The Mind of J. Krishnamurti
Edited by S. R. Vas (1989)

People need to be awakened, not instructed. (p.16)

My teaching is neither mystic nor occult. For I hold that both mysticism and occultism are man’s limitation upon truth. Life is more important than any beliefs or dogmas, and in order to allow life its full fruition you must liberate it from beliefs, authority, and tradition. But those who are bound by these things will have a difficulty in understanding truth.

Think and love. (p.21)

Of what importance is that to which you cling, if doubt can destroy it ? Of what value are your traditions, your beliefs, and your accumulations, if doubt is capable of sweeping them away ? A man who is afraid of doubt will never find the truth. Doubt is a precious ointment; it heals though it burns greatly. If you are afraid of little burns, you will never destroy the impurities you have accumulated throughout your lives. In avoiding life, in fearing life, you shelter yourself in decaying things, and in that shelter there is sorrow, but in inviting doubt you will create that which will be eternal, and bear the stamp of happiness. (p.22)

Trust life. (p.23)

I have nothing to offer you. (p.31)

Those who wish to understand my point of view, who have a desire to attain that which I have attained, can in no manner compromise with the unrealities, with the unessentials that surround them. Through their own ecstatic desire to attain they must impose on themselves the self-discipline of which I am going to speak. I want this perfectly understood. Of what use is a vast horde of people who always compromise, a vast number who are uncertain, vague, frightened, doubtful ? If there are three who have become a flame of Truth, who are a danger to everything around them that is unessential, those three and I will create a new understanding, a new delight, a new world. I am going to find one or three or half a dozen who are absolutely certain and determined, who have finished with all compromise. The rest will follow leisurely at their convenience, because they needs must suffer more, learn more.

Man being free, is wholly responsible to himself, unguided by any plan, by any spiritual authority, by any divine dispensation whatsoever. As he is free, he is, by that very freedom, limited. If you were not free, you would have a different world from that which exists at present. As the will in everyone is free, it is limited, and because the self is small, without determination or purpose at the beginning, it chooses, it discriminates, has its likes and has its dislikes. In the removal of that limitation, which is self-imposed on the self, lies the glory of the fulfilment of the self, the freedom of the self.

This attainment is not brought about by ecstasy, nor does it lie in the abandoning of oneself to works or to meditation, or in the blind following of another, or in immolation of oneself to a cause. Because the “I”, the self, is in process of achieving, it is creating barriers between itself and its fulfilment, by its eagerness, its struggles, through fear, through innumerable complications. To remove these barriers of limitation, you need constant awareness, constant watchfulness, constant self-reflection, which must be imposed on yourself, never by another. But if you discipline yourself unconsciously, without knowing where you are going, that self-discipline itself becomes a barrier. Understand the purpose of life, and from that very understanding will arise self-discipline. Self-discipline must be born out of the love of Life-vast, immeasurable, whole, unconditioned, limitless, to which all humanity belongs. Because you love that freedom which is absolute, which is Truth itself, which is harmony; by the very force of that love, your self-discipline will make you incorruptible; so you must nourish that love. The incorruptibility of the self is the perfection of life.

Till man is made incorruptible by himself, he will know no happiness, he will be held in the bondage of friendship and the fear of loneliness. The weariness of strife will still hold him. Men must be created who are great in the serenity of harmony. Such men must be born in you. Such men must give rise to new transformations, must become a flame to burn away the dross danger to all unessential, childish things.

To become such men you must live in the eternal now, in that moment of eternity which is neither the future nor the past. In you must be concentrated that understanding, that immense power which shall destroy the unrealities, the unessential things that surround the self. Such men by their lives will create a new world, a new understanding. It is your life that matters, what you do, what you think, not what you preach, not in what manner you cast a shadow on the face of life.

All this may seem immense, vague, uncertain, impossible to achieve; but you must go after it, even though you are weak, these are all small as compared with the everlasting. (p.44-46)

We all know that human consciousness can be disturbed with stimulants. An alcoholic drink will do that much for you. But then you are back next morning where you were before, when the effect of the drink is gone, feeling worse and miserable for your experience. Truly great experiences are those which happen on their own, without any effort on the part of the individual to manipulate them – for himself or for others. (p.50)

These experiences (yogic), however profound they may appear to be, remain within the sphere of time. For me hypnosis, drugs or yoga are all attempts at self-delusion.

