Jiddu Krishnamurti Quotes

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Beyond Violence - JKOnline Daily Quotes

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Can I look at you if I am antagonistic to you or if I am thinking what a marvellous person you are? I can see you only when I look at you with a certain care in which neither of these things is involved. Now, can I look at anger in the same way, which means that I am vulnerable to the problem, I do not resist it, I am watching this extraordinary phenomenon without any reaction to it? It is very difficult to look at anger dispassionately because it is a part of me, but that is what I am trying to do. Here I am, a violent human being, whether I am black, brown, white or purple. I am not concerned with whether I have inherited this violence or whether society has produced it in me; all I am concerned with is whether it is at all possible to be free from it. To be free from violence means everything to me. It is more important to me than sex, food, position, for this thing is corrupting me. It is destroying me and destroying the world, and I want to understand it, I want to be beyond it. I feel responsible for all this anger and violence in the world. I feel responsible - it isn't just a lot of words - and I say to myself, `I can do something only if I am beyond anger myself, beyond violence, beyond nationality'. And this feeling I have that I must understand the violence in myself brings tremendous vitality and passion to find out. - Freedom from the Known

Monday, April 19, 2010

Killing a deer is like killing your neighbour - JKOnline Daily Quotes

Killing a deer is like killing your neighbour

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And one would like to help - no, that's the wrong word - one would like in education to bring death into some kind of reality, actuality, not of someone else dying but of each one of us, however old or young, having inevitably to face that thing. It is not a sad affair of tears, of loneliness, of separation. We kill so easily, not only the animals for one's food but the vast unnecessary killing for amusement, called sport - killing a deer because that is the season. Killing a deer is like killing your neighbour. You kill animals because you have lost touch with nature, with all the living things on this earth. You kill in wars for so many romantic, nationalistic, political, ideologies. In the name of God you have killed people. Violence and killing go together. As one looked at that dead leaf with all its beauty and colour, maybe one would very deeply comprehend, be aware of, what one's own death must be, not at the very end but at the very beginning. Death isn't some horrific thing, something to be avoided, something to be postponed, but rather something to be with day in and day out. And out of that comes an extraordinary sense of immensity. - Krishnamurti to Himself

Sunday, April 18, 2010

How simple it is to be innocent! - JKOnline Daily Quotes

How simple it is to be innocent!

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How simple it is to be innocent! Without innocence, it is impossible to be happy. The pleasure of sensations is not the happiness of innocence. Innocence is freedom from the burden of experience. It is the memory of experience that corrupts, and not the experiencing itself. Knowledge, the burden of the past, is corruption. The power to accumulate, the effort to become destroys innocence; and without innocence, how can there be wisdom? The merely curious can never know wisdom; they will find, but what they find will not be truth. The suspicious can never know happiness, for suspicion is the anxiety of their own being, and fear breeds corruption. Fearlessness is not courage but freedom from accumulation. - Commentaries On Living Series II Chapter9 Effort

Saturday, April 17, 2010

Be dead to love - JKOnline Daily Quotes

Be dead to love

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Q: Of course we can go on endlessly analysing, describing the cause, but will that bridge the gap between the mind and the heart? That's what I want to know. I have read some of the psychological books and our own ancient literature but it doesn't set me on fire, so now I have come to you, though perhaps it may be too late for me. K: Do you really care that the mind and heart should come together? Aren't you really satisfied with your intellectual capacities? Perhaps the question of how to unite the mind and the heart is only academic? Why do you bother about bringing the two together? This concern is still of the intellect and doesn't spring, does it, from a real concern at the decay of your feeling, which is part of you? You have divided life into the intellect and the heart and you intellectually observe the heart withering away and you are verbally concerned about it. Let it wither away! Live only in the intellect. Is that possible? Q: I do have feelings. K: But aren't those feelings really sentimentality, emotional self-indulgence? We are not talking about that, surely. We are saying: Be dead to love; it doesn't matter. Live entirely in your intellect and in your verbal manipulations, your cunning arguments. And when you do actually live there - what takes place? What you are objecting to is the destructiveness of that intellect which you so worship. The destructiveness brings a multitude of problems. You probably see the effect of the intellectual activities in the world - the wars, the competition, the arrogance of power - and perhaps you are frightened of what is going to happen, frightened of the hopelessness and despair of man. So long as there is this division between the feelings and the intellect, one dominating the other, the one must destroy the other; there is no bridging the two. You may have listened for many years to the talks, and perhaps you have been making great efforts to bring the mind and the heart together, but this effort is of the mind and so dominates the heart. Love doesn't belong to either, because it has no quality of domination in it. It is not a thing put together by thought or by sentiment. It is not a word of the intellect or a sensuous response. You say, "I must have love, and to have it I must cultivate the heart". But this cultivation is of the mind and so you keep the two always separate; they cannot be bridged or brought together for any utilitarian purpose. Love is at the beginning, not at the end of an endeavour. - The Only Revolution India Part 3

Friday, April 16, 2010

The observer is the observed - JKOnline Daily Quotes

The observer is the observed

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One image, as the observer, observes dozens of other images around himself and inside himself, and he says, `I like this image, I'm going to keep it' or `I don't like that image so I'll get rid of it', but the observer himself has been put together by the various images which have come into being through reaction to various other images. So we come to a point where we can say, `The observer is also the image, only he has separated himself and observes. This observer who has come into being through various other images thinks himself permanent and between himself and the images he has created there is a division, a time interval. This creates conflict between himself and the images he believes to be the cause of his troubles. So then he says, "I must get rid of this conflict", but the very desire to get rid of the conflict creates another image. Awareness of all this, which is real meditation, has revealed that there is a central image put together by all the other images, and the central image, the observer, is the censor, the experiencer, the evaluator, the judge who wants to conquer or subjugate the other images or destroy them altogether. The other images are the result of judgements, opinions and conclusions by the observer, and the observer is the result of all the other images - therefore the observer is the observed. - Commentaries On Living Series II Chapter 50 Convictions--Dreams

Thursday, April 15, 2010

Is there silence when the mind is disciplined, shaped, controlled? - JKOnline Daily Quotes

Is there silence when the mind is disciplined, shaped, controlled?

