The Book of Life: Daily Meditations with Krishnamurti

by J. Krishnamurti

Inwardly, unconsciously, there is the tremendous weight of the past pushing you in a certain direction….

perceive the fact that analysis cannot under any circumstances clear away the burden of the unconscious, I am out of analysis. I no longer analyze.

How is it possible for the mind to be free? To be free, the mind must not only see and understand its pendulum-like swing between the past and the future but also be aware of the interval between thoughts….

that the moment you really want to do something, you have the energy to do it…. That very energy becomes the means of controlling itself, so you don’t need outside discipline.

In the search for reality, energy creates its own discipline. The man who is seeking reality spontaneously becomes the right kind of citizen, which is not according to the pattern of any particular society or government.

The highest form of this energy, the apogee, is the state of mind when it has no idea, no thought, no sense of a direction or motive—that is pure energy.

Can the mind give full attention without any sense of exclusion? Surely it can, and that is the only state of attention; the others are mere indulgence, or tricks of the mind.

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

In the cultivation of the mind, our emphasis should not be on concentration, but on attention.

Concentration is a process of forcing the mind to narrow down to a point, whereas attention is without frontiers.

Whereas, if you are wholly aware, totally attentive when you look at something, then you will find that a complete transformation takes place, and that total attention is the good.

where you will find everlasting happiness, permanent bliss? But as I said previously, there is no arriving, there is only the movement of learning—and that is the beauty of life. If you have arrived, there is nothing more.

Awareness is that state of mind which observes something without any condemnation or acceptance, which merely faces the thing as it is. When you look at a flower nonbotanically, then you see the totality of the flower; but if your mind is completely taken up with the botanical knowledge of what the flower is, you are not totally looking at the flower.

In awareness there is only the present—that is, being aware, you see the past process of influence which controls the present and modifies the future.

you don’t see the totality of the tree, you do not see the tree. In the same way is awareness. If you don’t see the operations of your mind totally in that sense—as you see the tree—you are not aware. The tree is made up of the roots, the trunk, the branches, the big ones and the little ones and the very delicate one that goes up there; and the leaf, the dead leaf, the withered leaf and the green leaf, the leaf that is eaten, the leaf that is ugly, the leaf that is dropping, the fruit, the flower—all that you see as a whole when you see the tree.

mean by the flowering of a thought giving freedom to it to see what happens, what is taking place in your thought, in your feeling. Anything that flowers must have freedom, must have light; it cannot be restricted. You cannot put any value on it, you cannot say, “That is right, that is wrong; this should be, and that should not be”—thereby, you limit the flowering of thought. And it can only flower in this awareness. Therefore, if you go into it very deeply, you will find that this flowering of thought is the ending of thought.

This extensional awareness and the creative emptiness are a total process and are not different stages. When you silently observe a problem without condemnation, justification, there comes passive awareness. In this passive awareness, the problem is understood and dissolved.

But you see, most of us are indolent. We are too lazy to take hold of ourselves and understand ourselves, and being lazy, which is really a form of conceit, we think others will solve this problem for us and give us peace, or that we should destroy the apparently few people that are causing wars.

We never listen to anything; our minds, our brain cells are so conditioned to an ideology about violence that we never look at the fact of violence. We look at the fact of violence through an ideology, and the looking at violence through an ideology creates a time interval.

The world, then, is an extension of yourself. If you as an individual desire to destroy hate, then you as an individual must cease hating. To destroy hate, you must dissociate yourself from hate in all its gross and subtle forms, and so long as you are caught up in it you are part of that world of ignorance and fear.

Then the world is an extension of yourself, yourself duplicated and multiplied. The world does not exist apart from the individual. It may exist as an idea, as a state, as a social organization, but to carry out that idea, to make that social or religious organization function, there must be the individual. His ignorance, his greed, and his fear maintain the structure of ignorance, greed, and hate.

If I am angry and you meet me with anger what is the result? More anger. You have become that which I am. If I am evil and you fight me with evil means then you also become evil, however righteous you may feel. If I am brutal and you use brutal methods to overcome me, then you become brutal like me.

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

for then happiness is sought through a means, and then the means destroys the end.

What awakens anger is that our ideal, the idea we have of ourselves, is attacked.

And our idea about ourselves is our escape from the fact of what we are.

So we are always living in an ideational world, a world of myth, and never in the world of actuality. To observe what is, to see it, actually be familiar with it, there must be no judgment, no evaluation, no opinion, no fear.

Do compassion and anger dwell together? Can there be justice when there is anger, hatred? You are perhaps angry at the thought of general injustice, cruelty, but your anger does not alter injustice or cruelty; it can only do harm.

To live with beauty, or to live with an ugly thing, and not become habituated to it requires enormous energy—an awareness that does not allow your mind to grow dull.

Words prevent me—words of explanations, rationalizations, which are still words, which are the mental process—from being directly in communion with sorrow. It is only when I am in communion with sorrow that I understand it.

Then you are simply a human being without a label, without a country.

but to receive it, the heart must be full and the mind empty. Now you have the mind full and your heart empty.

Truth is not continuous, it has no abiding place, it can be seen only from moment to moment. Truth is always new, therefore timeless.

Truth is always new; it is to see the same smile, and see that smile newly, to see the same person, and see that person anew, to see the waving palms anew, to meet life anew.

Is God to be found by seeking him out? Can you search after the unknowable? To find, you must know what you are seeking. If you seek to find, what you find will be a self-projection; it will be what you desire, and the creation of desire is not truth.

Truth is not for those who are respectable, nor for those who desire self-extension, self-fulfillment.

On the contrary, a man who is intent upon the discovery of truth must be inwardly a complete revolutionary. He cannot belong to any class, to any nation, to any group or ideology, to any organized religion; for truth is not in the temple or the church, truth is not to be found in the things made by the hand or by the mind.

Truth comes into being only when the things of the mind and of the hand are put aside, and that putting aside of the things of the mind and of the hand is not a matter of time.

leads to exploitation and the setting of man against man; but to really free your mind from the pettiness of nationalism is another matter.

But to discover for oneself what is true and what is false, and to see the truth in the false, is to let that truth operate and bring forth its own action.

The vision is the projection of the particular tradition which happens to form the background of the mind.

The thinker is made up of qualities; his qualities cannot be separated from himself. The controller is the controlled, he is merely playing a deceptive game with himself. Till the false is seen as the false, truth is not.

but when there is this complete absence of space as the observer and the observed, then there is vast space. In that space there is no conflict; in that space there is freedom.

This is enormously difficult because our mind is never satisfied, never content in the examination of what is. It always wants to transform what is into something else

Effort is distraction from what is. In the acceptance of what is, striving ceases. There

To solve these problems, what is necessary is not a new system of thought, not a new economic revolution, but to understand what is—the discontent, the constant probing of what is—which

will bring about a revolution which is more far-reaching than the revolution of ideas.

But none of us, or very few, have original, intellectual conception.

A mind that is competitive, held in the conflict of becoming, thinking in terms of comparison, is not capable of discovering the real.

Training the intellect does not result in intelligence. Rather, intelligence comes into being when one acts in perfect harmony, both intellectually and emotionally. There is a vast distinction between intellect and intelligence. Intellect is merely thought functioning independently of emotion. When intellect, irrespective of emotion, is trained in any particular direction, one may have great intellect, but one does not have intelligence, because in intelligence there is the inherent capacity to feel as well as to reason; in intelligence both capacities are equally present, intensely and harmoniously.