Jiddu Krishnamurti:
(Madanapalle, 12 May 1895 – Ojai (USA), 17 February 1986)
Indian-born spiritual teacher and philosopher.
But to discover whether there is anything beyond the imagination of the thinker, there must be freedom from any form of fear.
Do not follow anybody spiritually. Do not obey. Have a free mind. Where there is freedom there is love, and without freedom one remains in prison.
Freedom consists in recognizing boundaries.
A spiritual man is one who does not belong to any religion, to any nation, to any race, who is utterly alone inwardly, in a state of unknowing. For him flows the blessing of the sacred.
Most of us are afraid of dying because we don’t know what life means. We don’t know how to live, therefore we don’t know how to die. As long as we fear life, we will fear death.
If we could establish a deep abiding relationship with nature, we would never kill an animal for our appetite; we would never harm, vivisect, a monkey, a dog, a guinea pig for our benefit. We would find other ways to heal our wounds and our bodies. But the healing of the mind is something totally different. That healing gradually takes place if you are with nature, with that orange on the tree and the blade of grass that pushes through the cement, and the hills covered, hidden, by the clouds.
Longing for the future indicates the desire to avoid the present.
Understanding your own thinking is the end of all your sorrows.
Passion is a pretty scary thing because if you have passion you don’t know where it will lead you.
One is never afraid of the unknown; one is afraid of the known coming to an end.
When you give up all excuses, all hope – not in bitterness, not in cynicism, but because you see with your own eyes that there is nothing but fear and despair, then you have the freedom to look.
When the servant becomes a chief, he becomes of the factors that generate power politics wars, so he becomes directly responsible for those wars.
There is no end to education. It is not that you read a book, pass an examination, and finish with education. The whole of life, from the moment you are born to the moment you die, is a process of learning.
The greater the outward show, the greater the inward poverty.
The mind has to be empty to see clearly.
Man has made incredible progress technically, yet he is still just as warlike, greedy, envious and filled with great sorrow as thousands of years ago.
Freedom is not a reaction to anything, nor is freedom a choice, although we imagine that we are free because we can choose. Freedom is mere perception, without intention, without fear of punishment and without expecting a reward.
Whatever thought produces in the philosophical or religious field remains limited, fragmentary and part of ignorance.
To live perfectly, fully, every day, as if it were of a new loveliness, one must die to everything of yesterday, otherwise one lives mechanically, and a mechanical mind can never know what love or what freedom is.
Freedom is a state in which there is no hatred, no violence, no brutality.
Freedom can only come about naturally, not by wishes, wants, desires, nor will you find it by forming an image of what you think it is.
What frees man from fear – I assure you that this freedom is then complete – is having awareness of fear without naming it, without trying to deny or evade it, without the desire to be in another inner state.
Freedom is something completely different from rebellion.
Living fully and totally in the now means; living with what is, with what is occurring, without condemning or justifying it. Any problem you perceive clearly is solved.
Only when the mind ceases to think in terms of its survival does the unknowable arise.
With the end of thinking begins the essential.
Experiencing a fact without thinking or feeling is an event of great depth.
Don’t try to belong to anything, not some institution or organization. Don’t be someone’s follower or student. You are a human being who lives in this horrible world, a human being who is as the world is, while that world is as you are.
To understand yourself is the beginning of wisdom.
Truth can only come to you; you cannot go to it.
Do not pursue what should be, but understand what is.
Thought is never free because it is based on knowledge, and knowledge is always limited.
Where there is fear there is obviously no freedom, and without freedom there is no love at all.
It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
It’s beautiful to be alone. To be alone does not mean to be lonely. It means the mind is not influenced and contaminated by society.
To listen there must be an inward quietness, a freedom from the strain of acquiring, a relaxed attention.
Beauty is where there is order, a mind that is unconfused, that is absolutely orderly.
Love is a state of being when the activities of the self have ceased.
In that very demand that I must be happy is unhappiness.
Happiness is not old. Happiness is constantly renewing itself.
Happiness is strange; it comes when you are not seeking it.
It is only when the mind is free from the old that it meets everything anew, and in that there is joy.
We seek happiness through things, relationships, ideas or thought. So, things, relationship and ideas, and not happiness, become all-important.
In ambition is a sense of comparison, and so the ambitious man is not a creative man, is never a happy man; in himself he is discontented.
As long as we depend upon another for inward peace, we shall not find it, for dependence only breeds fear.
Happy is the man who is nothing.
Meditation is the understanding of the totality of life.
To go far you must begin very near.
Self-knowledge, or seeing what is false in the I, is the beginning of intelligence.
Self-understanding is an enormous task. It is not to be done casually, later on, tomorrow, but rather every day, every moment, all the time.
Understanding comes not through effort but spontaneously when there is an effortless relaxation.
Fear comes into being when there is ignorance. Since you are ignorant of yourself, there is a lack of confidence and there is fear.
The recognition of ‘what is’ – i.e. to accept and see what you actually are – is in itself a transformation.
I have to study myself in actuality – as I am, not as I wish to be.
The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence.
To be aware is to observe – just to observe – without any self-identifying process.
Meditation is not a withdrawal from life. Meditation is a process of understanding oneself.
Only with the understanding which comes with undivided interest and attention can the problem be solved and transcended.
In awareness there is no becoming, there is no end to be gained. There is silent observation without choice and condemnation, from which there comes understanding.
If awareness is not distorted, dissipated, but allowed to flow into ever deeper and wider comprehension, that very awareness will bring answers.
