J. Krishnamurti

May 12, 1895 1225a Madanapalle, India – February 17, 1986 Ojai, California
Path: theosophy and his own wikipedia, birthchart
Enlightened: At Ojai in August and September 1922

As human beings living in this monstrously ugly world, let us ask ourselves, can this society, based on competition, brutality and fear, come to an end? Not as an intellectual conception, not as a hope, but as an actual fact, so that the mind is made fresh, new and innocent and can bring about a different world altogether? It can only happen, I think, if each one of us recognises the central fact that we, as individuals, as human beings, in whatever part of the world we happen to live or whatever culture we happen to belong to, are totally responsible for the whole state of the world.

Can you observe without any sense of condemnation, judgment or opinion – just to observe? If you can so observe, you will see for yourself very clearly that there is an action which is not the product of thought. It is the action of insight and perception.

Conflict in any form distorts the mind. This is a fact, not some opinion or judgment given thoughtlessly. Any conflict between two people prevents their understanding each other. Conflict prevents perception. The understanding of what is, is the only important thing, not the formulating of what should be. This division between what is and what should be is the origin of conflict. And the interval between idea and action also breeds conflict. The fact and the image are two different things: the pursuit of the image leads to every form of conflict, illusion and hypocrisy whereas the understanding of what is, which is all we really have, leads to quite a different state of mind.

Experience is the response to a challenge. Every response to a challenge produces an experience, and that experience is the result of your conditioning. With your background, you respond to a challenge, even the smallest challenge. To the little challenges of everyday life, you respond from your background, your conditioning, and that reaction is experience.

Forget all you know about yourself; forget all you have ever thought about yourself; start as if you know nothing.

Happiness is strange; it comes when you are not seeking it. When you are not making an effort to be happy, then unexpectedly, mysteriously, happiness is there, born of purity, of a loveliness of being.

Have you not noticed that love is silence? It may be while holding the hand of another or looking lovingly at a child, or taking in the beauty of an evening. Love has no past or future, and so it is with this extraordinary state of silence.

In everything all around, there is God and only God .. Following every thought, every feeling… If you sit on the bank of a river after a storm, you see the stream going by, carrying a great deal of debris. Similarly, you have to watch the movement of yourself, following every thought, every feeling, every intention, every motive, just watch it. That watching is also listening; it is being aware with your eyes, with your ears, with your insight, of all the values that human beings have created, and by which you are conditioned, and it is only this state of total awareness that will end all seeking.

In oneself lies the whole world, and if you know how to look and learn, then the door is there and the key is in your hand. Nobody on earth can give you either that key or the door to open, except yourself.

It is man's pretense 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.
~ from a Public talk in Ojai, April 1980

Look what religions and spiritual institutions have done - they have focused on the instructor and forgot the teaching. Why do we give so much importance to the instructor's person? The instructor may be necessary to manifest the teaching, but beyond that what? The glass contains water; one has to drink the water, not worship the glass. Humanity loves the glass, and forgets the water.

Look within. You are the world.

Love is a state of being, and in that state, the ‘me’, with its identifications, anxieties, and possessions is absent. Love cannot be, as long as the activities of the self, of the ‘me’, whether conscious or unconscious, continue to exist.

Love is dying every day. Love is not memory, love is not a thought. Love is not a thing that continues as duration in time. And, through observation, one must die to the continuity of everything. Then there is love; and with love there comes creation.

Love is meditation. Love is not a remembrance, an image sustained by thought as pleasure, nor the romantic image that sensuality builds; it is something that lies beyond all the senses, for love is truth, and meditation is the discovery of the beauty of this truth.

Love is not sensation.
Sensations give birth to thought through words and symbols. Sensations and thought replace love; they become the substitute for love. Sensations are of the mind, as sexual appetites are. The mind breeds the appetite, the passion, through remembrance, from which it derives gratifying sensations.
The mind is composed of different and conflicting interests or desires, with their exclusive sensations; and they clash when one or other begins to predominate, thus creating a problem.
Sensations are both pleasant and unpleasant, and the mind holds to the pleasant, thus becoming a slave to them. This bondage becomes a problem because the mind is the repository of contradictory sensations.
The avoidance of the painful is also a bondage, with its own illusions and problems.
The mind is the maker of problems, and so cannot resolve them.
Love is not of the mind; but when the mind takes over there is sensation, which it then calls love. It is this love of the mind that can be thought about, that can be clothed and identified. The mind can recall or anticipate pleasurable sensations, and this process is appetite, no matter at what level it is placed.
Within the field of the mind, love cannot be. Mind is the area of fear and calculation, envy and domination, comparison and denial, and so love is not. Jealousy, like pride, is of the mind; but it is not love. Love and the processes of the mind cannot be bridged over, cannot be made one. When sensations predominate, there is no space for love; so the things of the mind fill the heart.
Thus love becomes the unknown, to be pursued and worshipped; it is made into an ideal, to be used and believed in, and ideals are always self-projected. So the mind takes over completely, and love becomes a word, a sensation. Then love is made comparative, "I love more and you love less." But love is neither personal nor impersonal; love is a state of being in which sensation as thought is wholly absent.

Love is not of the mind, it is not in the net of thought, it cannot be sought out, cultivated, cherished; it is there when the mind is silent and the heart is peaceful.

