multiverse-mind.org Flights into the Abstract

Gems of Krishnamurti

BEAUTY :

BEING :

Being is infinitely more significant than becoming. Being is not the opposite of becoming; if it's the opposite or in opposition, then there is no being. When becoming dies completely, then there's being. But this being is not static; it's not acceptance nor is it mere denial; becoming involves time and space. All striving must cease; then only there is being. Being is not within the field of social virtue and morality. It shatters the social formula of life. This being is life, not the pattern of life. Where life is there's no perfection; perfection is an idea, a word; life, the being, is beyond any formula of thought. It is there when the word, the example, and the pattern are destroyed.

CONSCIOUSNESS :

FREEDOM :

Freedom is to be a light to oneself; then it is not an abstraction, a thing conjured by thought. Actual freedom is freedom from dependency, attachment, from the craving for experience. Freedom from the very structure of thought is to be a light to oneself. In this light all action takes place and thus it is never contradictory. Contradiction exists only when that law, light, is separate from action, when the actor is separate from action. The ideal, the principle, is the barren movement of thought and cannot co-exist with this light; one denies the other. This light, this law, is separate from you; where the observer is, this light, this love, is not. The structure of the observer is put together by thought, which is never new, never free. There is no "how", no system, no practice. There is only the seeing which is the doing. You have to see, not through the eyes of another. This light, this law, is neither yours nor that of another. There is only light. This is love.

-/-

This complex variety, modified changes in the pattern of pleasure and pain, are the content of man's consciousness, shaped and conditioned by the culture in which it has been nurtured, with its religious and economic pressures. Freedom is not within the boundaries of such a consciousness; what is accepted as freedom is in reality a prison made somewhat livable in through the growth of technology. In this prison there are wars, made more destructive by science and profit. Freedom doesn't lie in the change of prisons, nor in any change of gurus, with their absurd authority. Authority does not bring the sanity of order. On the contrary it breeds disorder and out of this soil grows authority. Freedom is not in fragments. A non-fragmented mind, a mind that is whole is in freedom. It does not know it is free; what is known is within the area of time, the past through the present to the future. All movement is time and time is not a factor of freedom. Freedom of choice denies freedom; choice exists only where there is confusion. Clarity of perception, insight, is the freedom from the pain of choice. Total order is the light of freedom. This order is not the child of thought for all activity of thought is to cultivate fragmentation. Love is not a fragment of thought, of pleasure. The perception of this is intelligence. Love and intelligence are inseparable and from this flows action which does not breed pain. Order is its ground.

-/-

Meditation at that hour was freedom and it was like entering into an unknown world of beauty and quietness; it was a world without image, symbol or word, without waves of memory. Love was in the death of every minute and each death was the returning of love. It was not attachment, it had no roots; it flowered without pause and it was a flame which burnt away the borders, the carefully built fences of consciousness. Meditation was joy and with it came benediction.

-/-

There's no escape from loneliness: it is a fact and escape from facts breeds confusion and sorrow. But not to possess anything is an extraordinary state, not even to possess an idea, let alone a person or a thing. When idea, thought, takes root, it has already become a possession and then the war to be free begins. And this freedom is not freedom at all; it's only a reaction. Reactions take root and our life is the ground in which roots have grown. To cut all the roots, one by one, is a psychological absurdity. It cannot be done. Only the fact, loneliness, must be seen and then all other things fade away. 

LIFE/DEATH :

Death means the ending of the known. It means the ending of the physical organism, the ending of all the memory which I am, for I am nothing but memory. And I am frightened to let all that go, which means death. Death means the ending of attachments, that is dying while living, not separated by fifty years or so, waiting for some disease to finish you off. It is living with all your vitality, energy, intellectual capacity and with great feeling, and at the same time, for certain conclusions, certain idiosyncrasies, experiences, attachments, hurts, to end, to die. That is, while living, also live with death. Then death is not something far away, death is not something which is at the end of one’s life, brought about by some accident, disease or old age, but rather an ending to all the things of memory – that is death, a death not separate from living.