Meditation is freedom from thought and a movement in the ecstasy of truth.
Become aware of the course of desire; out of that awareness, there is born right thinking.
Word zelfbewust en ontdek waarom je theorieën en verklaringen hebt verzameld.
Not-knowing is freedom. Knowing is prison.
Love, freedom, goodness and beauty are one, not separate.
There is freedom when the entire being, the superficial as well as the hidden, is purged of the past.
Freedom from craving is virtue. And as the mind approaches the eternal, there is the extinction of all desire.
Each of us is a bundle of experiences and reactions. How is one to be free from this complex centre?
To live in the eternal present there must be death to the past, to memory.
It is truth that liberates, not your effort to be free.
Truth is more in the process than in the result.
The moment truth is organized, propagated, it ceases to be the truth. It becomes a lie.
No truth can be found through any organization because truth comes when there is freedom and freedom cannot exist when there is belief.
True reality is not found through following anybody; it is not self-fulfilment. It comes into being only when the self is absent.
Only the mind which is capable of being in a state of not-knowing is free to discover reality.
Truth comes into being from moment to moment only in a state of freedom and spontaneity.
To understand the immeasurable, the mind must be extraordinarily quiet, still.
Right thinking is not possible without thought freeing itself from prejudice and identification.
Ambition produces certain industrial benefits, but in its wake there is the darkening of the mind.
Only the mind that dies from day to day, from moment to moment, to all that it has accumulated, can know what the truth is.
The silent observation of the responses of the mind, without judgment, condemnation, or comparison, brings about revolution.
Your mind becomes ‘useful’ only when there are deep and wide spaces of stillness, for then only can there be timeless creation.
We can never look at a problem totally as long as the mind is merely demanding an answer, seeking inward security.
Where there is fear there is no intelligence.
The constant assertion of belief is an indication of fear.
We know how fear distorts and makes the mind small and also poisons the system.
Each one of us has built up this competitive, ruthless civilization, in which man is against man.
Fear is an extraordinary jewel which has dominated human beings. If you can hold it and look at it, one begins to see the ending of it.
Your intellect has built walls of self-protection against all discovery and spontaneity, against freedom and understanding.
Fear twists our ideas and makes crooked the ways of our life; it creates barriers between people, and it certainly destroys love.
Remain with fear, don’t fight it. The more you fight it, the more there is fear.
The thing you fight, you become.
Can craving ever be satisfied, or is it a bottomless pit?
The whole process of our thinking is based on security. You want security because you do not know what you are.
We have masses of information, knowledge, innumerable beliefs, creeds, dogmas, but we are very shallow and unhappy.
Your mind is overcrowded; there is no space, no stillness in any part of it. Hence confusion, distractions and weariness.
Can the mind be free of the urge for experience, which is really the pursuit of sensation, and thereby make itself new, fresh?
The self is the cause of ignorance and sorrow, and its cause and effect is desire, the craving for power, wealth, fame.
We crave the satisfaction of having a position in society because we are afraid of being nobody.
Without transcending the self, there will always be ignorance and suffering.
Seeing, observing, listening, these are the greatest acts.
Wisdom comes through the understanding of suffering.
Real learning comes about when the competitive spirit has ceased.
Put your books aside, forget your authorities and look at a problem directly.
That is the first thing to learn – not to seek. When you seek you are really only window-shopping.
We can help each other to find the door to reality, but each one must open that door for himself.
Freedom from the known is the essence of intelligence. It is this intelligence in operation in the universe.
The flow of awareness leads to the deep and still pools of wisdom.
If we do not love now, will we love tomorrow?
Here is my secret: I don’t mind what happens.
Truth is a pathless land. Man cannot come to it through any organisation, through any creed, through any dogma, priest or ritual, not through any philosophical knowledge or psychological technique.
To understand oneself requires patience, tolerant awareness; the self is a book of many volumes which you cannot read in a day, but when once you begin to read, you must read every word, every sentence, every paragraph for in them are the intimations of the whole. The beginning of it is the ending of it. If you know how to read, supreme wisdom is to be found.
We want to know the truth about reincarnation, we want proof of the survival of the soul, we listen to the claims of psychics and the conclusions about psychic research, but we never, ever ask how to live – live every day.
Faith is a danger that one must avoid entirely if one is to see the truth of what is.
Truth does not require sacrifice, but understanding.
We have discovered a fundamental truth, namely that the mind that still seeks and craves greater and deeper experience is very shallow and dull because it always lives with its memories.
If you ask yourself, “How can I break free from conflict?”, you create another problem and magnify the conflict, whereas if you want to see it simply as a fact – as you see some object – clearly, directly – you will substantially grasp the truth of a life, in which there is no conflict at all.
From the moment a child learns the name of a bird, it will never really see that bird again.
Observing without judging is the highest form of intelligence.
A mind that is not free does not know what love is – it may know what pleasure is and therefore know fear, which has nothing to do with love. Love can only exist when there is true freedom from the past in the form of knowledge
The ending of sorrow brings love and compassion.
When there is freedom, there is energy; when there is freedom, nothing can go wrong.
Understanding meditation requires order.
Freedom is a state of mind – not freedom from anything, but the feeling of being free, the freedom to question everything and therefore so intense, active and powerful that it throws overboard every form of dependence, bondage, imitation and acceptance.
Faith can never lead to reality.
Like beauty and love, truth does not belong to the realm of possessions
