Jiddu Krishnamurti Quotes

If you are not at all concerned with the world but only with your personal salvation, following certain beliefs and superstitions, following gurus, then I am afraid it will be impossible for you and the speaker to communicate with each other. …We are not concerned at all with private personal salvation but we are concerned, earnestly, seriously, with what the human mind has become, what humanity is facing. We are concerned as human beings, human beings who are not labelled with any nationality. We are concerned at looking at this world and what a human being living in this world has to do, what is his role?

The understanding of relationship, fear, pleasure and sorrow is to bring order in our house. Without order you cannot possibly meditate. Now the speaker puts meditation at the end of the talks because there is no possibility of right meditation if you have not put your house, your psychological house, in order. If the psychological house is in disorder, if what you are is in disorder, what is the point of meditating? It is just an escape. It leads to all kinds of illusions.

The very word "sorrow" colours the fact of sorrow, the pain of it.

And the brain has been trained to record because then in that recording there is safety, there is security, there is strength, a vitality, and therefore in that recording the mind creates the image about oneself. Right? And that image will constantly get hurt. So is it possible to live without a single image? Go into it, sir. Don't please go to sleep. Single image about yourself, about your husband, wife, children, friend and so on, about the politicians, about the priests, about the ideals, not a single shadow of an image? We are saying it is possible, must be, otherwise you will always be getting hurt, always living in a pattern. In that there is no freedom. And when you call me an idiot, to be so attentive at that moment. Right? When you give complete attention there is no recording. It is only when there is not attention, inattention, you record. I wonder if you capture this. Is it getting too difficult? Too abstract? That is, you flatter me. I like it. The liking at that moment is inattention. In that moment there is no attention. Therefore recording takes place. But when you flatter me, instead of calling me an idiot, now you have gone to the other extreme, flatter me, to listen to it so completely, without any reaction, then there is no centre which records.

When man becomes aware of the movement of his own thoughts, he will see the division between the thinker and thought, the observer and the observed, the experiencer and the experience. He will discover that this division is an illusion. Then only is there pure observation which is insight without any shadow of the past or of time. This timeless insight brings about a deep, radical mutation in the mind.

It is man’s pretence that because he has choice he is free. Freedom is pure observation without direction, without fear of punishment and reward. Freedom is without motive; freedom is not at the end of the evolution of man but lies in the first step of his existence.

The individuality is the name, the form and superficial culture he acquires from tradition and environment. The uniqueness of man does not lie in the superficial but in complete freedom from the content of his consciousness, which is common to all humanity.

Psychological knowledge has made us dull.

Can the mind resolve a psychological problem immediately?

Meditation is the emptying of the mind of all thought, for thought and feeling dissipate energy. They are repetitive, producing mechanical activities which are a necessary part of existence. But they are only part, and thought and feeling cannot possibly enter into the immensity of life. Quite a different approach is necessary, not the path of habit, association and the known; there must be freedom from these. Meditation is the emptying of the mind of the known. It cannot be done by thought or by the hidden prompting of thought, nor by desire in the form of prayer, nor through the self-effacing hypnotism of words, images, hopes, and vanities. All these have to come to an end, easily, without effort and choice, in the flame of awareness.

Man, in order to escape his conflicts, has invented many forms of meditation. These have been based on desire, will, and the urge for achievement, and imply conflict and a struggle to arrive. This conscious, deliberate striving is always within the limits of a conditioned mind, and in this there is no freedom. All effort to meditate is the denial of meditation. Meditation is the ending of thought. It is only then that there is a different dimension which is beyond time.

Woke up early this morning with an enormous sense of power, beauty and incorruptibility…in which nothing could exist that could become corrupt, deteriorate. It was too immense for the brain to grasp…limitless, untouchable, impenetrable. Because of its incorruptibility, there was in it beauty. Not the beauty that fades… One felt that in its presence all essence exists and so it was sacred. It was a life in which nothing could perish…With it all there was a sense of power – strength as solid as that mountain. (...) Yesterday, driving through the narrow valley … there was this benediction. It was very strong and everything was bathed in it.The noise of the stream was part of it and the high waterfall… It was like the gentle rain … and one became utterly vulnerable; the body seemed to have become light as a leaf, exposed and trembling. This went on … talk became monosyllabic. The beauty of it seemed incredible.

Thought shattering itself against its own nothingness is the explosion of meditation.

There's a great and unutterable beauty in all this.

If there is no meditation, then you are like a blind man in a world of great beauty, light and colour.