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K: Is silence to be cultivated, carefully nurtured and strengthened? And who is the cultivator? Is he different from the totality of your being? Is there silence, a still mind, when one desire dominates all others, or when it sets up resistance against them? Is there silence when the mind is disciplined, shaped, controlled? Does not all this imply a censor, a so-called higher self who controls judges, chooses? And is there such an entity? If there is, is he not the product of thought? Thought dividing itself as the high and the low, the permanent and the impermanent, is still the outcome of the past, of tradition, of time. In this division lies its own security. Thought or desire now seeks safety in silence, and so it asks for a method or a system which offers what it wants. In place of worldly things it now craves the pleasure of silence, so it breeds conflict between what is and what should be. There is no silence where there is conflict, repression, resistance. Q: Should one not seek silence? K: There can be no silence as long as there is a seeker. There is the silence of a still mind only when there is no seeker, when there is no desire. Without replying, put this question to yourself: Can the whole of your being be silent? Can the totality of the mind, the conscious as well as the unconscious, be still? - Commentaries On Living Series II Chapter 50 Convictions-Dreams

To imagine is one thing, and to perceive what is is another

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To imagine is one thing, and to perceive what is is another, but both are binding. It is easy to perceive what is, but to be free of it is another matter; for perception is clouded with judgment, with comparison, with desire. To perceive without the interference of the censor is arduous. Imagination builds the image of the self, and thought then functions within its shadows. From this self-concept grows the conflict between what is and what should be, the conflict in duality. Perception of the fact and idea about the fact, are two entirely different states, and only a mind that is not bound by opinion, by comparative values, is capable of perceiving what is true. - Commentaries On Living Series II Chapter 50 Convictions--Dreams

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Feeling and naming - JKOnline Daily Quotes

Feeling and naming

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Feeling and naming are almost simultaneous, are they not? Can they be separated? Can there be a gap between a feeling and the naming of it? If this gap is really experienced, it will be found that the thinker ceases as an entity separate and distinct from thought. The verbalizing process is part of the self, the `me', the entity who is jealous and who attempts to get over his jealousy. If you really understand the truth of this, then fear ceases. Naming has a physiological as well as a psychological effect. When there is no naming, only then is it possible to be fully aware of that which is called the void of loneliness. Then the mind does not separate itself from that which is. - Commentaries On Living Series II Chapter 53 Envy And Loneliness

Monday, April 12, 2010

An active mind is silent - JKOnline Daily Quotes

An active mind is silent

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This preoccupation with the body prevents adaptablity to the present, the gaining of vitality and movement, however limited. The self, with its preoccupations, brings about its own pains and problems, which affect the body; and concern over bodily ills only further hinders the body. This does not mean that health should be neglected; but preoccupation with health, like preoccupation with truth with ideas, only entrenches the mind in its own pettiness. There is a vast difference between a preoccupied mind and an active mind. An active mind is silent, aware, choiceless. - Commentaries On Living Series II Chapter 46 Silence Of The Mind

Sunday, April 11, 2010

When you are open, there is unending help - JKOnline Daily Quotes

When you are open, there is unending help

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If someone has helped you and you make of him your authority, then are you not preventing all further help, not only from him, but from everything about you? Does not help lie about you everywhere? Why look in only one direction? And when you are so enclosed so bound, can any help reach you? But when you are open, there is unending help in all things, from the song of a bird to the call of a human being, from the blade of grass to the immensity of the heavens. The poison and corruption begin when you look to one person as your authority, your guide, your saviour. - Commentaries On Living Series II Chapter 45 Help

Saturday, April 10, 2010

The very assumption of an attitude is resistance - JKOnline Daily Quotes

The very assumption of an attitude is resistance

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I wonder what we mean by attitude. Why do we want an attitude? What does attitude mean? Taking up a position, coming to a conclusion. I have an attitude about whatever it is, which means I have come to a conclusion after study, after examining, after planning, after probing into the question. I have come to this point, to this attitude, which means that very assumption of an attitude is resistance; therefore that in itself is violence. We cannot have an attitude towards violence or hostility. That means you are interpreting it according to your particular conclusion, fancy, imagination, understanding. What we are saying is: is it possible to look at this hostility in oneself, this creating enmity in oneself, this violence, this brutality in oneself without any attitude, to see the fact as it is? The moment you have an attitude you are already prejudiced, you have taken a side and therefore you are not looking, you are not understanding that fact within yourself. So, Sir, to look at oneself without an attitude, without any opinion, judgment, evaluation, is one of the most arduous tasks. In this looking there is clarity and it is that clarity which is not a conclusion, not an attitude, that dispels this total structure of brutality and hostility. - Talks in Europe 1968 Amsterdam 5th Public Talk 22nd May 1968