-/-

There is no resurrection, that is superstition, a dogmatic belief. Everything on earth, on this beautiful earth, lives, dies, comes into being and withers away. To grasp this whole movement of life requires intelligence, not the intelligence of thought, or books, or knowledge, but the intelligence of love and compassion with its sensitivity... As one looked at that dead leaf with all its beauty and color, maybe one would very deeply comprehend, be aware of, what one’s own death must be, not at the very end but at the 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. 

-/-

Death is everywhere and we never seem to live with it. It is a dark, frightening thing to be avoided, never to be talked of. Keep it away from the closed door. But it is always there. The beauty of love is death and one knows neither. Death is pain and love is pleasure and the two can never meet; they must be kept apart and the division is the pain and agony. This has been from the beginning of time, the division and the endless conflict. There will always be death for those who do not see that the observer is the observed, the experiencer is the experienced. It is like a vast river in which man is caught, with all his worldly goods, his vanities, pains and knowledge. Unless he leaves all the things he has accumulated in the river and swims ashore, death will be always at his door, waiting and watching. When he leaves the river there is no shore, the bank is the word, the observer. He has left everything, the river and the bank. For the river is time and the banks are the thoughts of time: the river is the movement of time and thought is of it. When the observer leaves everything which he is, then the observer is not. This is not death. It is the timeless. You cannot know it, for what is known is of time; you cannot experience it: recognition is made up of time. Freedom from the known is freedom from time. Immortality is not the word, the book, the image, you have put together. The soul, the "me", the atman is the child of thought which is time. When time is not then death is not. Love is.

-/-

Is there depth to life, to existence at all? Is all relationship shallow? Can thought ever discover it? Thought is the only instrument that man has cultivated and sharpened, and when that's denied as a means to the understanding of depth in life, then the mind seeks other means. To lead a shallow life soon becomes wearying, boring, meaningless and from this arises the constant pursuit of pleasure, fears, conflict and violence. To see the fragments that thought has brought about and their activity, as a whole, is the ending of thought. Perception of the whole is only possible when the observer, who is one of the fragments of thought, is not active. Then action is relationship and never leads to conflict and sorrow.

-/-

There is only one movement in life, the outer and the inner; this movement is indivisible, though it is divided. Being divided, most follow the outer movement, of knowledge, ideas, beliefs, authority, security, prosperity and so on. In reaction to this, one follows the so-called inner life, with its visions, hopes, aspirations, secrecies, conflicts, despairs. As this movement is a reaction, it is in conflict with the outer. So there is contradiction, with its aches, anxieties and escapes. There is only one movement, which is the outer and the inner. With the understanding of the outer, then the inner movement begins, not in opposition or in contradiction. As conflict is eliminated, the brain, though highly sensitive and alert, becomes quiet. Then only the inner movement has validity and significance. Out of this movement there is a generosity and compassion which is not the outcome of reason and purposeful self-denial. 

MIND/INTELLIGENCE :

Mind, in which are the brain, thought, feeling and every subtle emotion, fancy and imagination, is an extraordinary thing. All its contents do not make up the mind and yet without them, it is not; it is more than what it contains. Without the mind the contents would not be; they exist because of it. In the total emptiness of the mind, intellect, thought, feeling, all consciousness have their existence. A tree is not the word, nor the leaf, the branch or the roots; the whole of it is the tree and yet it is none of these things. Mind is that emptiness in which the things of the mind can exist but the things are not the mind. Because of this emptiness time and space come into being. But the brain and the things of the brain cover a whole field of existence; it is occupied with its multiple problems. It cannot capture the nature of the mind, as it functions only in fragmentation and the many fragments do not make the whole. And yet it is occupied with putting together the contradictory fragments to make the whole. The whole can never be gathered and put together. The activity of memory, knowledge in action, the conflict of opposing desire, the search for freedom are still within the confines of the brain; the brain can refine, enlarge, accumulate its desires but sorrow will go on. There's no ending of sorrow as long as thought is merely a response of memory, of experience. There's a "thinking" born out of the total emptiness of the mind; that emptiness has no center and so is capable of infinite movement. Creation is born out of this emptiness but it is not the creation of man putting things together. That creation of emptiness is love and death.

