J. Krishnamurti/Freedom from the Known, 111
You are waiting for me to describe what this silence is so that you can compare it, interpret it, carry it away and bury it. It cannot be described. What can be described is the known, and the freedom from the known can come into being only when there is a dying every day to the known, to the hurts, the flatteries, to all the images you have made, to all your experiences.
J. Krishnamurti/Freedom from the Known, 109
It seems to me that one of the greatest stumbling blocks in life is this constant struggle to reach, to achieve, to acquire. We are trained from childhood to acquire and to achieve - the very brain cells themselves create and demand this pattern of achievement in order to have physical security, but psychological security is not within the field of achievement.
J. Krishnamurti/Freedom from the Known, 107
If there is an awareness of how thought begins then there is no need to control thought. We spend a great deal of time and waste a great deal of energy all through our lives, not only at school, trying to control our thoughts -'This is good thought, i must think about it a lot. This is an ugly thought, I must suppress it.' There is a battle going on all the time between one thought an another, one desire and another, one pleasure dominating all other pleasures. But if there is an awareness of the beginning of thought, then there is no contradiction in thought.
J. Krishnamurti/Freedom from the Known, 103
If one wants to see a thing very clearly, one's mind must be very quiet, without all the prejudices, the chattering, the dialogue, the images, the pictures - all that must be put aside to look.
J. Krishnamurti/Freedom from the Known, 103
Thought is crooked because it can invent anything and see things that are not there. It can perform the most extraordinary tricks, and therefore it cannot be depended upon. But if you understand the whole structure of how you think, why you think, the words you use, the way you behave in your daily life, the way you talk to people, the way you treat people, the way you walk, the way you eat- if you are aware of all these things then your mind will not deceive you, then there is nothing to be deceived.
J. Krishnamurti/Freedom from the Known, 102
It is really extraordinarily interesting to watch the operation of one's own thinking, just to observe how one thinks, where that reaction we call thinking, springs from. Obviously from memory. Is there a beginning to thought at all? If there is, can we find out its beginning- that is, the beginning of memory, because if we had no memory we would have no thought.
J. Krishnamurti/Freedom from the Known, 100
Ideas have become far more important to us than action - ideas so cleverly expressed in books by the intellectuals in every field. The more cunning, the more subtle, those ideas are, the more we worship and the books that contain them, We are those books, we are those ideas, so heavily conditioned are we by them. We are foreever discussing ideas and ideals and dialectically offering opinions. Every religion has its dogma, its formula, its own scaffold to reach the gods, and when inquiring into the begining of thought, we are questioning the importance of this whole edifice of ideas. We have separated ideas from action because ideas are always of the past and action is always the present - that is, living is always the present.
J. Krishnamurti/Freedom from the Known, 100
J. Krishnamurti/Freedom from the Known, 99
If one allows a problem to endure for a month or a day, or even for a few minutes, it distorts the mind. So is it possible to meet a problem immediately without any distortion and be immediately, completely, free of it and not allow a memory, a scratch on the mind, to remain?
J. Krishnamurti/Freedom from the Known, 93
Every problem is related to every other problem so that if you can solve one problem completely - it does not matter what it is- you will see that you are able to meet all other problems easily and resolve them. We are talking , of course, of psychological problems.
J. Krishnamurti/Freedom from the Known, 93
Only when we understand the true relationship between each other is there a possibility of love, and love is denied when we have images. Therefore it is important to understand, not intellectually but actually in your daily life, how you have built images about your wife, your husband, your neighbour, your child, your country, your leaders, your politicians, your gods - you have nothing but images.
J. Krishnamurti/Freedom from the Known, 92
When I say I know you, I mean I knew you yesterday. I do not know you actually now. All I know is my image of you. That image is put together by what you have said in praise of me or to insult me, what you have done to me- it is put together by all the memories I have of you- and your image of me is put together in the same way, and it is those images which have relationship and which prevent us from really communing with each other.
J. Krishnamurti/Freedom from the Known, 92
It is only when we see without any preconception, any image, that we are able to be in direct contact with anything in life. All our relationships are really imaginary - that is based on an image formed by thought.
J. Krishnamurti/Freedom from the Known, 91
Beauty lies in the total abandonment of the observer and the observed and there can be self-abandonment only when there is total austerity.
