marți, 10 martie 2015

Jiddu Krishnamurti - The Core of the Teachings

"Find out for yourself what are the possesions and ideals that you do not desire. By knowing what you do not want, by elimination, you will unburden the mind, and only then will it understand the essential which is ever there."

"If you begin to understand what you are without trying to change it, then what you are undergoes a transformation."

"To investigate the fact of your own anger you must pass no judgement on it, for the moment you conceive of its opposite you condemn it and therefore you cannot see it as it is. When you say you dislike or hate someone that is a fact, although it sounds terrible. If you look at it, go into it completely, it ceases, but if you say, 'I must not hate; I must have love in my heart', then you are living in a hypocritical world with double standards. To live completely, fully, in the moment is to live with what is, the actual, without any sense of condemnation or justification - the you understand it so totally that you are finished with it. When you see clearly the problem is solved."

"Perhaps you have never experienced that state of mind in which there is total abandonment of everything, a complete letting go. And you cannot abandon everything without deep passion, can you? You cannot abandon everything intellectually or emotionally. There is total abandonment, surely, only when there is intense passion. Don't be alarmed by that word because a man who is not passionate, who is not intense, can never understand or feel the quality of beauty. The mind that holds something in reserve, the mind that has a vested interest, the mind that clings to position, power, prestige, the mind that is respectable, which is a horror; such a mind can never abandon itself."

"The only thing that really matters is that there be an action of goodness, love and intelligence in living. Is goodness individual or collective, is love personal or impersonal, is intelligence yours, mine or somebody else? If it is yours or mine then it is not intelligence, or love, or goodness. If goodness is an affair of the individual or of the collective, according to one s particular preference or decision, then it is no longer goodness. Goodness is not in the backyard of the individual nor in the open field of the collective; goodness flowers only in freedom from both."

"Freedom from the known is death, and then you are living."

Questioner: I wonder whether one can survive when one is put in a place where everybody is fighting with another.
Jiddu Krishnamurti: Yes, put yourself in that position. Have you thought about violence? What is involved in violence, how does it arise, what is the structure of violence? There is physical violence and there is the violence of obedience - are you obeying and therefore being violent? Do you understand what I mean? When I obey you and suppress what I think, that suppression will burst out one day. So there is physical violence and violence brought about through obedience, the violence of competitiveness, of conformity. When I conform to a pattern I am violent - you see the connection? When I live a life of fragmentation - that is, when I think one thing and say another, do another - that is fragmentation and that also breeds violence. I may be very quiet, gentle, do all the work I am asked to do, but I flare up: which indicates there has been suppression in me. So violence is not just physical violence, it is a very complex question. And if you haven't thought about it, when you are faced with violence you will react most unintelligently.

"The brain is the source of thought. The brain is matter and thought is matter. Can the brain — with all its reactions and its immediate responses to every challenge and demand — can the brain be very still? It is not a question of ending thought, but of whether the brain can be completely still? This stillness is not physical death. See what happens when the brain is completely still."

"There are the states of inattention and of attention. When you are completely giving your mind, your heart, your nerves, everything you have, to attend, then the old habits, the mechanical responses, do not enter into it, thought does not come into it at all. But we cannot maintain that all the time, so we are mostly in a state of inattention, a state in there is not an alert choiceless awareness. What takes place? There is inattention and rare attention and we are trying to bridge the one to the other. How can my inattention become attention or, can attention be complete, all the time?"