Many of us seem to think that by teaching every human being to read and write, we shall solve our human problems; but this idea has proved to be false. The so-called educated are not peace-loving, integrated people, and they too are responsible for the confusion and misery of the world.
The right kind of education means the awakening of intelligence, the fostering of an integrated life, and only such education can create a new culture and a peaceful world; but to bring about this new kind of education, we must make a fresh start on an entirely different basis.

Movement means time. From here to there is a movement, and that means time, to cover from this place to that place needs time. So movement is time. All movement is time. Right? By the clock... So the past, the present and the future is a movement which we call time. I was young once, now I'm ninety - this is time. So what is time? What is time? It took you time to come from Benares to here. It'll take time for you to get back. So there is time by the clock - right? - there is time to cover a distance, there is time as the past, the present, and the future. Right, sir? All this is time. Right? The past shapes the present - right? - circumstances and so on. Please, this is very difficult, don't agree or disagree, just listen, find out. The past is now operating. Right? And the future is shaped by the present, modified, circumstance has changed, certain incidents happen, so the past is modified, changed, altered. Right? And the future is what happens now. Right? So all time - the past, the present, and the future - is contained now. Ah, this puzzles you - go slowly, I'm not in a hurry.

Nature is busy creating absolutely unique individuals, whereas culture has invented a single mold to which all must conform. It is grotesque.

Nature is not imaginary: it is actual; and what is happening to you now is actual. From the actual you must begin - with what is happening now — and the now is timeless.

One has to be a light to oneself; this light is the law. There is no other law. All the other laws are made by thought and so are fragmentary and contradictory. To be a light to oneself is not to follow the light of another, however reasonable, logical, historical, and however convincing. You cannot be a light to yourself if you are in the dark shadows of authority, of dogma, of conclusion.

Pleasure is the product of thought; joy is not.
Pleasure is sustained, built up by thought. The mind has an experience, and that experience is thought about. If that experience has a certain form of pleasure, delight, amusement; thought begins to think about it and therefore sustains that pleasure by thinking about it. That is what most people do when they have sex – sexual demands, sexual pleasures – the mind, thought, thinks about it over and over and over again, and then that pleasure must be fulfilled. That is a constant image in the mind.
One hears, ‘Die to everything you know,’ and one asks, ‘What have I left?’ But if one has really gone into it deeply, what one has left is joy, real joy of living – seeing a beautiful tree, a beautiful face, the movement of water, the bird – living.
Not living in conflict, in misery – all that is not living.
Death is not something prolonged; it comes immediately, and it is over.
To die to the past immediately requires a great deal of attention, a great deal of inquiry, a great deal of inward apprehension. Not apprehension in the sense fear, but inward awareness. Then out of that, there is a different kind of life altogether. Therefore there is no fear of death because you are dying every day to everything you have gathered. So your mind becomes extraordinarily alert, fresh, young and – if I may use that word which is so laden – innocent. It is only the innocent mind that can live, not that jaded mind.
~ Jiddu Krishnamurti from a conversation with Donald Ingram Smith, New Delhi, 24 December 1966

Seeing the illusion is the beginning of intelligence.

So, seeing all this, the mind is very quiet. It is only then that Reality comes. You cannot invite it. You cannot bribe it. There is no sacrifice that you can make in order to get it. There is no virtue that will reward you with that Reality. It is only when the mind is completely still - not expecting, not hoping - that Reality can come to that mind which is still.

The difficulty is that we do not know how to listen, how to see, and how to hear because when a new thing is said, we put it into old bottles, fit it into old terminologies, and therefore we spoil it.

The ending of sorrow is the beginning of wisdom. Knowledge is always within the shadow of ignorance. Meditation is freedom from thought and a movement in the ecstasy of truth. Meditation is explosion of intelligence.

To understand the immeasurable, the mind must be extraordinarily quiet, still.

The moment you have in your heart this extraordinary thing called love and feel the depth, the delight, the ecstasy of it, you will discover that for you, the world is transformed.

We are always asking, asking. In the very asking, in that very question, we want someone to reply, someone in authority, someone who knows, someone who has a deep understanding of life. So we look to others, and thereby depend and are caught in the opinions of the clever ones, or the ancient teachers, or the latest erudite scholar. We are concerned with opinions, and opinions are not the truth. Discussing opinions has very little meaning; it only leads to dialectical, clever, intellectual argumentation.
From Public Talk 1, Saanen, 10 July 1966

We carry about with us the burden of what thousands of people have said and the memories of all our misfortunes. To abandon all that totally is to be alone, and the mind that is alone is not only innocent but young - not in time or age, but young, innocent, alive at whatever age - and only such a mind can see that which is truth and that which is not measurable by words.

When the mind, because it is frightened, puts death at a distance and separates it from daily living, that separation only breeds more fear, more anxiety, and the multiplication of theories about death. To understand death, you have to understand life.

When one says ‘I know you’, one means 'I know you as you were yesterday; I don’t know you actually now'.

You can be converted from one belief to another, from one dogma to another, but you cannot be converted to an understanding of reality. Belief is not reality.

You cannot be frightened of the unknown because you do not know what the unknown is and so there is nothing to be afraid of….We think that living is always in the present and that dying is something that awaits us at a distant time…To live completely, wholly, every day as if it were a new loveliness, there must be dying to everything of yesterday, otherwise you live mechanically, and a mechanical mind can never know what love is or what freedom is…Most of us are frightened of dying because we don’t know what it means to live.