-/-

Intelligence is not the mere capacity of design, remembrance and communication; it is more than that. One can be very informed and clever at one level of existence and quite dull at other levels. Their knowledge, however deep and wide, does not necessarily indicate intelligence. Capacity is not intelligence. Intelligence is sensitive awareness of the totality of life; life with its problems, contradictions, miseries, joys. To be aware of all this, without choice and without being caught by any one of its issues and to flow with the whole of life is intelligence. This intelligence is not the result of influence and environment; it is not the prisoner of either of them and so can understand them and thus be free of them. Consciousness is limited, open or hidden, and its activity, however alert, is confined within the borders of time; intelligence is not. Sensitive awareness, without choice, of the totality of life is intelligence. This intelligence cannot be used for gain and profit, personal or collective. This intelligence is destruction and so the form has no significance and reform then becomes a retrogression. Without destruction all change is modified continuity. Psychological destruction of all that has been, not mere outward change, that is the essence of intelligence. Without this intelligence every action leads to misery and confusion. Sorrow is the denial of this intelligence. Ignorance is not the lack of knowledge but of self-knowing; without self-knowing there is no intelligence. Self-knowing is not accumulative as knowledge; learning is from moment to moment. It is not an additive process; in the process of gathering, adding, a center is formed, a center of knowledge, of experience. In this process, positive or negative, there is no understanding, for as long as there is an intention of gathering or resisting, the movement of thought and feeling are not understood, there is no self-knowing. Without self-knowing there's no intelligence. Self-knowing is active present, not a judgment; all self-judgment implies an accumulation, evaluation from a center of experience and knowledge. It is this past that prevents the understanding of the active present. In the pursuit of self-knowing there is intelligence.

-/-

Analysis, personal or professional, does not bring about mutation of consciousness. No effort can transform it; effort is conflict and conflict only strengthens the walls of consciousness. No reason, however logical and sane, can liberate consciousness, for reason is idea wrought by influence, experience and knowledge and all these are the children of consciousness. When all this is seen as false, a false approach to mutation, the denial of the false is the emptying of consciousness. Truth has no opposite nor has love; the pursuit of the opposite does not lead to truth, only the denial of the opposite. There is no denial if it is the outcome of hope or of attaining. There is denial only when there is no reward or exchange. There is renunciation only when there is no gain in the act of renouncing. Denial of the false is the freedom from the positive; the positive with its opposite. The positive is authority with its acceptance, conformity, imitation, and experience with its knowledge. To deny is to be alone; alone from all influence, tradition and from need, with its dependence and attachment. To be alone is to deny the conditioning, the background. The frame in which consciousness exists and has its being is its conditioning; to be choicelessly aware of this conditioning and the total denial of it is to be alone. This aloneness is not isolation, loneliness, self- enclosing occupation. Aloneness is not withdrawal from life; on the contrary it is the total freedom from conflict and sorrow, from fear and death. This aloneness is the mutation of consciousness; complete transformation of what has been. This aloneness is emptiness, it is not the positive state of being, nor the not being. It is emptiness; in this fire of emptiness the mind is made young, fresh and innocent. It is innocency alone that can receive the timeless, the new which is ever destroying itself. Destruction is creation. Without love, there is no destruction. 

TALK/SILENCE :

 There are no ends to words but communication is verbal and non-verbal. The hearing of the word is one thing and the hearing of no word is another; the one is irrelevant, superficial, leading to inaction; the other is non-fragmentary action, the flowering of goodness. Words have given beautiful walls but no space. Remembrance, imagination, are the pain of pleasure, and love is not pleasure.

-/-

The word is not the thing; the image, the symbol is not the real. Reality, truth, is not a word. To put it into words wipes it away and illusion takes its place. The intellect may reject the whole structure of ideology, belief and all the trappings and power that go with them, but reason can justify any belief, any ideation. Reason is the order of thought and thought is the response of the outer. Because it is the outer, thought puts together the inner. No man can ever live only with the outer, and the inner becomes a necessity. This division is the ground on which the battle of "me" and "not me" takes place. The outer is the god of religions and ideologies; the inner tries to conform to those images and conflict ensues. There is neither the outer nor the inner but only the whole. The experiencer is the experienced. Fragmentation is insanity. This wholeness is not merely a word; it is when the division as the outer and inner utterly ceases. The thinker is the thought.