Life in Freedom

Because man has forgotten that the true purpose of his being is to cultivate happiness within himself and in those around him, there is confusion and chaos, and his actions but add to that chaos.
What is it for which everyone in the world is craving and longing? To find happiness. True happiness is neither selfish, nor negative. It is intelligence, the accumulation of all experience; it is Truth which is eternal. No cloud can hide it nor can any sorrow lessen it. It is such happiness that every one desires. It is such happiness that I have always desired. I have seen people weighed down with labor, performing great works, accumulating knowledge, struggling to be spiritual and yet they had forgotten the one thing -happiness- which alone gives life to the mind and nourishment to the heart. There can be no health except in happiness. He who has not found it will never find Truth, will never bring life to its fulfillment, will never have tranquillity in this world of travail.
If you desire to establish that happiness within yourself, you must make it your goal and then your life will be as the flame which soars heavenwards.
People in search of happiness resort to many things -they will worship at temples and churches, they will gather from books the knowledge of others, they will perform religious rites in the hope of establishing in their minds peace and tranquillity. The desire for happiness is ever gnawing at their hearts.
In the great continent of America they are making the physical predominant in search for happiness. They say that without physical comfort, without a body that is strong and healthy, there cannot be a right development of the emotions. But in trying to establish perfect physical conditions they are losing sight of other essential things. In India, they go to the opposite extreme and in search for happiness they neglect altogether the physical.
Look where you will, every human being is seeking happiness. He begins his search in the mere pleasures which come from physical excitement. Then discovering that this excitement does not satisfy his craving for the lasting happiness, he experiments with other experiences, mental and emotional.
Life is a process of accumulating and discarding, of gathering and setting aside. What you gather you reject, and the more you reject the nearer you are to liberation. By setting aside what you have gained, you acquire the knowledge which will give you strength to shape your purpose, which will give you power ultimately to reach the Kingdom of Happiness which each one of you seeks.
As there is sap in the tree which brings forth foliage for the glory of its being, so in each man there is the spark of divinity which through sorrow, through ecstasy, through struggle, through all the processes of life, grows to perfection, to that state of eternal happiness which is the goal for all, which is the truest spirituality -the greatest gift that anyone can give to another.
You will find this undying, unalterable happiness when you are liberated from the tyrannies of the self -its desires and longings. This is not a goal imposed upon you by another. It is the longing of every human soul, of every individual who is striving, who is in sorrow, who is seeking. It is the spark of this desire which grows into a flame and becomes part of the Eternal Flame, and when you are able to lose yourself in that Flame, then you are in the Kingdom of Happiness.
Each must discover his own way of attainment. There is no other truth or other god but that goal which each one has established for himself, which cannot be destroyed by the breath of man or by the passing whims of any god.
In what way can you attain this goal and hold this happiness eternally in your heart? If you are a thoughtful person, you will recognize that in every one there are three different beings: the mind, the emotions and the body. And if you observe you will find that each of these beings has a separate existence of its own and tries to create and to act independently of the others, thus causing disharmony. Absolute happiness comes from the establishment of harmony between these three. If you are driving three horses -each desiring to run independently of the other two- unless you are able to control them and drive them all together, you will not reach your destination.
The mind must have a goal of its own, but it must be a goal created by you yourself; otherwise it will lead to superstition.
What is the ultimate goal for the mind?
It is the purification of the self, which means the development of individual uniqueness.
As the seed is forced by the life within it to break through the heavy earth and come into light, so if you are urged by the desire to find freedom, you will break through all limitations which bind you. To gain freedom, great desire is needed. People are afraid of desire, thinking that it is something evil which must be destroyed. But this is a mistaken attitude. Desire is the motive power behind all action. If you would light a great fire to warm and comfort you, you must give fuel to it, feed it with great logs of wood. So if you would fulfill life you must have great desires, for desire brings experience and experience leads to knowledge. If a man knows how to use desire it will bring him to the freedom for which he longs. If desire is killed or suppressed, there is no possibility of freedom. Most people in the world have intense, burning, vital desires but instead of utilizing them and training them, they either suppress them or are controlled by them. Without desire there can be no creative work. If you kill desire you become like a piece of dead wood, or else you become an automaton, a machine. Machines have been invented to minimize human labor. Physical problems perhaps may be solved in this way, but mental and emotional problems are more difficult to solve, and because the way to solve these problems is so little understood, religions, creeds, and dogmas have been invented.