It was not a change of ‘attitudes’ (breaking with the Order of the Star). It was a total change which I experienced, if I may put it that way. I felt that the truth about life had to be discovered by each individual for himself. The whole concept of Gurus and Followers became unreal to me, and I had to step aside from that position which I realised was a false one.

I have been teaching, but at a totally different level (not as a Guru). I am certainly all for sharing one’s thoughts with others. In that light, I would be willing to accept any of the great teachers, Christ or Buddha or any one else. I only object to a cult being woven around them where the figure of the teacher becomes more important than his words or his thoughts. (p.51)

Man’s discovery of God ceases to be a discovery if he begins this search with a foregone conclusion in his mind. Most religions impose a certain image of the type of God they would want their followers to worship. Whereas to mind, in the search for truth, which to me is the search for God, the choice does not rest with us as to what to reject or accept. Truth, God, call it what you will, is an awareness of the totality of existence, of our hopes and desires, our ambitions, our greed, our loves and thousands of other emotions which constitute what passes for the living individual. I believe organized religions stand in the way of this awareness of the totality of existence.

Mind has its own place, a unique place in our lives. Without the use of your mind you won’t be able to find your way back home, and I won’t be able to conduct this conversation without its help. But mind can only move in the sphere of the known, in the sphere of time. Whereas we refer to God as the unknown the timeless, is it not ? Till a certain stage, in the three dimensions world, our mind can serve us to our advantage. But to reach the fourth dimension of existence, the mind instead of moving along the horizontal plane, must learn to shoot up vertically as it were and explode for the timeless, for the unknown to be. (p.52)

[How do you see this worked our in practice, in the routine life of the millions who seek God ?]

In their sensitivity, in their ability to remain open for the new. I do not like the word God: it smacks of anthropomorphism. But in a man’s sensitivity to, in his choiceless awareness of the totality of existence, in this alone I find whatever meaning the word God conveys.

Day-to-day living is more valuable for me, for it is through this that one unfolds the meaning of existence.

We form a relationship and later get into the habit of looking at it from a fixed point of view – whether the relationship is with one’s wife, or one’s children, or one’s neighbours. Such relationships cease to be creative; they become dead. To have a moving relationship one has to be aware of the others as they are , from moment to moment, one has to be responsive to them, in short one has to be sensitive. Habit of any kind dulls sensitivity. We must be willing to accept the change in others and willing to change ourselves. ‘Willing’ is perhaps not the correct expression. If we are sensitive, we cannot help noticing how time and circumstances modify others and we cannot help being impressed ourselves by the same process. Sensitivity demands the ability to have serene mind, a mind which is not preoccupied with itself, a mind which is receptive, which is an open mind, a mind which is not always getting hurt at what it sees or perceives. (p.53)

If some one sticks a pin into you, you are bound to react – protect yourself, or cry out in pain, or take yourself away from the offending agent – your reaction depending on several factors, varying from man to man, I mean hurt in the sense of nursing hatred. An event is over and for years we keep brooding over it working ourselves up into a state of passion. The challenge of existence ever demands a fresh approach on our part to an issue or to an individual. A mind which nurses hatred, or for that matter nurses joy, long after the event is over, ceases to be sensitive. Sensitivity is my equivalent of meditation, which brings you its own rewards.

By being what you really are (one can achieve this sensitivity). By trying to see what is. You see genetically, or through earlier conditioning, I have acquired a certain type of character. It is there, a part of myself, like my nose or the shape of my chin. Now I must try and see myself as I am, and I must make no effort to be anything else.

I am not advocating self-indulgence, that a hypocrite should continue to be hypocrite or a thief remain a thief. I should not submit to my weakness, but I should not indulge in the opposite of my weakness either as a way of getting rid of it.

I’ll make it clear. Let us say I am given to hating others. Now I must not go and start loving them, making love as a panacea for my foolish temperament. That way I shall never learn to grow out of my hateful nature. I will only be generating contradictions in myself, running from one conflict to another. What is wanted of me is to accept the fact that I hate others and then go into the cause of this. I should ask myself: why do I hate ? Is it that I expect too much from life ? Am I in any respect frustrated? What is it that I want ? Am I capable enough to get it ? I should ask myself all this, and stay in this state of exploration, without making any deliberate effort on my part to get rid of my malady. Suddenly, I will discover that a transformation takes place in myself, without any planning on my part, a creative transformation. My sensitivity has now come into play! (p.54-55)

It is a fear only if we see death as an event in time. We imagine death waiting for us far ahead, and in the course of the years we build up a terror of this enemy which is lying behind the bush to pounce on us.

