The Book of Life: Daily Meditations with Krishnamurti

by J. Krishnamurti

Listening has importance only when one is not projecting one’s own desires through which one listens. Can one put aside all these screens through which we listen, and really listen?

a man who is protecting himself constantly through knowledge is obviously not a truth-seeker….

Learning is never accumulative. You cannot store up learning and then from that storehouse act. You learn as you are going along. Therefore, there is never a moment of retrogression or deterioration or decline.

I don't quite get this.

God is a fiction; you may believe in it, but still it is a fiction. But to find God you must completely destroy the fiction, because the old mind is the mind that is frightened, is ambitious, is fearful of death, of living, and of relationship; and it is always, consciously or unconsciously, seeking a permanency, security.

to know oneself, one must be aware of oneself in action, which is relationship. You discover yourself, not in isolation, not in withdrawal, but in relationship—in relationship to society, to your wife, your husband, your brother, to man; but to discover how you react, what your responses are, requires an extraordinary alertness of mind, a keenness of perception.

That which is eternal cannot be sought after; the mind cannot acquire it. It comes into being when the mind is quiet, and the mind can be quiet only when it is simple, when it is no longer storing up, condemning, judging, weighing.

You and the world are not two different entities with separate problems; you and the world are one.

Separation between God or reality and yourself is brought about by you, by the mind that clings to the known, to certainty, to security.

The whole process of that is the self; and we know actually when we are faced with it, that it is an evil thing. I am using the word evil intentionally, because the self is dividing; the self is self-enclosing; its activities, however noble, are separated and isolated. We know all this. We also know that extraordinary are the moments when the self is not there, in which there is no sense of endeavor, of effort, and which happens when there is love.

we demand a belief when we want to escape from a fact into an unreality.

A mind that escapes from the actual, from the facts of relationship, shall never find God; a mind that is agitated by belief shall not know truth. But the mind that understands its relationship with property, with people, with ideas, the mind which no longer struggles with the problems which relationship creates, and for which the solution is not withdrawal but the understanding of love—such a mind alone can understand reality.

So, religion, which is organized belief, becomes a means of escape from what is, from the fact of confusion. The man who believes in God, the man who believes in the hereafter, or who has any other form of belief, is escaping from the fact of what he is.

Is it possible to live in this world without a belief—not change beliefs, not substitute one belief for another, but be entirely free from all beliefs, so that one meets life anew each minute? This, after all, is the truth: to have the capacity of meeting everything anew, from moment to moment, without the conditioning reaction of the past, so that there is not the cumulative effect which acts as a barrier between oneself and that which is.

It is only when the mind is free from idea that there can be experiencing. Ideas are not truth; and truth is something that must be experienced directly, from moment to moment.

when there is complete attention, that is, when the mind is totally aware, alert, watchful, there is no such thing as evil or good; there is only an awakened state. Goodness then is not a quality, not a virtue, it is a state of love.

you and I are the problem, and not the world, because the world is the projection of ourselves, and to understand the world we must understand ourselves.

Fear is the destructive energy in man.

if you understand fear—which can only take place when you come directly in contact with it, as you are in contact with hunger, as you are directly in contact when you are threatened with losing your job—then you do something; only then will you find that all fear ceases—we mean all fear, not fear of this kind or of that kind.

Face your fear.

fear is the nonacceptance of what is.

desire has to be understood, not destroyed.

where you are important, love is not.

there is love, and without love there is no chastity.

Because without passion life becomes empty, shallow, and without much meaning. If you cannot see the beauty of a tree and love that tree, if you cannot care for it intensely, you are not living.

The desire to free oneself from conditioning only furthers conditioning. But if, instead of trying to suppress desire, one understands the whole process of desire, in that very understanding there comes freedom from conditioning.

You see, man is energy, and if man does not seek truth, this energy becomes destructive; therefore society controls and shapes the individual, which smothers this energy…

invention is not creation; capacity is not creation; thought can never be creative because thought is always conditioned and can never be free. It is only that energy which is not the product of thought that is creative.