If desire gives life it should be encouraged. If desire creates sorrow, through understanding that sorrow must be overcome. Because man does not want to be free, he kills his desires; because he does not want to attain true liberation, he is making of himself a machine. Use desire as a stepping-stone to kindle greater desires, to awaken greater delight and longing.
But intelligence is necessary in order to develop your individual uniqueness, to purify your desires, to realize that self which is the self of all -that absolute union with all things which brings to an end the sense of separation. It is necessary for the mind to be simple, but simplicity does not mean crudeness. We should not turn our back upon the results of progress and evolution, but on the contrary we should utilize them.
A mind that is simple will understand perfection because it is part of perfection itself. A mind that is crooked cannot understand the Truth. A mind that is complicated, that is full of the knowledge of books -though they have their value- is apt to become crystallized. In all great architecture, painting and sculpture, in all the greatest forms of beauty, there is simplicity and there is restraint. Simplicity of the mind is the greatest and most difficult thing to acquire, but in order to be simple you must have had great experience. Simplicity of the truest kind is the highest form of spirituality.
What is the ultimate goal for the emotions?
It is affectionate detachment. To be able to love and yet not be attached to anyone or anything is the absolute perfection of emotion.
As a barren tree in winter without leaf or flower to give scent to the morning air, so is a man without love. Those who would attain to Truth must cultivate -as the gardener cultivates his garden- this flower of affection, which is to give delight, which is to be a source of comfort in disappointment and sorrow. Love -however envious, jealous, tyrannical, selfish it may be at first- is a bud that will grow into great glory and give the scent of its perfection to every passer-by. Without love man is as a desert of dry sand, as the river in the summer time, without water to nourish its banks. Those who would attain the perfection of happiness, the beauty that is hidden from the human eye, must cultivate this quality of love. You must love all and yet be detached from all, for love is necessary to the unfoldment of life. To cultivate it you must learn to observe, you must gather experience -vicariously, or through your own treading of the sorrowful paths of experience. It is through experience that you know sympathy, that you are able to give affection to those who desire it, for if you have never experienced sorrow then your heart is incapable of sympathy and understanding.
This does not mean that you should taste of everything. There are many ways of acquiring experience -one is by living in the life of everyone, looking through the eyes of every passer-by and experiencing in imagination his sorrow, his transient pleasures. When you see a drunken man in the street, it should be sufficient to give you the experience of drunkenness; if you see a man in tears, that should give you the experience of grief; if you see a man in joy and ecstasy, that should give you the experience of joy. We need not all follow one road of knowledge. We give and take from each other. We can gather knowledge from the experience of the whole world and that is sufficient for progress, for culture and refinement. If you would attain to the fulfillment of life, you must have this accumulation of experience, for without experience you cannot arrive at the goal, you cannot unite the beginning and the end. While there is separation, there is pain, and it is only in the union with the goal that there is happiness, that you establish lasting Truth within yourself. To do that, you must from the very beginning gather experience as a man gathers the grain of the field.
If you have no sympathy, no affection, you can never achieve, you can never identify yourself with the goal. A mind that is contented and satisfied will never acquire sympathy or affection or give understanding to others. I have watched people who have greatly desired to help others but they do not know how to help. They are incapable of putting themselves into the place of another and so envisaging his point of view.
Those who would understand the life around them, who would see the goal and thereby establish the Beloved in their hearts, must develop great love and yet be detached from the bondage of that love. They must have great sympathy and yet not be bound by that sympathy. They must have great desires and yet not be slaves of those desires.
What is the ultimate goal for the body?
Everyone in the world is seeking for beauty but they seek without understanding. It is essential for the body to be beautiful, but it must not be a mere shell of beauty without beautiful thought and feeling. Restraint is necessary for the body -control without suppression.
These are the essentials for the absolute harmony of the three beings in each of us.
The desire for freedom, the desire to escape from all things, or rather to transcend all things, is necessary for the attainment of perfection. You can only free yourself if your mind and heart have determined their purpose in life and are continually struggling towards it, never yielding to those things which create barriers between yourself and your goal.
To attain perfection, to walk towards the goal of Truth which is eternal happiness for all, at whatever stage of evolution you may be, it is necessary to be rid of the binding narrow traditions that are born out of blind belief and have no touch with life.
As, when the rains come, only those who have prepared their fields and removed the weeds will have the full produce of their labor, the full benefit of the rain, so, if you would have the Beloved always with you, you must remove from your mind and heart the complicated ideas, traditions, and narrow points of view, which are as weeds that kill true understanding. For without understanding there can be no cooperation with life.
Life in Freedom. Talks in Benares, Ojai and Ommen, 1928.

