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if any
visitor to this page has a quote from Krishnamurti that they feel has
special significance to them, we will endeavour to include it here.
you may send it, with its
source, to:
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So beauty is, where you are not. It is a
tragedy if you don't see this.
Truth is, where you are not. Beauty is, love is, where you are not.
We are
not capable of looking at this extraordinary thing called truth.
Mumbai 4th Public Talk, January 31, 1982
What thought thinks about is made into a
reality but it's not the truth. Beauty can never be the expression of
thought. A bird is not made by thought and so it's beautiful. Love is
not shaped by thought and when it is it becomes something quite
different. The worship of the intellect and its integrity is a reality
made by thought. But it is not compassion. Thought cannot manufacture
compassion; it can make it into a reality, a necessity, but it will
not be compassion. Thought by its very nature is fragmentary and so it
lives in a fragmented world of division and conflict. So knowledge is
fragmentary and however much it is piled up, layer after layer, it
will still remain fragmented, broken up. Thought can put together a
thing called integration and that too will be a fragment.
Krishnamurti's Journal
Malibu
38th Entry
3rd
April 1975
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"What have you done with your life?
You have lived 30 years, or 80 years. What have you done with your life?
Yes sir.
Don't say I'm going to fulfil next life. There is only the present. The
beauty of the present. The richness of the present.
You've has this life, this extraordinary thing called life, in which
there is sorrow, pleasure, fear. Guilt, and all the tortures and the
loneliness, and the despair of life. And the beauty of life. You've had
it. And what have you done with it?
Do consider it.
And it's very important to ask, and to answer it. Not to the speaker, to
your self.
When you ask it, don't go to bed with sorrow because you have done
nothing. You've done absolutely nothing. A life was given to you, the
most precious thing in the world, and what have you done? Distorted it,
tortured it, torn it to pieces. Divided it. Brought about violence,
destruction, hatred. Without love, without compassion, without passion.
So when you ask, and I hope you are asking, seriously, what you have
done with your life; when you ask that question inevitably, if you are
all sensitive, you'll have tears in your eyes. But, you'll have tears
because you're thinking of the past, what you might have done. Tears are
self pity. So don't have tears. For the question is asked, and the
answer lies only in the present. Not tomorrow or in the past. Which
means what are you doing now? With your life that has been given. Now,
not tomorrow. And if you can answer it you will find out what love is."
Talk 5 Bombay 14th Dec. 1969
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Question: The hope that tomorrow will
solve our problems prevents our seeing the absolute urgency
of change. How does one deal with this?
What do you mean by the future, what is future? If one is
desperately ill, tomorrow has meaning; one may be healed by
tomorrow. So one must ask, what is this sense of future? We know
the past; we live in the past, which is the opposite movement; and
the past, going through the present, modifying itself, moves to
that which we call the future.
First of all, are we aware that we live in the past - the
past that is always modifying itself, adjusting itself, expanding
and contracting itself, but still the past - past experience, past
knowledge, past understanding, past delight, the pleasure which
has become the past?
The future is the past, modified. So one's hope of the future
is still the past moving to what one considers to be the future.
The mind never moves out of the past. The future is always the
mind acting, living, thinking in the past.
What is the past? It is one's racial inheritance, one's
conditioning as Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, Catholic, American and
so on. It is the education one has received the hurts the
delights, as remembrances. That is the past. That is one's
consciousness. Can that consciousness, with all its content of
belief, dogma, hope, fear, longing and illusion, come to an end?
For example, can one end, this morning, completely, one's
dependence on another? Dependence is part of one's consciousness.
The moment that ends, something new begins, obviously. But one
never ends anything completely and that non-ending is one's hope.
Can one see and end dependence and its consequences,
psychologically, inwardly? See what it means to depend and the
immediate action taking place of ending it. Now is the content of
one's consciousness to be got rid of bit by bit? That is, get rid
of anger, then get rid of jealousy, bit by bit. That would too
long. Or, can the whole thing be done instantly, immediately? for
taking the contents of one's consciousness and ending them one by
one, will take many years, all one's life perhaps. Is it possible
to see the whole and end it - which is fairly simple, if one does
it? But one's mind is so conditioned that we allow time as a
factor in change.
