The Book of Life: Daily Meditations with Krishnamurti

by J. Krishnamurti

That which has continuity can never renew itself. As long as thought continues through memory, through desire, through experience, it can never renew itself; therefore, that which is continued cannot know the real.

you cannot meet death if you don’t die every day. It is only when you die that there is love.

So one has to live every day dying—dying because you are then in contact with life.

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.”

In the dying of the “me” every minute there is eternity, there is immortality, there is a thing to be experienced

When you are no longer afraid, because every minute there is an ending and therefore a renewal, then you are open to the unknown. Reality is the unknown. Death is also the unknown.

what matters is not whether there is reincarnation, but to realize complete fulfillment in the present. And you can do that only when your mind and heart are no longer protecting themselves against life.

it is the truth that liberates, not your own conclusion, your own opinion….

That which has continuity can never renew itself. As long as thought continues through memory, through desire, through experience, it can never renew itself; therefore, that which is continued cannot know the real.

is there such a thing as a soul, which is something beyond time, something beyond thought, something that is not invented by man, something that is beyond the nature of man, something that is not put together by the cunning mind? Because the mind sees such enormous uncertainty, confusion, nothing permanent in life—nothing.

the idea of a continuity of a soul that will be reborn over and over and over again has no meaning because it is the invention of a mind that is frightened, of a mind that wants, that seeks a duration through permanency, that wants certainty, because in that there is hope.

karma implies cause and effect. And are cause and effect static, are cause and effect ever fixed? Does not effect become cause also? So there is no fixed cause or fixed effect.

the human being does not end completely. There is the possibility of constant renewal; he is not limited by specialization.

That is the whole process of karma, cause and effect; and obviously, though it may temporarily give pleasure, such a process of cause and effect ultimately leads to pain. That is the real crux of the matter: Can thought be free?

Thought or action that is free does not produce pain, does not bring about conditioning. That is the vital point of this whole question. So, can there be action unrelated to the past?

As long as action is the outcome of the past, action can never be free, and only in freedom can you discover what is true.

can the mind be free from its conditioning?

How do you solve that problem?

a flower that has perfume is not concerned who comes to smell it, or who turns his back upon it. So is love.

love comes only when the mind is very quiet, disinterested, not self-centered. These are not ideals.

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.

Love is the most dangerous and uncertain element in life; and because we do not want to be uncertain, because we do not want to be in danger, we live in the mind.

When you observe those poor women carrying a heavy load to the market, or watch the peasant children playing in the mud with very little else to play with, [children] who will not have the education that you are getting, who have no proper home, no cleanliness, insufficient clothing, inadequate food—when you observe all that, what is your reaction?

You may revolutionize, break the pattern of this society, but in the very breaking of it a new one is born, which is again the same thing in another form

is it possible to create a society in which all this corruption and misery does not exist? It can be created only when you and I as individuals break away from the collective, when we are free of ambition and know what it means to love.

unless each one of us has a deep sense of compassion, we shall become more and more brutal, inhuman to each other. We shall have mechanical, computer-like minds that have merely been trained to perform certain functions;

Compassion is not the word, which is merely of the past, but something that is of the active present; it is the verb and not the word, the name, or the noun.

Compassion comes into being only when thought has come to an end at its very root.

Do not war your thoughts. That is yet thought. Notice the activity and the movement they provoke within you (sensations, feelings, and any feeling about the feeling (attitude)).

if I change, how will it affect society, which is my relationship with you? Society is not some extraordinary mythical entity; it is our relationship with each other, and if two or three of us change, how will it affect the rest of the world? Or is there a way of affecting the total mind of man?

is there a process by which the individual who is changed can touch the unconscious of man?

Yes

What is the relationship between the man who has this sense of compassion, and the man whose mind is entrenched in the collective, in the traditional? How are we to find the relationship between these two, not theoretically, but actually?

freedom comes only when you understand the whole problem of envy, greed, ambition, and the desire for power. It is freedom from those things that allows the extraordinary thing called character to flower.

Compassion is not hard to come by when the heart is not filled with the cunning things of the mind. It is the mind with its demands and fears, its attachments and denials, its determinations and urges, that destroys love.

When the mind is serene, without any movement, it is there. Serenity is without motive, without the urge for the more.

The very process of the mind is separative. And that which separates knows loneliness.

aloneness is not separative.

You may withdraw into the mountains and live as a recluse, but when you are physically by yourself, you will have with you all your ideas, your experiences, your traditions, your knowledge of what has been.

man seeks to find significance in life and invents a significance, a meaning. But the loneliness still remains. So can you look at it without any comparison, just see it as it is, without trying to run away from it, without trying to cover it up, or to escape from it? Then you will see that loneliness becomes something entirely different.

it is only the one who is completely alone who is innocent. It is this innocency that frees the mind from sorrow.

Is it not important to find out, to see, the whole significance of interference, of influence, the establishment of the “me,” which is the contradiction of the anonymous?

Is it possible immediately to bring about that state of mind that is not influenced, which cannot be influenced by its own experience or by the experience of others, a mind that is incorruptible, that is alone?

when the mind is capable of shedding all influences, all interferences, of being completely alone … there is creativeness.

when we allow one influence to persuade us to a particular attitude or action, naturally we create resistance to other influences.

That creativeness is not yours or mine, it is anonymous.

The religious man is concerned totally and completely with the understanding of society, which is himself. He is not separate from society.

therefore he is not dependent on circumstances, though he is the result of circumstance—the food he eats, the books he reads, the cinemas he goes to, the religious dogmas, beliefs, rituals, and all that business.

The religious mind does not function from a center of authority, whether it is accumulated knowledge as tradition, or it is experience—which is really the continuation of tradition, the continuation of conditioning.

Without understanding himself, he who prays may through his very prayer be led to self-delusion.

Does supplication to another, to something outside, bring about the understanding of truth?

We demand, supplicate, pray, only when we are in confusion, in sorrow; and not understanding that confusion and sorrow, we turn to somebody else.