J. Krishnamurti/Freedom from the Known, 91
So long as we ourselves are confused, small, petty, whatever our activity may be, and whatever concept we may have of truth, of God, of beauty or love, our thinking and our action are bound to be equally petty, confused, limited. A confused mind can only think in terms of confusion. A petty mind can never imagine what God is, what truth is, and yet that is what we are occupied with. So it seems to me important to discover whether the mind can transform itself without any compulsion, without any motive. The moment there is compulsion, the mind is already conforming to a pattern. If there is a motive for change, that motive is self-projected; therefore, the change, being a product of self-centered activity, is no change at all. It seems to me that this is the real thing which we have fundamentally to tackle, put our teeth into -and not whom to follow, who is the best leader, and all that rubbish.
J. Krishnamurti/Hamburg 1956, Talk 6
Question: Most of us are caught up in and are bored with the routine of our work, but our livelihood depends on it. Why can we not be happy in our work?
Krishnamurti: Surely, modern civilization is making many of us do work which we as individuals do not like at all. Society as it is now constituted, being based on competition, ruthlessness, war, demands, let us say, engineers and scientists; they are wanted everywhere throughout the world because they can further develop the instruments of war and make the nation more efficient in its ruthlessness. So education is largely dedicated to building the individual into an engineer or a scientist, whether he is fit for it or not. The man who is being educated as an engineer may not really want to be one. He may want to be a painter, a musician, or who knows what else. But circumstances -education, family tradition, the demands of society, and so on- force him to specialize as an engineer. So we have created a routine in which most of us get caught, and then we are frustrated, miserable, unhappy for the rest of our lives. We all know this.
J. Krishnamurti/Hamburg 1956, Talk 5,
So what is it that most of us are afraid of? There are superficial fears, such as the fear of losing a job, and so on, but to those fears we can generally adjust ourselves. If you lose your job, you will find some other way of making a living. The great fear is not for one's social security; it lies much deeper than that. And I do not know if the mind is willing to look at itself so profoundly as to be able to find out for itself what it is intrinsically frightened of. Unless you discover for yourself the deep source of your fear, all efforts to escape from fear, all cultivation of virtue, and so on is of no avail because fear is at the root of most of our anxious urges. So can we find out what it is we are afraid of, each one of us? Is the cause of fear common to us all, like death? Or is it something that each one of us has to discover, look at, go into for himself?
J. Krishnamurti/Hamburg 1956, Talk 5
Your life is shaped, controlled by the society which you have created. You have created the wars, the leaders; you have created the organized religions of which you are now slaves. So your life is predetermined. And to be free, you must first be aware that your life is predetermined, that it is conditioned, that all your responses are more or less the same as those of everybody else throughout the world. Superficially your responses may be different; you may respond one way here, another way in India or in China, and so on, but fundamentally you are held in the framework of your particular conditioning, and you are never an individual. Therefore it is absurd to talk about freedom and self-determination. You can choose between blue cloth and red cloth, and that is about all; your freedom is on that level. If you go into it very deeply, you will find that you are not an individual at all.
But in going into it very deeply, you will also find that you can be free from all this conditioning -as a German, as a Catholic, as a Hindu, as a believer or a nonbeliever. You can be free from it all. Then you will know what it is to have an innocent mind, and it is only such a mind that can find out what is truth.
J. Krishnamurti/Hamburg 1956, Talk 4
And are we individuals -individuals in the sense of being unique? Are we? Or are we merely the result of our conditioning, of innumerable influences, of centuries of tradition? You may like to separate yourself as being of the West, and set yourself still further apart as being German. But are you an individual in the sense of being completely uncorrupted, uninfluenced? Only in that state are you free -not otherwise. Which does not mean anarchy or selfishly individual existence-on the contrary.
But now you are not individuals; you are anything but that. You are German, English, French; you are Catholics, Protestants, communists, something or other. You are stamped, shaped, held within the framework in which you have been brought up, or which you have subsequently chosen. So your life is predetermined.And every Catholic, every churchgoer, every person who belongs to any religious organization -his life is predetermined, fixed; therefore, he is never free. He may talk about freedom, he may talk about love and peace, but he cannot have love and peace, nor can he be free because for him those are mere words.
J. Krishnamurti/Hamburg 1956, Talk 4