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
11TH QUESTION OJAI, CALIFORNIA
2ND QUESTION & ANSWER MEETING
8TH MAY 1980 'HOPE'
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As a cloud hurried by the winds across the valley so is man wherever he
be, hurried along through life. Man has no fixed purpose, man has no
understanding of the meaning of life, but is as the clouds that have no
resting place, that are chased from valley to valley, that have no
quietude, no tranquillity, no peace. Man has no goal. He is blind to the
purpose of life and there is chaos and disintegration in him and hence
in the world.
LIFE THE GOAL page 1
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"Freedom from the desire for an answer is essential to the understanding
of a problem".
COMMENTARIES ON LIVING
SERIES I
CHAPTER 41 'AWARENESS'
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Questioner: How you live, how you think, what you do, will create the world,
or destroy the world. We do not realize this. We do not see this
responsibility, and so we say, `Technical knowledge is bringing about the
destruction of man; how can that be prevented?'
Krishnamurti: The good is not the `respectable'. The respectable man can never
know what is good. Most of us are respectable and therefore we do not know
what it is to be good. Moral education can only come, not with the cultivation
of respectability, but with the awakening of love. But we do not know what
love is. Is love something to be cultivated? Can you learn it in colleges, in
schools, from teachers, from technicians, from the following of your gurus? Is
devotion love? And if it is, can the man who is respectable, who is devoted,
know love? Do you know what I mean by respectability? Respectability is when
the mind is cultivating, when the mind is becoming virtuous. The respectable
man is the man who is struggling consciously not to be envious, the man who is
following tradition, he who says, `What will
people say'? Respectability will obviously never know what Truth is, what good
is, because the respectable man is only concerned with himself.
from Krishnamurti's third talk in Poona 1953
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DB:
Do you think it is possible that a thing like this could
divert the course of mankind away from the dangerous path it is taking?
K: Yes, that is what I think. But to divert the course of man's
destruction somebody must listen. Right? Somebody - ten people - must listen!
DB: Yes.
K: Listen to that immensity calling.
THE ENDING OF TIME CHAPTER 8 19TH APRIL 1980 CONVERSATION WITH PROF. DAVID
BOHM
'CAN INSIGHT BE AWAKENED IN ANOTHER'
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"Sir", I said, "twenty years ago I heard
you say that one must enter the
house of death with all one's senses fully alert, not when one is old and
decrepit".
"Yes", he replied. "For me the line dividing life and death has always been
very thin."....(cut)
"What would happen if you were told that you were going to die tomorrow
morning", I asked.
He said, "Nothing. I would live exactly as before. The thought that death
was so imminent wouldn't enter my mind again, and nothing would change".
From a conversation between Krishnamurti and Asit Chanmal. Taken from Chandmal's book "One Thousand Suns".
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So
we are saying the brain has an extraordinary capacity but that brain has been
restricted, narrowed down by our education, our self interest.
1st Public Question & Answer Meeting
Brockwood Park 1985.
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Why do we give such deep significance and meaning to the unconscious? - for
after all, it is as trivial as the conscious. If the conscious mind is
extraordinarily active, watching, listening, seeing, then the conscious mind
becomes far more important than the unconscious; in that state all the
contents of the unconscious are exposed; the division between the various
layers comes to an end. Watching your reactions when you sit in a bus, when
you are talking to your wife, your husband, when in your office, writing,
being alone - if you are ever alone - then this whole process of observation,
this act of seeing (in which there is no division as the `observer' and the
`observed') ends the contradiction.
The Flight of the Eagle Chapter 2
Belief is merely a self-protective covering for the mind.
"Sutras on Life" page 36
Questioner (student): "How do you know all these things that you are
talking about?"
Krishnamurti: "Not from books. Not from other people. Not from
ancient or modern books, not from philosophies, and so on".
from a discussion with staff and students at
Brockwood Park, 1983
Once
in India I was travelling in a car. There was a chauffeur driving and I was
sitting beside him. There were three gentlemen behind discussing awareness very
intently and asking me questions about awareness, and unfortunately at that
moment the driver was looking somewhere else and he ran over a goat, and the
three gentlemen were still discussing awareness - totally unaware that they had
run over a goat. When the lack of attention was pointed out to those gentlemen
who were trying to be aware it was a great surprise to them.
