Jiddu Krishnamurti Quotes

Sunday, January 15, 2012

To Destroy Is To Create - JKOnline Daily Quotes

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To be free, you have to examine authority, the whole skeleton of authority, tearing to pieces the whole dirty thing. And that requires energy, actual physical energy, and also, it demands psychological energy. But the energy is destroyed, is wasted when one is in conflict.So when there is the understanding of the whole process of conflict, there is the ending of conflict, there is abundance of energy. Then you can proceed, tearing down the house that you have built throughout the centuries and that has no meaning at all.You know, to destroy is to create. We must destroy, not the buildings, not the social or economic system -this comes about daily- but the psychological, the unconscious and the conscious defenses, securities that one has built up rationally, individually, deeply, and superficially. We must tear through all that to be utterly defenseless, because you must be defenseless to love and have affection. Then you see and understand ambition, authority; and you begin to see when authority is necessary and at what level -the authority of the policeman and no more. Then there is no authority of learning, no authority of knowledge, no authority of capacity, no authority that function assumes and which becomes status. To understand all authority -of the gurus, of the Masters, and others- requires a very sharp mind, a clear brain, not a muddy brain, not a dull brain. - J. Krishnamurti, The Book of Life

Friday, January 13, 2012

Authority Prevents Learning - JKOnline Daily Quotes

Authority Prevents Learning

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We generally learn through study, through books, through experience, or through being instructed. Those are the usual ways of learning. We commit to memory what to do and what not to do, what to think and what not to think, how to feel, how to react. Through experience, through study, through analysis, through probing, through introspective examination, we store up knowledge as memory; and memory then responds to further challenges and demands, from which there is more and more learning. What is learned is committed to memory as knowledge, and that knowledge functions whenever there is a challenge, or whenever we have to do something.Now I think there is a totally different way of learning, and I am going to talk a little bit about it; but to understand it, and to learn in this different way, you must be completely rid of authority; otherwise, you will merely be instructed, and you will repeat what you have heard. That is why it is very important to understand the nature of authority. Authority prevents learning -learning that is not the accumulation of knowledge as memory. Memory always responds in patterns; there is no freedom. A man who is burdened with knowledge, with instructions, who is weighted down by the things he has learned, is never free. He may be most extraordinarily erudite, but his accumulation of knowledge prevents him from being free, and therefore he is incapable of learning. - J. Krishnamurti, The Book of Life

Learning Has No Past

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Wisdom is something that has to be discovered by each one, and it is not the result of knowledge. Knowledge and wisdom do not go together. Wisdom comes when there is the maturity of self-knowing. Without knowing oneself, order is not possible, and therefore there is no virtue.Now, learning about oneself, and accumulating knowledge about oneself, are two different things. A mind that is acquiring knowledge is never learning. What it is doing is this: It is gathering to itself information, experience as knowledge, and from the background of what it has gathered, it experiences, it learns; and therefore it is never really learning, but always knowing, acquiring.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. It is only a mind that is not acquiring, but always learning, it is only such a mind that can understand this whole entity that we call the "me," the self. I have to know myself, the structure, the nature, the significance of the total entity; but I can't do that burdened with my previous knowledge, with my previous experience, or with a mind that is conditioned, for then I am not learning, I am merely interpreting, translating, looking with an eye that is already clouded by the past. - J. Krishnamurti, The Book of Life

Monday, January 9, 2012

Learning Is Not Experience - JKOnline Daily Quotes

Learning Is Not Experience

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The word 'learning' has great significance. There are two kinds of learning. For most of us learning means the accumulation of knowledge, of experience, of technology, of a skill, of a language. There is also psychological learning, learning through experience, either the immediate experiences of life, which leave a certain residue, of tradition, of the race, of society. There are these two kinds of learning how to meet life: psychological and physiological; outward skill and inward skill. There is really no line of demarcation between the two; they overlap. We are not considering for the moment the skill that we learn through practice, the technological knowledge that we acquire through study. What we are concerned about is the psychological learning that we have acquired through the centuries or inherited as tradition, as knowledge, as experience. This we call learning, but I question whether it is learning at all. I am not talking about learning a skill, a language, a technique, but I am asking whether the mind ever learns psychologically. It has learned, and with what it has learned it meets the challenge of life. It is always translating life or the new challenge according to what it has learned. That is what we are doing. Is that learning? 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. - J. Krishnamurti, The Book of Life