Look eternally forward

For those who have discovered Truth and attained the fulfilment of life -which is happiness and liberation- time and the complications of time have ceased. But those who are still bound to the yoke of experience are limited by the past, present and future.
You who would discover the Truth which is absolute and infinite must realize that you are the product of the past, and the outcome of your own creation. You are bringing forth out of yourself that which you have sown in the past. And as man is the product of the past, so by his actions of today he can control the future. Tomorrow depends upon today, and therefore today determines tomorrow. By controlling the future you become the master of the future. You bring the future to the present.
Everyone throughout the world is bound by the traditions, the fears, the shame, the beliefs, the morality, of the past. If you are constantly looking backwards, you will never discover Truth. The discovery of eternal Truth lies always ahead of you. If you truly understand this, you will not cling to the past. You will not be always conditioned by the thoughts, the actions, the feelings, the ethics of the past, because therein is stagnation and the bondage of life. Cut away the bondage of the past as a woodman cuts his way through a dark forest to find the open spaces and fresh breezes. For the past always binds, however glorious, however well seasoned, however fruitful it may have been, and the man who would be free must look eternally forward.
If you would walk, and build, and create in the shelter of eternity, you must not bring the past into conflict with the present, but must invite the future and thereby bring that future into conflict with the present.
Because your mind and heart are bound by traditions and beliefs, by the sacred books of the past, by the dark shadows of temples and remembered gods, you do not understand either the present or the future. Time, as man understands it, is dividing you from your goal. Therefore, to bring time to naught, you must so live now that you are the master of the future, so that the future becomes the present. People love to think of themselves as being glorified in the future, or resting on the laurels of what they have been in the past. What a comforting idea! The belief in your greatness in some distant future will not help you to deal with life in the present, when you are struggling, when there is confusion in your mind and heart.
Not in the distant future did I want to be great, but I desired to be happy in the present, I wanted to be free in the present, I wanted to be beyond all the limitations of time. So I invited the future into the present, and hence I have conquered the future.
Do not live in the future, nor in the dead things of yesterday, but live rather in the immediate now, with the understanding that you are a product of the past, and that by your actions of today you can control tomorrow and so become the master of time, the master of evolution, and hence the master of perfection.
Then you will live with greater intensity, then every second will count and every moment be of value. But you are frightened of such a present. You would much rather be conditioned by the past, because you have a dread of the future. But the future is not fearsome to those who walk in the way of understanding. If you would attain to the fulfilment of life, you must invite the future to the present and thereby create a conflict within yourself. Through contentment you do not find happiness, but a state of stagnation. If you would know true happiness there must first be that inward conflict, which will bring forth in you the flower of life.
Put aside the past with all its glories, beautiful and terrible, all its traditions, wide and yet so conditioned, all its moralities that strangle life, and look into your own heart and mind to discover what lies before you in the future. For as you are the product of the past, and as you can control the future, so the future becomes the present and you live in that present.
Life in Freedom. Talks in Benares, Ojai and Ommen, 1928.

