The Book of Life: Daily Meditations with Krishnamurti

by J. Krishnamurti

If there is a gap between what is said and your own reaction to what is said, in that interval, whether you prolong it indefinitely, for a long period, or for a few seconds—in that interval, if you observe, there comes clarity. It is the interval that is the new brain.

The intention must be to understand ourselves and not to leave it to others to transform themselves or to bring about a modified change through revolution, either of the left or of the right. It is important to understand that this is our responsibility, yours and mine; because, however small may be the world we live in, if we can transform ourselves, bring about a radically different point of view in our daily existence, then perhaps we shall affect the world at large, the extended relationship with others.

Real change can only take place when the mind comes to the problem afresh, not with all the jaded memories of a thousand yesterdays. Obviously

Does knowledge, which is the known, bring about change? I must have knowledge to build a bridge; but must my mind know towards what it is changing?

So the mind that wishes to be fundamentally, deeply, in a state of change, in a state of revolution, must be free from the known. Then the mind becomes astonishingly still, and only such a mind will experience the radical transformation that is so necessary.

radical change can take place only outside the field of thought, not within it, and the mind can leave the field only when it sees the confines, the boundaries of the field, and realizes that any change within the field is no change at all. This is real meditation.

And it is also your problem how to bring about a radical change in yourself and not be satisfied with superficial revolutions in politics, in economics, in different bureaucracies. You are not trying to understand me or the way I look at life. You are trying to understand yourself, and these are your problems which you have to face; and by considering them together, which is what we are doing in these talks, we can perhaps help each other to look at them more clearly, see them more distinctly. But to see clearly merely at the verbal level is not enough. That does not bring about a creative psychological change. We must go beyond the words, beyond all symbols and their sensations …

It is a problem, it becomes a problem, when I want to give it up; as long as I am satisfied with it, it is not a problem.

The mind can understand the present only if it does not compare, judge; the desire to alter or condemn the present without understanding it gives continuance to the past.

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

You know, it is good to hide your brilliance under a bushel, to be anonymous, to love what you are doing and not to show off. It is good to be kind without a name. That does not make you famous, it does not cause your photograph to appear in the newspapers.

You are just a creative human being living anonymously, and in that there is richness and great beauty.

You may create a face, an image out of a stone, because you have learned the technique, and not be a master creator.

If you have something to say, you create your own style; but when you have nothing to say, even if you have a beautiful style, what you write is only the traditional routine, a repetition in new words of the same old thing…

I think one can live in this world anonymously, completely unknown, without being famous, ambitious, cruel. One can live very happily when no importance is given to the self; and this also is part of right education.

It is not only the child that is innocent—he may not be—but the mind that is capable of experiencing without accumulating the residue of experience.

My inquiry now is how to be free from the fear of the known, which is the fear of losing my family, my reputation, my character, my bank account, my appetites, and so on.

Thus my fear is of the known, I am afraid of the accumulations, physical or psychological, that I have gathered as a means of warding off pain or preventing sorrow…. Knowledge also helps to prevent pain. 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.

thought is from yesterday, thought is a continuous movement, the response of the past; so thought is essentially a product of time.

So we invent a life that we have lived of daily agony, daily insensitivity, the increase of problems, and its stupidity; that life we want to carry over, which we call the “soul”—which we say is the most sacred thing, a part of the divine, but it is still part of your thought and therefore it has nothing to do with divinity. It is your life!

death as it is—an ending; an ending in which there is renewal, a rebirth,

You want me to give you an assurance that you will live another life, but in that there is no happiness or wisdom. The search for immortality through reincarnation is essentially egotistic, and therefore not true. Your search for immortality is only another form of the desire for the continuance of self-defensive reactions against life and intelligence.

This means that you must think and act completely anew. You must liberate yourself from the net of false values that environment has imposed upon you. There must be utter nakedness. Then there is immortality, reality.

Now, is the “I” such a spiritual entity? If it is a spiritual entity, it must be beyond all time; therefore, it cannot be reborn or continued…. 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.

thought. And my thought is the result of time, of experience, of knowledge. So, the soul is still within the field of time…. So 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.

