Jiddu Krishnamurti Quotes

Friday, April 9, 2010

We are never alone - JKOnline Daily Quotes

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We are never alone; we are surrounded by people and by our own thoughts. Even when the people are distant, we see things through the screen of our thoughts. There is no moment, or it is very rare, when thought is not. We do not know what it is to be alone, to be free of all association, of all continuity, of all word and image. We are lonely, but we do not know what it is to be alone. The ache of loneliness fills our hearts, and the mind covers it with fear. Loneliness, that deep isolation, is the dark shadow of our life. We do everything we can to run away from it, we plunge down every avenue of escape we know, but it pursues us and we are never without it. Isolation is the way of our life; we rarely fuse with another, for in ourselves we are broken, torn and unhealed. In ourselves we are not whole complete, and the fusion with another is possible only when there is integration within. We are afraid of solitude, for it opens the door to our insufficiency, the poverty of our own being; but it is solitude that heals the deepening wound of loneliness. To walk alone, unimpeded by thought, by the trail of our desires, is to go beyond the reaches of the mind. It is the mind that isolates, separates and cuts off communion. The mind cannot be made whole; it cannot make itself complete, for that very effort is a process of isolation, it is part of the loneliness that nothing can cover. The mind is the product of the many, and what is put together can never be alone. Aloneness is not the result of thought. Only when thought is utterly still is there the flight of the alone to the alone. - Commentaries On Living Series II Chapter 20

Thursday, April 8, 2010

One cannot be violent and meditate - JKOnline Daily Quotes

One cannot be violent and meditate

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Wednesday, April 7, 2010

Religion is life itself - JKOnline Daily Quotes

Religion is life itself

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Krishnamurti: Religion is not separate from life; on the contrary it is life itself. It is this division between religion and life which has bred all the misery you are talking about. So we come back to the basic question of whether it is possible in daily life to live in a state which, for the moment, let us call enlightenment? Questioner: I still don't know what you mean by enlightenment... Krishnamurti: A state of negation. Negation is the most positive action, not positive assertion. This is a very important thing to understand. Most of us so easily accept positive dogma, a positive creed, because we want to be secure, to belong, to be attached, to depend. The positive attitude divides and brings about duality. The conflict then begins between this attitude and others. But the negation of all values, of all morality, of all beliefs, having no frontiers, cannot be in opposition to anything. A positive statement in its very definition separates, and separation is resistance. To this we are accustomed, this is our conditioning. To deny all this is not immoral; on the contrary to deny all division and resistance is the highest morality. To negate everything that man has invented, to negate all his values, ethics and gods, is to be in a state of mind in which there is no duality, therefore no resistance or conflict between opposites. In this state there are no opposites, and this state is not the opposite of something else. Questioner: Then how do you know what is good and what is bad? Or is there no good and bad? What is to prevent me from crime or even murder? If I have no standards what is to prevent me from God knows what aberrations? Krishnamurti: To deny all this is to deny oneself, and oneself is the conditioned entity who continually pursues a conditioned good. To most of us negation appears as a vacuum because we know activity only in the prison of our conditioning, fear and misery. From that we look at negation and imagine it to be some terrible state of oblivion or emptiness. To the man who has negated all the assertions of society, religion, culture and morality, the man who is still in the prison of social conformity is a man of sorrow. Negation is the state of enlightenment which functions in all the activities of a man who is free of the past. It is the past, with its tradition and its authority, that has to be negated. Negation is freedom, and it is the free man who lives, loves, and knows what it means to die. - Freedom, Love and Action Eight Conversations

Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Meditation - JKOnline Daily Quotes