-/-

 Only silence has depth, as love. Silence is not the movement of thought nor is love. Then only the words, deep and shallow, lose their meaning. There is no measurement to love nor to silence. What's measurable is thought and time; thought is time. Measure is necessary but when thought carries it into action and relationship, then mischief and disorder begin. Order is not measurable, only disorder is.

-/-

The great silence with its vast space held the night and every movement of thought became still. The mind itself was the immeasurable space and in that deep quietness there was not a thing that thought had built. To be absolutely nothing is to be beyond measure… Be alone, without word and thought, but only watching and listening. The great silence showed that without it, existence loses its profound meaning and beauty.

THOUGHT :

Thought may put together the inner but it is still the outer. Thought will never find the new for it is old, it is never free. Freedom lies beyond thought. All the activity of thought is not love.

-/-

Control implies division, the controller and the thing to be controlled; this division, as all division, brings about conflict and distortion in action and behavior. This fragmentation is the work of thought, one fragment trying to control the other parts, call this one fragment the controller or whatever name you will. This division is artificial and mischievous. Actually, the controller is the controlled. Thought in its very nature is fragmentary and this causes confusion and sorrow. Thought has divided the world into nationalities, ideologies and into religious sects, the big ones and the little ones. Thought is the response of memories experience and knowledge, stored up in the brain; it can only function efficiently, sanely, when it has security, order. To survive physically it must protect itself from all dangers; the necessity of outward survival is easy to understand but the psychological survival is quite another matter, the survival of the image that thought has put together. Thought has divided existence as the outer and the inner and from this separation conflict and control arise. For the survival of the inner, belief ideology, gods, nationalities, conclusions become essential and this also brings about untold wars, violence and sorrow. The desire for the survival of the inner, with its many images, is a disease, is disharmony. Thought is disharmony. All its images, ideologies, its truths are self-contradictory and destructive. Thought has brought about, apart from its technological achievements, both outwardly and inwardly, chaos and pleasures that soon become agonies. To read all this in your daily life, to hear and see the movement of thought is the transformation that meditation brings about. This transformation is not the "me" becoming the greater "me" but the transformation of the content of consciousness; consciousness is its content. The consciousness of the world is your consciousness; you are the world and the world is you. Meditation is the complete transformation of thought and its activities. Harmony is not the fruit of thought; it comes with the perception of the whole.

-/-

Thought is material and its activity, outer or inner, is materialistic. Thought is measurable and so it is time. Within this area, consciousness is matter. Consciousness is its content; the content is consciousness; they are inseparable. The content is the many things which thought has put together: the past modifying the present which is the future which is time. Time is movement within the area which is consciousness, expanded or contracted. Thought is memory, experience and knowledge, and this memory, with its images and its shadows, is the self, the “me" and the “not me", the “we" and "they". The essence of division is the self with all its attributes and qualities. Materialism only gives strength and growth to the self. The self may and does identify itself with the State, with an ideology, with activities of the "non-me", religious or secular, but it is still the self. Its beliefs are self-created, as are its pleasures and fears. Thought by its very nature and structure is fragmentary, and conflict and war are between the various fragments, the nationalities, the races and ideologies. A materialistic humanity will destroy itself unless the self is wholly abandoned. The abandonment of the self is always of primary importance. And only from this revolution a new society can be put together. The abandonment of the self is love, compassion: passion for all things the starving, the suffering, the homeless and for the materialist and the believer. Love is not sentimentality, romanticism; it is as strong and final as death.

-/-

Knowledge is destructive to discovery. Knowledge is always in time, in the past; it can never bring freedom. But knowledge is necessary, to act, to think, and without action existence is not possible. But action however wise, righteous and noble will not open the door to truth. There's no path to truth; it cannot be bought through any action nor through any refinement of thought. Virtue is only order in a disordered world and there must be virtue, which is a movement of non-conflict. But none of these will open the door to that immensity. The totality of consciousness must empty itself of all its knowledge, action and virtue; not empty itself for a purpose, to gain, to realize, to become. It must remain empty though functioning in the everyday world of thought and action. Out of this emptiness, thought and action must come. But this emptiness will not open the door. There must be no door nor any attempt to reach. There must be no center in this emptiness, for this emptiness has no measurement; it's the center that measures, weighs, calculates. This emptiness is beyond time and space; it's beyond thought and feeling. It comes as quietly, unobtrusively, as love; it has no beginning and end. It's there unalterable and immeasurable. 