Understanding

For the well-being of the mind and heart, understanding is as essential as a warm fire on a cold night.
People imagine that they can attain by some miraculous process, that they can find Truth by the mere outward form of worship, that they can discover their goal by the continual repetition of prayers and chants, or by the performance of yoga, puja and other rites. You can only discover that which you desire, that for which your heart longs, and for which your mind craves, by yourself, through the purification of the heart and mind.
Those who seek for an understanding of life must fix their inward perception on eternal Truth which is the unfolding of life.
To those who live and have their being in the valley, the mountains are mysterious, hard, cruel, eternally aloof. The mountains never change; they are ever constant, never yielding. So it is with Truth. To those who live in the valley of shadows, of transient things, Truth seems terrible, hard and cruel.
Everywhere, among all people, there is a search for something hidden, for some realization which will give wisdom, greater knowledge, greater vision, greater understanding; this the people call Truth.
They think that Truth lies hidden in some distant place, away from life, away from joy, away from sorrow. But Truth is life, and with an understanding of life there is born an understanding of Truth. When you are fulfilling life with understanding you are the master of Truth.
Though there is at the present time a revolt against tradition and the established order of things, against morality in the narrow sense, yet the majority of people still judge and try to understand life from the prejudiced point of view of a limited and settled mind. A Hindu will only recognize Truth when it is presented to him through the medium of Hinduism, and so it is with the Christian and the Buddhist. But Truth is never contained in a particular form or medium. Truth can only be understood with an unbiased mind, capable of detachment and pure judgment.
As every human being is divine, so every individual in the world should be his own master, his own absolute ruler and guide. But if he would guide himself intelligently, he must be able to judge all things with an open mind and not reject what he does not understand because he is prejudiced.
When you bind life to beliefs and traditions, to codes of morality, you kill life. In order to keep alive, vital, ever changing, ever growing, as the tree that is ever putting out new leaves, you must give to life the opportunities, the nourishment which will strengthen it and make it grow. When life desires to find its freedom the only way by which it can attain is through experience.
There can be no understanding of life, which is Truth, when there is not the thrill, the agony, the suffering, the continual upheaval, discouragement and encouragement of life.
In the olden days, especially in India, those who desired to find Truth imagined that they could discover the way by withdrawing from the aching world, from the transient things, from the shadow of the real, by the destruction of the physical. But now you have to face life as it is, for you can only conquer life when you have a complete and not a partial understanding of it.
Once there was a man who kept all the windows of his house well closed except one, hoping that through that window alone the sunlight would come, but it never came. That is what those people are doing who are bound by tradition, by narrow sectarian beliefs, and who think that Truth is contained in any of those beliefs. You cannot bind life, which is the Truth, by anything, for life must be free and untrammeled. If you do not understand that the purpose of life is freedom, then you are only gilding the bars of your cage by the invention of theories, of creeds, of philosophies and religions.
The basis of all these innumerable beliefs is fear. You are afraid for your salvation, you are afraid to test your own knowledge, and hence you rely on the assertions, on the authority of another.
You must give to the suffering world, not beliefs, creeds, dogmas, but new understanding which comes from intelligent cooperation with Nature, through observation of all the events of daily life.
Those who would understand Truth, who would give of their heart and their mind to that Truth, must first have grown in experience. Then experience will guide them, for experience gives intelligence, and intelligence is the accumulation of all experience. The web of life is spun out of common things and the common things are experience.
Learn from every event, from every activity in daily life, and assimilate the experience every moment of the day.
You go to temples or to churches or to other places of worship and there you imagine that you are purified. But does that purification stand the test of daily life?
Your theories, your superficial knowledge of life, do not help you at moments of crisis. When death comes and takes away your friend, your beliefs and theories do not help you to overcome your loneliness and the sense of separation. You will only overcome it if the poison of separation has been destroyed, and you can only destroy that sense of separation by observing others in sorrow, in pain and in pleasure like yourself, and finding that in suffering as well as in pleasure there is unity.