Now the thing to do is to bring death closer to our daily life. Instead of letting it sit there at other end of our life, let us bring it nearer, to the present day. We will discover then that death is there in everything: in our relationship with others, in the cells of our body as we continue to live, a constant change which is the law of life. If we keep this fact before us and learn the art of dying every day to some part of ourselves, old memories, old relationships, the fear of death will vanish. The art of living to a large extent consists of learning the art of dying. It will then give rise to that play of sensitivity about which I spoke earlier. The actual death of the body one day, as you know, is unavoidable.

[But what do you think of the hereafter ?]

No one knows the answer. (p.55)

[But do you hold out the hope of some kind of survival of man’s personality after death ?]

That is the repetitive desire of holding on to the known, to the familiar facets of life, is it not? The hereafter belongs to the unknown. Any attempt to affirm or deny its existence will take us away from the truth of it, which truth is that no one knows the answer. (p.55-56)

Most of these schools, whether it is Buddhism or Vedanta or any other, suggest a “path” – the middle path, the negative path and the like, I suggest no path at all. For a path implies effort or practice, and the immeasurable can only be faced by a person in keeping himself free of effort, in a state of alert readiness for the new, in a state without fear or hope.

I’m very fond of India. (p.56)

I’ve my home in the world. (p.57)

It is wrong, he said to regard liberation as annihilation. It is more truly a beginning. And yet, in one sense, it is not a beginning at all, since pure life is altogether out of Time.

A goal it is, for those who are striving to reach it; but in itself it is more truly a starting point.

There is nothing in liberation, as such, he went on, to preclude further activity in the phenomenal worlds. There can, of course, be no compulsion, since freedom from compulsion is implicit in the idea of liberation. But if the liberated life so wills, it can manifest itself in the worlds of matter; and, in so far as it enters into those worlds, it will come under the law of those worlds, which is evolution.

But even if it does so, the growth which will then ensue will be of a different kind from that which preceded liberation. For it will be a growth informed by absolute, or pure life. Formerly there was (or seemed to be) an Ego, and growth appeared as the unfolding of this. Now there is no longer an Ego; it has disappeared for ever at liberation. What we have therefore to grasp, if we can – and it is no easy matter – is the idea of a universal life building up fresh instruments for its self-expression; those instruments being in the world of form and so having, in that world, the outward appearance of individuality. The chief mark of post-liberation activity will be that it is absolutely natural, effortless, spontaneous, unselfconscious. The life thus manifested in the material worlds will have its roots in the Eternal. It will have realised its own universality. And, because there is no longer any sense of separate “I-Ness” to obstruct things, its activity will be as simple and as natural as that of a flower. (p.59-60)

It does preserve what may be called a sense of self-identity. It still, so to speak, looks out on the world through its own eyes and refers all its experience to itself. But this “self” is not an Ego. It is that far more subtle thing – individual uniqueness. And here we come to another thing which must almost elude our powers of thought. Individual uniqueness is not a differentiation on the form side, as the Ego is. It is a differentiation inherent in the life itself, and it only comes into full action, if one may put it so, when the Ego has ceased to exist. Such uniqueness is what makes every individual life different from every other and gives it its own centre of consciousness; and even when the universal life has been realised, this uniqueness remains. One may speak of it as that pure abstract “form” of individuality, which remains when all the egoism has been drained from it. It is individual, and at the same time it is universal. The nearest we can go to it in concrete language, is to describe it as the focus through which the universal life is released, and through which it manifests freely after liberation. For a human being there can be no complete merging in the Absolute, in the sense of evaporation into the Totality of Life. The differentiation, however, abstract and tenuous, involved in this individual uniqueness is everlasting; and it is this that makes possible any subsequent evolutionary growth, which the liberated life may still experience in the world of form, if it so wills. (p.60-61)

We can see that to talk of so-and-so “obtaining liberation” is a misuse of terms. That which is liberated is always life, not the individual. Indeed it is at the expense of the individual that such liberation is achieved. Life alone benefits by the transaction. It is true that the individual uniqueness, which persists on both sides of the liberating process, finds that, instead of belonging to the Ego, it has really all along belonged to the life universal. But that discovery is made at, or after, liberation. The process towards liberation must always seem like the killing out of individuality – hence its painfulness. (p.61)

Liberation, then, is the liberating of life by the destruction of separateness, so that this life can thenceforward function in its fullness through the pure form of individual uniqueness.