Meditation

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Meditation implies a mind that is so astonishingly clear that every form of selfdeception comes to an end. One can deceive oneself infinitely; and generally meditation, so-called, is a form of self-hypnosis - the seeing of visions according to your conditioning. It is so simple: if you are a Christian you will see your Christ; if you are a Hindu you will see your Krishna, or whichever of the innumerable gods you have. But meditation is none of these things: it is the absolute stillness of the mind, the absolute quietness of the brain. The foundation for meditation has to be laid in daily life; in how one behaves, in what one thinks. One cannot be violent and meditate; that has no meaning. If there is, psychologically, any kind of fear, then obviously meditation is an escape. For the stillness of the mind, its complete quiet, an extraordinary discipline is required; not the discipline of suppression, conformity, or the following of some authority, but that discipline or learning which takes place throughout the day, about every movement of thought; the mind then has a religious quality of unity; from that there can be action which is not contradictory. J. Krishnamurti Beyond Violence Part IV Chapter 2 Commentaries On Living Series II We are never alone; we are surrounded by people and by our own thoughts. Even when the people are distant, we see things through the screen of our thoughts. There is no moment, or it is very rare, when thought is not. We do not know what it is to be alone, to be free of all association, of all continuity, of all word and image. We are lonely, but we do not know what it is to be alone. The ache of loneliness fills our hearts, and the mind covers it with fear. Loneliness, that deep isolation, is the dark shadow of our life. We do everything we can to run away from it, we plunge down every avenue of escape we know, but it pursues us and we are never without it. Isolation is the way of our life; we rarely fuse with another, for in ourselves we are broken, torn and unhealed. In ourselves we are not whole complete, and the fusion with another is possible only when there is integration within. We are afraid of solitude, for it opens the door to our insufficiency, the poverty of our own being; but it is solitude that heals the deepening wound of loneliness. To walk alone, unimpeded by thought, by the trail of our desires, is to go beyond the reaches of the mind. It is the mind that isolates, separates and cuts off communion. The mind cannot be made whole; it cannot make itself complete, for that very effort is a process of isolation, it is part of the loneliness that nothing can cover. The mind is the product of the many, and what is put together can never be alone. Aloneness is not the result of thought. Only when thought is utterly still is there the flight of the alone to the alone. - Commentaries On Living Series II Chapter 20

Monday, April 5, 2010

The state of negation - JKOnline Daily Quotes

The state of negation

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Sunday, April 4, 2010

How does one perceive the whole of anything? - JKOnline Daily Quotes

How does one perceive the whole of anything?

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How does one perceive the whole of anything? The whole of fear, not the broken up of fear in different forms or the fear of the unconscious and the conscious - in the conscious and in the unconsciousness - but the whole of fear. You understand? How does one perceive the whole of fear? How do I perceive the whole of me - the 'me' constructed by thought, isolated by thought, fragmented by thought which in itself is fragmented? So it creates the 'me' and thinks that 'me' is independent of thought. The 'me' thinks it is independent of thought but it has created the 'me' - the 'me' with all its anxieties, fears, vanities, agonies, pleasures, pain, hopes - all that. That 'me' has been created by thought. And that 'me' becomes independent of thought, it thinks it has its own life - like a microphone which is created by thought, and yet it is independent of thought. The mountain is not created by thought but yet it is independent. The 'me' is created by thought and the 'me' says: "I am independent of thought". Now to see the totality - you understand - is this clear now? So what is fear totally - not the various forms of fear, not the various leaves of this tree of fear but the total tree of fear? Right? How does one see the totality of fear? To see something totally or to listen to something completely there must be freedom, mustn't there? Freedom from prejudice, freedom from your conclusion, freedom from your wanting to be free of fear, freedom from the rationalization of fear. Please follow all this. Freedom from the desire to control it - can the mind be free of all that? Otherwise it can't see the whole. I am afraid. I am afraid because of tomorrow, losing a job, afraid I may not succeed, afraid I might lose my position, afraid that there I will be challenged and I'll not be able to reply, afraid of losing my capacity - all the fears that one has. Can you look at it without - please listen - any movement of thought which is time, which causes fear? Have you understood something? - Saanen 4th Public Talk 20th July 1975

Saturday, April 3, 2010

The worshipper is the worshipped. - JKOnline Daily Quotes

The worshipper is the worshipped.