To Learn, the Mind Must Be Quiet

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o discover anything new you must start on your own; you must start on a journey completely denuded, especially of knowledge, because it is very easy, through knowledge and belief, to have experiences; but those experiences are merely the products of self-projection and therefore utterly unreal, false. If you are to discover for yourself what is the new, it is no good carrying the burden of the old, especially knowledge -the knowledge of another, however great. You use knowledge as a means of self-projection, security, and you want to be quite sure that you have the same experiences as the Buddha or the Christ or X. But a man who is protecting himself constantly through knowledge is obviously not a truth-seeker.For the discovery of truth there is no path. When you want to find something new, when you are experimenting with anything, your mind has to be very quiet, has it not? If your mind is crowded, filled with facts, knowledge, they act as an impediment to the new; 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. Thus knowledge and learning are impediments for those who would seek, for those who would try to understand that which is timeless. - J. Krishnamurti, The Book of Life

Sunday, January 8, 2012

I Do Not Know - JKOnline Daily Quotes

I Do Not Know

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If one can really come to that state of saying, "I do not know," it indicates an extraordinary sense of humility; there is no arrogance of knowledge; there is no self-assertive answer to make an impression. When you can actually say, "I do not know," which very few are capable of saying, then in that state all fear ceases because all sense of recognition, the search into memory, has come to an end; there is no longer inquiry into the field of the known. Then comes the extraordinary thing. If you have so far followed what I am talking about, not just verbally, but if you are actually experiencing it, you will find that when you can say, "I do not know," all conditioning has stopped. And what then is the state of the mind?We are seeking something permanent -permanent in the sense of time, something enduring, everlasting. We see that everything about us is transient, in flux, being born, withering, and dying, and our search is always to establish something that will endure within the field of the known. But that which is truly sacred is beyond the measure of time; it is not to be found within the field of the known. The known operates only through thought, which is the response of memory to challenge. If I see that, and I want to find out how to end thinking, what am I to do? Surely, I must through self-knowledge, be aware of the whole process of my thinking. I must see that every thought, however subtle, however lofty, or however ignoble, stupid, has its roots in the known, in memory. If I see that very clearly, then the mind, when confronted with an immense problem, is capable of saying, "I do not know," because it has no answer. - J. Krishnamurti, The Book of Life

Saturday, January 7, 2012

To Learn, the Mind Must Be Quiet - JKOnline Daily Quotes

To Learn, the Mind Must Be Quiet

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Look with Intensity

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It seems to me that learning is astonishingly difficult, as is listening also. 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. I think, or rather, it is a fact that 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, but unfortunately you never do listen, as you have never learned about it. After all, you only learn when you give your whole being to something. 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. To learn is like reading a novel with innumerable characters; it requires your full attention, not contradictory attention. If you want to learn about a leaf -a leaf of the spring or a leaf of the summer you must really look at it, see the symmetry of it, the texture of it, the quality of the living leaf. There is beauty, there is vigor, there is vitality in a single leaf. So to learn about the leaf, the flower, the cloud, the sunset, or a human being, you must look with all intensity. - J. Krishnamurti, The Book of Life

Friday, January 6, 2012

Listening to Yourself - JKOnline Daily Quotes

Listening to Yourself

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Q: While I am here listening to you, I seem to understand, but when I am away from here, I don't understand, even though I try to apply what you have been saying. K: . . . You are listening to yourself, and not to the speaker. 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. So what you are doing here is listening to yourself. You are looking at the picture the speaker is painting, which is your own picture, not the speaker's. If that much is clear, that you are looking at yourself, then you can say, "Well, I see myself as I am, and I don't want to do anything about it" and that is the end of it. But if you say, "I see myself as I am, and there must be a change," then you begin to work out of your own understanding which is entirely different from applying what the speaker is saying. 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. - J. Krishnamurti, The Book of Life

Listening Without Effort

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You are now listening to me; you are not making an effort to pay attention, you are just listening; and if there is truth in what you hear, you will find a remarkable change taking place in you -a change that is not premeditated or wished for, a transformation, a complete revolution in which the truth alone is master and not the creations of your mind. And if I may suggest it, you should listen in that way to everything -not only to what I am saying, but also to what other people are saying, to the birds, to the whistle of a locomotive, to the noise of the bus going by. You will find that the more you listen to everything, the greater is the silence, and that silence is then not broken by noise. 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. - J. Krishnamurti, The Book of Life