TRUTH :

There is no path to truth, historically or religiously. It is not to be experienced or found through dialectics; it is not to be seen in shifting opinions and beliefs. You will come upon it when the mind is free of all the things it has put together.

SOCIETY/SELF-TRANSFORM :

A new consciousness and a totally new morality are necessary to bring about a radical change in the present culture and social structure. This is obvious, yet the left and the right and the revolutionary seem to disregard it. Any dogma, any formula, any ideology, is part of the old consciousness; they are the fabrications of thought whose activity is fragmentation the left, the right, the center. This activity will inevitably lead to bloodshed of the right or of the left or to totalitarianism. This is what is going on around us. One sees the necessity of social, economic and moral change but the response is from the old consciousness thought being the principle actor. The mess, the confusion and the misery that human beings have got into within the area of the old consciousness, and without changing that profoundly, every human activity, political, economic and religious, will only bring us to the destruction of each other and the earth. This is so obvious to the sane.

-/-

Why should all this happen to us? No explanation is good enough, though one can invent a dozen. But certain things are fairly clear.

1. One must be wholly "indifferent" to it coming and going.
2. There must be no desire to continue the experience or to store it away in memory.
3. There must be a certain physical sensitivity, a certain indifference to comfort.
4. There must be self- critical humourous approach.

But even if one had all these, by chance, not through deliberate cultivation and humility, even then, they are not enough. Something totally different is necessary or nothing is necessary. It must come and you can never go after it, do what you will. You can also add love to the list but it is beyond love. One thing is certain, the brain can never comprehend it nor can it contain it. Blessed is he to whom it is given. And you can add also a still, quiet brain.

-/-

It's absolutely necessary for maturity that there should be:

1. Complete simplicity which goes with humility, not in things or possessions but in the quality of being.
2. Passion with that intensity which is not merely physical.
3. Beauty; not only the sensitivity to outward reality but being sensitive to that beauty which is beyond and above thought and feeling.
4. Love; the totality of it, not the thing that knows jealousy, attachment, dependence; not that as divided into carnal and divine. The whole immensity of it.
5. And the mind that can pursue, that can penetrate without motive, without purpose, into its own immeasurable depths; that has no barrier, that is free to wander without time- space.

-/-

The understanding of need is of great significance. There is the outward need, necessary and essential, food, clothes and shelter; but beyond that is there any other need? Though each one is caught up in the turmoil of inward needs, are they essential? The need for sex, the need to fulfil, the compulsive urge of ambition, envy, greed, are they the way of life? Each one has made them the way of life for thousands of years; society and church respects and honors them greatly. Each one has accepted that way of life or, being so conditioned to that life, goes along with it, struggling feebly against the current, discouraged, seeking escapes. And escapes become more significant than the reality. The psychological needs are a defensive mechanism against something much more significant and real. The need to fulfil, to be important springs from the fear of something which is there but not experienced, known. Fulfilment and self-importance, in the name of one's country or party or because of some gratifying belief, are escapes from the fact of one's own nothingness, emptiness, loneliness, of one's own self-isolating activities. The inward needs which seem to have no end multiply, change and continue. This is the source of contradictory and burning desire. Desire is always there; the objects of desire change, diminish or multiply but it is always there. Controlled, tortured, denied, accepted, suppressed, allowed to run freely or cut off, it is always there, feeble or strong. What is wrong with desire? Why this incessant war against it? It is disturbing, painful, leading to confusion and sorrow but yet it is there, always there, weak or rich. To understand it completely, not to suppress it, not to discipline it out of all recognition is to understand need. Need and desire go together, like fulfilment and frustration. There's no noble or ignoble desire but only desire, ever in conflict within itself. The hermit and the party boss are burning with it, call it by different names but it is there, eating away the heart of things. When there is total understanding of need, the outward and the inner, then desire is not a torture. Then it has quite a different meaning, a significance far beyond the content of thought and it goes beyond feeling, with its emotions, myths and illusions. With the total understanding of need, not the mere quantity or the quality of it, desire then is a flame and not a torture. Without this flame life itself is lost. It is this flame that burns away the pettiness of its object, the frontiers, the fences that have been imposed upon it. Then call it by whatever name you will - love, death, beauty. Then it is there without an end.