I am not getting it.

meditation is a process of freeing the mind from systems, and of giving attention without either being absorbed or making an effort to concentrate.

there is no arriving, there is only the movement of learning—and that is the beauty of life.

You do not condemn a bird in flight: you observe it, you see the beauty of it. But, when you consider your own inward strife, you condemn it or justify it. You are incapable of observing this inward conflict without choice or justification. To be aware of your thought and feeling without identification and denial is not tedious and painful; but in search of a result, an end to be gained, conflict is increased and the tedium of strife begins.

A problem comes into being only when there is a search for result. When the search for result ceases, then only is there no problem.

When the individual is in conflict within himself he must inevitably create conflict without, and only he can bring about peace within himself and so in the world, for he is the world.

there is no such thing as certainty, security, in any relationship. Inwardly, psychologically, we should like to be secure, but there is no such thing as permanent security….

Happiness is derivative; it is a by-product of something else.

happiness is not a thing to be pursued; it comes. But if you seek it, it will evade you.

Now, the understanding of suffering does not lie in finding out what the cause is.

As medical knowledge helps to prevent physical pain, so beliefs help to prevent psychological pain, and that is why I am afraid of losing my beliefs, though I have no perfect knowledge or concrete proof of the reality of such beliefs.

Truth is always new, therefore timeless. What was truth yesterday is not truth today, what is truth today is not truth tomorrow.

You cannot search out reality; you must cease for reality to be.

It’s what we like and don’t like that has created this misery.

You will find, if you have heard all that has been said, that truth will come in moments when you are not expecting it. If I may say so, be open, sensitive, be fully aware of what is from moment to moment. Don’t build around yourself a wall of impregnable thought. The bliss of truth comes when the mind is not occupied with its own activities and struggles.

We are constantly escaping from what is, to transform or modify it. He who is truly content is he who understands what is, who gives the right significance to what is. True contentment lies not in few or many possessions, but in understanding the whole significance of what is. Only in passive awareness is the meaning of what is understood.

Observe your own emotional states and you will see that the moments of great joy, great ecstasy, are unpremeditated; they happen, mysteriously, darkly, unknowingly.

The mind that perpetually has problems is not a serious mind at all, but the mind that understands each problem as it arises and dissolves it immediately so that it is not carried over to the next day—such a mind is serious….

You perceive something only when your mind is silent, when there is no chattering of any kind.

Surely, beauty and love are the same. Without love there is no beauty, and without beauty there is no love. Beauty is in form, beauty is in speech, beauty is in conduct. If there is no love, conduct is empty; it is merely the product of society, of a particular culture, and what is produced is mechanical, lifeless.

We consider the present as a means to an end, so the present loses its immense significance. The present is the eternal.

what is important is not to ask, “What is the purpose of life, of existence?” but to clear the confusion that is within you. It is like a blind man who asks, “What is light?” If I tell him what light is, he will listen according to his blindness, according to his darkness; but suppose he is able to see, then he will never ask the question, “What is light?” It is there. Similarly, if you can clarify the confusion within yourself, then you will find what the purpose of life is; you will not have to ask, you will not have to look for it; all that you have to do is to be free from those causes that bring about confusion.

It is tradition, the accumulation of experience, the ashes of memory, that make the mind old. The mind that dies every day to the memories of yesterday, to all the joys and sorrows of the past—such a mind is fresh, innocent, it has no age; and without that innocence, whether you are ten or sixty, you will not find God.

Therefore, in dying every day there is renewal, there is a rebirth. That is immortality. In death there is immortality—not the death of which you are afraid, but the death of previous conclusions, memories, experiences, with which you are identified as the “me.”

What is love without motive? Can there be love without any incentive, without wanting something for oneself out of love? Can there be love in which there is no sense of being wounded when love is not returned? If I offer you my friendship and you turn away, am I not hurt? Is that feeling of being hurt the outcome of friendship, of generosity, of sympathy? Surely, as long as I feel hurt, as long as there is fear, as long as I help you hoping that you may help me—which is called service—there is no love. If you understand this, the answer is there.