No one can develop that power which dwells within you but yourself, for that power grows by experience. But experience alone, undirected by the goal you would attain, produces chaos, the chaos which prevails in the world at present. Without the understanding of the purpose of life there is bound to be chaos.
The first demand upon those who would seek the understanding of true happiness, is that they should have the burning longing to be free from all things, to gain that freedom which comes when you are beyond the need for further experience because you have passed through all experience.
If you would understand what I mean by the freedom of life, you must establish for yourself the goal which is liberation even from life itself.
For the understanding of life you must have revolt, dissatisfaction and great discontentment. Many people in the world imagine that they have found Truth by adopting some theory or other, and hence that they have solved the whole problem of life.
Contentment without understanding is like a pool covered with green scum, which does not reflect the bare eye of heaven. It is very easy to be ignorantly discontented, but to be discontented and to revolt intelligently is a divine gift. Revolt with intelligence, with understanding, is as a great river that is full of power.
Revolt is essential in order to escape from the narrowness of tradition, from the binding influences of belief, of theories. If you would understand the Truth, you must be in revolt so that you may escape from all these -from books, from theories, from gods, from superstitions- from everything which is not of your own.
If you would understand the meaning of my words, then throw aside all your mental conceptions of life and begin again from the very beginning. Then you will see for yourself how life works, how life which is the accumulation of all experience speaks through that voice which we call intuition, which guides you and helps you on the onward path.
I would urge you to be free -free from the very gods whom you worship, from the very beings whom you hold dear, because freedom is necessary for the growth of the soul and without freedom there is decay.
Because you do not wish to be free, you seek comfort, and comfort is like the shadow of a tree, it varies according to the sun from moment to moment, and those who seek comfort must move from one abode to another. Comfort cannot dwell with understanding.
The man who seeks comfort, who searches for the satisfaction of the moment, will never find real and lasting joy, for the momentary comfort is as transitory as the flower that is born of a morning and withers at the ending of the day.
When a pond is not touched with the breath of air, the waters become stagnant, and no animal comes to it to slake its thirst. But when the fresh winds come and breathe on its face, then animals and human beings alike can quench their thirst.
So if there is not in you the fresh wind of desire for freedom from all things, you will not find the Truth which alone can remove the thirst of the world.
When you are free, as the bird in the skies, your life becomes simple. Life is complicated only when there is limitation. Then you need traditions and beliefs to uphold you.
But when you desire to be free from all things, then you break away from the old order and enter upon that new life which will lead you towards perfection which is liberation and happiness.
When you are able to become a flame of revolt, then the means to reach the Kingdom will be found.
We have to create a miracle of order in this century of chaos and superstition. But first we have to create order in ourselves, a lasting order which is not based on fear or on authority.
I have found and established for myself that which is eternal, and it is my work to create order in your mind, so that you will no longer depend on outward authority, no longer be the slave of superstition or of those trivialities which hold life in bondage, and divide you from your goal.
Because you have no true purpose in life there is chaos within you; there is misery without understanding, strife without purpose, struggle in ignorance. But when you have established the goal of the Beloved in your heart and mind there is understanding in your life. There may still be struggle but it will be with understanding, and there will be greater love and greater happiness. Establish, therefore, within you that which is eternal, and the present shadows will pass away.
When you have established the Beloved in your heart, the source and the end are united and time no longer exists, for you hold eternity within you.
When you have established the Beloved in your heart, you are ready to face the open seas, where there are great storms, and the strong breezes which quicken life.
Because you have the Beloved in your heart, you must be a lighthouse on a dark shore, to guide those who are still enshrouded in their own darkness.
Of what value is your understanding, of what value are your high and noble thoughts, your pure life, if you do not help those who are in constant pain, who are in darkness, and in confusion? Of what value is the Truth you have seen if you are not able to give of that Truth to those who are hungering and thirsting after the eternal?
Because you have understood, be courageous with that understanding, and give of your life to those who are in darkness.
Life in Freedom. Talks in Benares, Ojai and Ommen, 1928.

Jiddu Krishnamurti - The Core of the Teachings