-/-

There is no virtue, only humility; where it is, there is all virtue. Social morality is not virtue; it is merely an adjustment to a pattern and that pattern varies and changes according to time and climate. It is made respectable by society and organized religion, but it is not virtue. Morality, as recognized by church, society, is not virtue; morality is put together, it conforms; it can be taught and practiced; It can be brought about through reward and punishment, through compulsion. Influence shapes morality as does propaganda. In the structure of society there are varying degrees of morality, of different shades. But it is not virtue. Virtue is not of time and influence; it cannot be cultivated; it is not the result of control and discipline; it is no a result at all as it has no cause. It cannot be made respectable. Virtue is not divisible as goodness, charity, brotherly love and so on. It is not the product of an environment, of social affluence or poverty nor of the monastery nor of any dogma. It is not born out of a cunning brain; it is not the outcome of thought and emotion; nor is it a revolt against social morality, with its respectability; a revolt is a reaction and a reaction is a modified continuity of what has been. Humility cannot be cultivated; when it is, it is pride taking on the cloak of humility which has become respectable. Vanity can never become humility, any more than love can become hate. Violence cannot become non-violence; violence has to cease. Humility is not an ideal to be pursued; ideals have no reality; only what is has reality. Humility is not the opposite of pride; it has no opposite. All opposites are interrelated and humility has no relationship with pride. Pride has to end, not by any decision or discipline or for some profit; it ceases only in the flame of attention, not in the contradiction and confusion of concentration. To see pride, outwardly and inwardly, in its many forms, is the ending of it. To see it is to be attentive to every movement of pride; in attention there is no choice. There is attention only in the active present; it cannot be trained; if it is, then it becomes another cunning faculty of the brain and humility is not its product. There is attention when the brain is utterly still, alive and sensitive, but still. There is no center from which to attend whereas concentration has a center, with its exclusions. Attention, the complete and instant seeing of the whole significance of pride, ends pride. This awakened "state" is humility. Attention is virtue, for in it flowers goodness and charity. Without humility there is no virtue.

SPACE/TIME :

The space that thought creates is measurable and so is limited; cultures and religions are its product. But the mind is filled with thought and is made up of thought; its consciousness is the structure of thought, having little space within it. But this space is the movement of time, from here to there, from its center towards its outer lines of consciousness, narrow or expanding. The space which the center makes for itself is its own prison. Its relationships are from this narrow space but there must be space to live; that of the mind denies living. Living within the narrow confines of the center is strife, pain and sorrow and that is not living. The space, the distance between you and the tree, is the word, knowledge which is time. Time is the observer who makes the distance between himself and the trees, between himself and what is. Without the observer, distance ceases. Identification with the trees, with another or with a formula, is the action of thought in its desire for protection, security. Distance is from one point to another and to reach that point time is necessary; distance only exists where there is direction, inward or outward. The observer makes a separation, a distance between himself and what is; from this grows conflict and sorrow. The transformation of what is takes place only when there is no separation, no time, between the seer and the seen. Love has no distance.

-/-

Time is illusion. There is tomorrow and there have been many yesterdays; this time is not an illusion. Thought which uses time as a means to bring about an inward change, a psychological change is pursuing a non-change, for such a change is only a modified continuity of what has been; such thought is sluggish, postpones, takes shelter in the illusion of gradualness, in ideals, in time. Through time mutation is not possible. The very denial of time is mutation; mutation takes place where the things which time has brought into being, habit, tradition, reform, the ideals, are denied. Deny time and mutation has taken place, a total mutation, not the alteration in patterns nor the substitution of one pattern by another. But acquiring knowledge, learning a technique, require time which cannot and must not be denied; they are essential for existence. Time to go from here to there is not an illusion but every other form of time is illusion. In this mutation, there is attention and from this attention there is a totally different kind of action. Such action does not become a habit, a repetition of a sensation, of an experience, of knowledge which dulls the brain, insensitive to a mutation. Virtue then is not the better habit, the better conduct; it has no pattern, no limitation; it has not the stamp of respectability; it is not then an ideal to be pursued, put together by time. Virtue then is a danger not a tame thing of society. To love then is destruction; a revolution, not economic and social but of total consciousness.