and sorrow is time as thought. (Location 3785)
by dying to your name, to your house, to your property, to your cause, so that you are fresh, young, clear, and you can see things as they are without any distortion. (Location 3787)
So one has to live every day dying—dying because you are then in contact with life. (Location 3792)
It’s only in death that a new thing comes into being. (Location 3796)
In death there is immortality—not the death of which you are afraid, but the death of previous conclusions, memories, experiences, with which you are identified as the “me.” (Location 3799)
But to call death beautiful, to say how marvelous it is because we shall continue in the hereafter and all that nonsense, has no reality. What has reality is seeing death as it is—an ending; an ending in which there is renewal, a rebirth, not a continuity. (Location 3804)
So what matters is not whether there is reincarnation, but to realize complete fulfillment in the present. (Location 3811)
you can do that only when your mind and heart are no longer protecting themselves against life. (Location 3812)
the mind sees such enormous uncertainty, confusion, nothing permanent in life—nothing. Your relationship to your wife, your husband, your job—nothing is permanent. And so the mind invents a something which is permanent, which it calls the soul. (Location 3837)
it is the invention of a mind that is frightened, (Location 3842)
Karma implies, does it not, cause and effect? (Location 3846)
cause is effect, and effect becomes cause—it is one continuous movement (Location 3849)
Any species that specializes obviously comes to an end. (Location 3851)
The greatness of man is that he cannot specialize. He may specialize technically, but in structure he cannot specialize. (Location 3851)
As long as we regard the cause, the background, the conditioning, as unrelated to the effect, there must be conflict between thought and the background. (Location 3853)
A man who is attached to his family has no love. (Location 3887)
When you say, “I love my wife,” you really do not mean it, because the next moment you are jealous of her. (Location 3888)
But love comes only when the mind is very quiet, disinterested, not self-centered. (Location 3889)
ideals. If you have no love, do what you will—go after all the gods on earth, do all the social activities, try to reform the poor, the politics, write books, write poems—you are a dead human being. (Location 3890)
And with love, do what you will, there is no risk; there is no conflict. (Location 3892)
Surely, as long as I feel hurt, as long as there is fear, as long as I help you hoping that you may help me—which is called service—there is no love. (Location 3899)
existence without love is control, confusion, and pain (Location 3903)
We organize for existence and we accept conflict as inevitable because our existence is a ceaseless demand for power. (Location 3904)
the purpose of an army is to create war. (Location 3907)
Even in so-called peace, the more intellectually efficient we are, the more ruthless, the more brutal, the more callous we become. (Location 3907)
Love is the most dangerous and uncertain element in life; and because we do not want to be uncertain, because we do not want to be in danger, we live in the mind. (Location 3910)
Organizations have never brought order and peace. Only love, only goodwill, only mercy can bring order and peace, ultimately and therefore now (Location 3912)
And is it possible to create a society in which all this corruption and misery does not exist? It can be created only when you and I as individuals break away from the collective, when we are free of ambition and know what it means to love. (Location 3925)
Thought cannot, by any means whatsoever, cultivate compassion. (Location 3930)
Society is not some extraordinary mythical entity; it is our relationship with each other, and if two or three of us change, how will it affect the rest of the world? (Location 3951)
Know the Whole Content of One Thought Not being anything is the beginning of freedom. So if you are capable of feeling, of going into this you will find, as you become aware, that you are not free, that you are bound to very many different things, and that at the same time the mind hopes to be free. And you can see that the two are contradictory. So the mind has to investigate why it clings to anything. All this implies hard work. It is much more arduous than going to an office, than any physical labour, than all the sciences put together. Because the humble, intelligent mind is concerned with itself without being self-centered; therefore it has to be extraordinarily alert, aware, and that means real hard work every day, every hour, every minute…. This demands insistent work because freedom does not come easily. Everything impedes—your wife, your husband, your son, your neighbor, your Gods, your religions, your tradition. All these impede you, but you have created them because you want security. And the mind that is seeking security can never find it. If you have watched a little in the world, you know there is no such thing as security. The wife dies, the husband dies, the son runs away—something happens. Life is not static, though we would like to make it so. No relationship is static because all life is movement. That is a thing to be grasped, the truth to be seen, felt, not something to be argued about. Then you will see, as you begin to investigate, that it is really a process of meditation. But do not be mesmerized by that word. To be aware of every thought, to know from what source it springs and what is its intention—that is meditation. And to know the whole content of one thought reveals the whole process of the mind. (Location 4270)