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The worshipper is the worshipped. To worship another is to worship oneself; the image, the symbol, is a projection of oneself. After all, your idol, your book, your prayer, is the reflection of your background; it is your creation, though it be made by another. You choose according to your gratification; your choice is your prejudice. Your image is your intoxicant, and it is carved out of your own memory; you are worshipping yourself through the image created by your own thought. Your devotion is the love of yourself covered over by the chant of your mind. The picture is yourself, it is the reflection of your mind. Such devotion is a form of self-deception that only leads to sorrow and to isolation, which is death. Is search devotion? To search after something is not to search; to seek truth is not to find it. We escape from ourselves through search, which is illusion; we try in every way to take flight from what we are. In ourselves we are so petty, so essentially nothing, and the worship of something greater than ourselves is as petty and stupid as we are. Identification with the great is still a projection of the small. The more is an extension of the less. The small in search of the large will find only what it is capable of finding. The escapes are many and various but the mind in escape is still fearful, narrow and ignorant. The understanding of escape is the freedom from what is. The what is can be understood only when the mind is no longer in search of an answer. The search for an answer is an escape from what is. This search is called by various names, one of which is devotion; but to understand what is, the mind must be silent. - Commentaries On Living Series II Chapter 10 Devotion And Worship

Friday, April 2, 2010

Life - JKOnline Daily Quotes

Life

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Life is a very complex problem and you can't forget the complexity of it by saying 'I won't look at it'. One has to approach it extraordinarily simply, and no formula must be there, no ideology, no choice - mere observation. - Talks in Europe 1967

Thursday, April 1, 2010

Death is total ending - JKOnline Daily Quotes

Death is total ending

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So for us death is total ending, the ending of your attachment - right?-ending all that you have collected. You cannot take it with you. You may like to have it until the last minute, but you cannot possibly take it with you. So please listen. So we have divided life into dying and living. And this division has brought about great fear. And out of that fear we invent all kinds of theories, very comforting, may be illusory, but it is very comforting, illusions are comfortably neurotic. So is it possible, please I am asking you this question, is it possible, as we live, to die to things that we are attached to? Do you understand my question? I am attached to my reputation - God forbid - I am attached to it. And death is coming along, because I am getting older and I am frightened, because I am going to lose everything. So can I be totally free of the image, of the reputation that people have given me? Do you understand? So that you are dying as you are living. I wonder if you understand this? So the division between the living and dying is not miles apart, it is together. I wonder if you understand this please. And if you understand the great beauty of it that each day, or each second there is no accumulation, no psychological accumulation, you have to accumulate clothes with money and so on, that's a different matter, but psychologically there is no accumulation as knowledge, as attachment, saying, `It's mine'. Will you do it? Will you actually do this thing so that this conflict between death and living with all its pain and fear and anxiety comes totally to an end, so that you are - the brain is incarnated? Do you understand? I wonder if you understand all this. The brain is being reborn afresh, so that it has tremendous freedom. - New Delhi 4th Public Talk 13th November, 1983

Wednesday, March 31, 2010

The isolated cannot live - JKOnline Daily Quotes

The isolated cannot live

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The very desire to take shelter through conditioning breeds more strife, more problems; for conditioning is separating, and the separate, the isolated cannot live. The separate, by joining itself to other separates, does not become the whole. The separate is always the isolated, though it may accumulate and gather, expand, include and identify. Conditioning is destructive, disintegrating; but the shallow mind cannot see the truth of this, for it is active in search of truth. This very activity hinders the receiving of truth. Truth is action, not the activity of the shallow, of the seeker, of the ambitious. Truth is the good, the beautiful, not the activity of the dancer, of the planner, of the spinner of words. It is truth that liberates the shallow, not his scheme to be free. The shallow, the mind can never make itself free; it can only move from one conditioning to another, thinking the other is more free. The more is never free, it is conditioning, an extension of the less. The movement of becoming, of the man who wants to become the Buddha or the manager, is the activity of the shallow. The shallow are ever afraid of what they are; but what they are is the truth. Truth is in the silent observation of what is, and it is truth that transforms what is. - Commentaries on Living Series I Chapter 76 Exploitation and Activity