Thursday, January 5, 2012

Listening Brings Freedom - JKOnline Daily Quotes

Listening Brings Freedom

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When you make an effort to listen, are you listening? Is not that very effort a distraction that prevents listening? Do you make an effort when you listen to something that gives you delight? . . . You are not aware of the truth, nor do you see the false as the false, as long as your mind is occupied in any way with effort, with comparison, with justification or condemnation. . . .Listening itself is a complete act; the very act of listening brings its own freedom. But are you really concerned with listening, or with altering the turmoil within? 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. You see, 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. - J. Krishnamurti, The Book of Life

Tuesday, January 3, 2012

Listening Without Thought - JKOnline Daily Quotes

Listening Without Thought

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I do not know whether you have listened to a bird. To listen to something demands that your mind be quiet -not a mystical quietness, but just quietness. I am telling you something, and to listen to me you have to be quiet, not have all kinds of ideas buzzing in your mind. 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. Therefore, I am saying that it is one of the most difficult things to listen -to listen to the communist, to the socialist, to the congressman, to the capitalist, to anybody, to your wife, to your children, to your neighbor, to the bus conductor, to the bird- just to listen. 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. - J. Krishnamurti, The Book of Life

Beyond the Noise of Words

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Listening is an art not easily come by, but in it there is beauty and great understanding. We listen with the various depths of our being, but our listening is always with a preconception or from a particular point of view. We do not listen simply; there is always the intervening screen of our own thoughts, conclusions, and prejudices. To listen there must be an inward quietness, a freedom from the strain of acquiring, a relaxed attention. This alert yet passive state is able to hear what is beyond the verbal conclusion. Words confuse; they are only the outward means of communication; but to commune beyond the noise of words, there must be in listening an alert passivity. Those who love may listen; but it is extremely rare to find a listener. Most of us are after results, achieving goals; we are forever overcoming and conquering, and so there is no listening. It is only in listening that one hears the song of the words. - J. Krishnamurti, The Book of Life

Monday, January 2, 2012

Your Gods Are Dividing You - JKOnline Daily Quotes

Your Gods Are Dividing You

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What is happening in the world? You have a Christian God, Hindu Gods, Mohammedans with their particular conception of God, each little sect with their particular truth; and all these truths are becoming like so many diseases in the world, separating people. These truths, in the hands of the few, are becoming the means of exploitation. You go to each, one after the other, tasting them all, because you begin to lose all sense of discrimination, because you are suffering and you want a remedy, and you accept any remedy that is offered by any sect, whether Christian, Hindu, or any other sect. So, what is happening? Your gods are dividing you, your beliefs in God are dividing you and yet you talk about the brotherhood of man, unity in God, and at the same time deny the very thing that you want to find out, because you cling to these beliefs as the most potent means of destroying limitation, whereas they but intensify it. These things are so obvious. - J. Krishnamurti, The Book of Life

To Climb High One Must Begin Low

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Religious organizations become as fixed and as rigid as the thoughts of those who belong to them. Life is a constant change, a continual becoming, a ceaseless revolution, and because an organization can never be pliable, it stands in the way of change; it becomes reactionary to protect itself. The search for truth is individual, not congregational. To commune with the real there must be aloneness, not isolation, but freedom from all influence and opinion. Organizations of thought inevitably become hindrances to thought.As you yourself are aware, the greed for power is almost inexhaustible in a so-called spiritual organization; this greed is covered over by all kinds of sweet and official-sounding words, but the canker of avariciousness, pride and antagonism is nourished and shared. From this grow conflict, intolerance, sectarianism, and other ugly manifestations.Would it not be wiser to have small informed groups of twenty or twenty-five persons, without dues or membership, meeting where it is convenient to discuss gently the approach to reality? To prevent any group from becoming exclusive, each member could from time to time encourage and perhaps join another small group; thus, it would be extensive, not narrow and parochial.To climb high one must begin low. Out of this small beginning one may help to create a more sane and happy world. - J. Krishnamurti, The Book of Life

Sunday, January 1, 2012

Listening Without Thought - JKOnline Daily Quotes

Listening Without Thought

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Beyond the Noise of Words

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