FREEDOM FROM THE KNOWN CHAPTER 3
If you set out to meditate it will not be meditation. If you set out to be
good, goodness will never flower. If you cultivate humility, it ceases to
be. Meditation is like the breeze that comes in when you leave the window
open; but if you deliberately keep it open, deliberately invite it to come,
it will never appear.
J. Krishnamurti The Only Revolution India Part 6
Question: You say the present crisis is without precedent. In what
way is it exceptional?
Krishnamurti: Obviously the present crisis throughout the world
is exceptional, without precedent. There have been crises of varying types
at different periods throughout history, social, national, political. Crises
come and go; economic recessions, depressions, come, get modified, and
continue in a different form. We know that; we are familiar with that
process. Surely the present crisis is different, is it not? It is different
first because we are dealing not with money nor with tangible things but
with ideas. The crisis is exceptional because it is in the field of
ideation. We are quarrelling with ideas, we are justifying murder;
everywhere in the world we are justifying murder as a means to a righteous
end, which in itself is unprecedented. Before, evil was recognized to be
evil, murder was recognized to be murder, but now murder is a means to
achieve a noble result. Murder, whether of one person or of a group of
people, is justified, because the murderer, or the group that the murderer
represents, justifies it as a means of achieving a result which will be
beneficial to man. That is we sacrifice the present for the future - and it
does not matter what means we employ as long as our declared purpose is to
produce a result which we say will be beneficial to man. Therefore, the
implication is that a wrong means will produce a right end and you justify
the wrong means through ideation. In the various crises that have taken
place before, the issue has been the exploitation of things or of man; it is
now the exploitation of ideas, which is much more pernicious, much more
dangerous, because the exploitation of ideas is so devastating, so
destructive. We have learned now the power of propaganda and that is one of
the greatest calamities that can happen: to use ideas as a means to
transform man. That is what is happening in the world today. Man is not
important - systems, ideas, have become important. Man no longer has any
significance. We can destroy millions of men as long as we produce a result
and the result is justified by ideas. We have a magnificent structure of
ideas to justify evil and surely that is unprecedented. Evil is evil; it
cannot bring about good. War is not a means to peace. War may bring about
secondary benefits, like more efficient aeroplanes, but it will not bring
peace to man. War is intellectually justified as a means of bringing peace;
when the intellect has the upper hand in human life, it brings about an
unprecedented crisis.
THE FIRST AND LAST FREEDOM
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
QUESTION 1 'ON THE PRESENT CRISIS'
Questioner: Did you seriously mean what you said when you
suggested last week that one should retire from the world when one is
around forty-five or so?
Krishnamurti: I suggested this seriously. Almost all of
us, till death overtakes us, are so caught up in worldliness that we
have no time to search out deeply, to discover the real. To retire
from the world necessitates a complete change in educational and
economic systems, does it not? If you did retire, you would be
unprepared, you would be lost, you would be lonely, you would not know
what to do with yourself. You would not know how to think. You would
probably form new groups, new organizations with new beliefs, badges
and labels, and once again be active outwardly, doing reforms which
will need further reform. But this is not what I mean. To retire from
the world you must be prepared: by right kind of occupation, by
creating right kind of environment, by setting up the right State, by
right education and so on. If you have been so prepared then to
withdraw from worldliness at any age is the natural not abnormal
sequence; you withdraw to flow into deep and pure awareness, you
withdraw not into isolation but to find the real; to help to transform
the ever congealing, conflicting society and State. All this would
involve a wholly different kind of education, an upheaval in our
social and economic order. Such a group of people would be completely
disassociated from authority, from politics, from all those causes
which produce war and antagonism between man and man. A stone may
direct the course of a river; so a small number may direct the course
of a culture. Surely any great thing is done in this manner. You will
probably say most of us cannot retire however much we may want to.
Naturally all cannot but some of you can. To live alone or in a small
group requires great intelligence. But if you really thought it
worthwhile then you would set about it, not as a wonderful act of
renunciation but as a natural and intelligent thing for a thoughtful
man to do. How extraordinarily important it is that there should be at
least some who do not belong to any particular group or race or to any
specialized religion or society! They will create the true brotherhood
of man for they will be seeking truth. To be free from outward riches
there must be the awareness of inward poverty, which brings untold
riches. The stream of culture may change its course through a few
awakened people. These are not strangers but you and me.
J. Krishnamurti Ojai 5th Public Talk 11th June, 1944.
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