So cause is effect, and effect becomes cause—it is one continuous movement … there is no fixed cause or fixed effect. If there were a fixed cause and a fixed effect, there would be specialization; and is not specialization death? Any species that specializes obviously comes to an end. The greatness of man is that he cannot specialize.

So, can there be action unrelated to the past? Can there be action not based on idea? Idea is the continuation of yesterday in a modified form, and that continuation will condition tomorrow, which means action based on idea can never be free. As long as action is based on idea, it will inevitably produce further conflict.

Love implies great freedom—not to do what you like. But love comes only when the mind is very quiet, disinterested, not self-centered.

We organize for existence and we accept conflict as inevitable because our existence is a ceaseless demand for power. Surely, when we love, organization has its own place, its right place; but without love, organization becomes a nightmare, merely mechanical and efficient, like the army;

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.

And 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. That was my whole reaction, in a flash.

By compassion I do not mean a thing to be acquired. 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. There is a difference between the verb and the word. The verb is of the active present, whereas the word is always of the past and therefore static. You may give vitality or movement to the name, to the word, but it is not the same as the verb, which is actively present….

We are not alone. We are the result of a thousand influences, a thousand conditionings, psychological inheritances, propaganda, culture. We are not alone, and therefore we are secondhand human beings. When one is alone, totally alone, neither belonging to any family, though one may have a family, nor belonging to any nation, to any culture, to any particular commitment, there is the sense of being an outsider—outsider to every form of thought, action, family,

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

Should not such a mind be alone and therefore creative? That creativeness is not yours or mine, it is anonymous.

A religious man does not seek God. The religious man is concerned with the transformation of society, which is himself. The religious man is not the man that does innumerable rituals, follows traditions, lives in a dead, past culture, explaining endlessly the Gita or the Bible, endlessly chanting, or taking sannyasa—that is not a religious man;

He is responsible, and therefore the religious man must understand himself, who is the product of society that he himself has created. Therefore, to find reality he must begin here, not in a temple, not in an image—whether the image is graven by the hand or by the mind. Otherwise, how can he find something totally new, a new state?

The ultimate truth is your

projection, that is what you want, which will make you happy, which will give a certainty of the deathless state.

Belief will not give you anything; belief only corrupts, binds, darkens. The mind can only be free through vigor, through self-reliance.

And is there any truth in theories, in ideals, in beliefs? Why do you have beliefs? Obviously, because beliefs give you security, comfort, safety, a guide. In yourself you are frightened, you want to be protected, you want to lean on somebody, and therefore, you create the ideal, which prevents you from understanding that which is. Therefore, an ideal becomes a hindrance to action.

Religious organizations become as fixed and as rigid as the thoughts of those who belong to them. Life is a constant change, a continual becoming, a ceaseless revolution, and because an organization can never be pliable, it stands in the way of change; it becomes reactionary to protect itself. The search for truth is individual, not congregational. To commune with the real there must be aloneness; not isolation, but freedom from all influence and opinion. Organizations of thought inevitably become hindrances to thought.

To climb high one must begin low. Out of this small beginning one may help to create a more sane and happy world

Religion is the feeling of goodness, that love which is like the river, living, moving everlastingly. In that state you will find there comes a moment when there is no longer any search at all; and this ending of search is the beginning of

something totally different. The search for God, for truth, the feeling of being completely good—not the cultivation of goodness, of humility, but the seeking out of something beyond the inventions and tricks of the mind, which means having a feeling for that something, living in it, being it—that is true religion.

But you can do that only when you leave the pool you have dug for yourself and go ou...

The mind is the product of the past, it is the result of yesterday, and can such a mind be open to the unknown? It can only project an image, but that projection is not real; so your God is not God—it is an image of your own making, an image of your own gratification. There can be reality only when the mind understands the total process of itself and comes to an end. When the mind is completely empty—only then is it capable of receiving the unknown.

Until it understands the whole process of conflict in relationship, the mind cannot be free. Only when the mind is wholly silent, completely inactive, not projecting, when it is not seeking and is utterly still—only then that which is eternal and timeless comes into being.

Now, if you approach it quite differently, you will find out for yourselves, as individuals, something real that is

beyond all the limitations of beliefs, beyond the illusion of words. But that—the discovery of truth, or God—demands great intelligence, which is not assertion of belief or disbelief, but the recognition of the hindrances created by lack of intelligence.