There is one simple mark, which holds good of every manifestation of pure, or universal, life. It is that it acts but never reacts. Until we have got rid of the Ego, most our conscious life is made up of reactions. Take love, for example. This is, in most cases, a reaction set up within us by some person who happens to attract us. A person who does not happen to set up this reaction, we do not love. But after liberation, when pure life is at work, what occurs is quite the reverse. Then love becomes life-force going out from ourselves. It may be compared to a searchlight, which renders loveable all on whom its beam may happen to fall.

The liberated life means the poise of love and reason. (p.62)

No impact from outside can disturb its equilibrium; on the contrary, it is ever ready to leap forth in any direction, as soon as the impulse comes from within.

The great thing that we have all to do, therefore, said Krishnamurti, is gradually to change our reactions into actions. Every movement of the life within us must become self-originating. We must cease to be stirred either by attraction or repulsion from without, and must set up an outward-going life which will bestow its own qualities upon the world about it. Such substitution of pure action for reaction is the true detachment; for it is, of its own nature, indifferent to objects. It is also liberation; for the sole life of the Ego – which itself is the sole obstacle to freedom – consists in reactions. Abolish the reactions and substitute pure actions and the Ego automatically disappears. (p.63)

Liberation is a matter of life and not of forms. (p.64)

The idea that liberation can be won “in moments”, and that each such moment has the essential quality of full liberation, is one on which K laid much stress. That is why he speaks sometimes of the necessity of aiming at perfection in all the little things of life. For “perfection” is that quality which automatically supervenes when absolute life is touched. It is the natural and spontaneous expression of pure life. Consequently to aim at perfection in small details is to aim, indirectly, at the release of pure life; and any perfect action, no matter how small, is thus a liberation. By doing this, K said, we can, so to speak, set up a “habit of liberation”, long before the final freedom is achieved. (p.64-65)

It’s important to think rightly in order to release something creative. To think rightly you must know yourself. To know yourself you must be detached, absolutely honest, free from judgement. It means continual awareness of one’s thoughts and feelings during the day without acceptance or rejection, like watching a movie of oneself.

In order to watch more closely, it’s necessary to slow down the mental process. Close examination will automatically do this, like slowing down the movie. (p.67)

When I’m giving a lecture my whole attention is on the audience, but the recording process continues; afterwards I can look at my inward reactions. If I’m talking to someone about something that occupies merely my superficial attention, or if I’m doing something such as washing dishes, then I’m aware of what’s going on inside of me; but I can’t give my whole attention to think about it until I’m alone.

Once begun and given the right environment, awareness is like a flame. It will grow immeasurably. The difficult thing is to activate the faculty.

[What do you mean by the right environment?]

Not being too tired; having enough time to be aware. ‘Work’ on it and give it enough fuel – the fuel is one’s life. (p.68)

You’re the result of the past – your body, your feelings, and your thinking. Your body is just a copy. Any feeling, for example, envy or anger, is a result of the past. Whatever you do about that envy, such as repression, trying to make it into something, or some other action, is also the result of the past. So you’re merely moving within the circle of experience. You must ‘work’ on this; think about it, meditate, try to see it in all its aspects – calmly, detached, as looking at a new and unknown animal, you’re interested in its shape, its habits and so on; you don’t know whether it’s poisonous or not so you’ve no reaction. That’s meditation, trying to free oneself from the past, transcending the past so as to discover the unknown, the timeless; otherwise it’s merely moving within the circle of the past. (p.69)

You must meditate on this until you can feel it throughout all your being, not just one layer, all the layers. Then there will be a great calmness, infinite peace.

Write this down as I’ve said it. Then look at it and watch your reactions to it. Think about it. Try to find out what you think about it. It will come to you later. (p.70)

There =’s a distinct difference between being stimulated and being awake. Being awake is like a flame illuminating everything within. (p.72-73)

One has to watch one’s physical condition, being careful about diet, not getting too tired and so on.

Experiment with foods and watch the body’s reactions to different kinds. (p.76)