Total Freedom: The Essential Krishnamurti

by J. Krishnamurti

Is there not a difference between the flowering mind and the becoming mind? The becoming mind is a mind that is always growing, becoming, enlarging, gathering experience as knowledge. We know that process full well in our daily life, with all its results, with all its conflicts, its miseries and strife, but we do not know the life of flowering. And is there not a difference between the two which we have to discover—not by trying to demarcate, to separate, but to discover—in the process of our living? When we discover this, we may perhaps be able to set aside this ambition, the way of choice, and discover a flowering, which is the way of life, which may be true action. So if we merely say that we must not be ambitious without the discovery of the flowering way of life, the mere killing of ambition destroys the mind also because it is an action of the will, which is the action of choice. So is it not essential for each one of us to find out in our lives the truth of ambition? We are all encouraged to be ambitious; our society is based on the strength of the drive toward a result. And in that ambition there are inequalities which legislation tries to level out, to alter. Perhaps that way, that approach to life, is essentially wrong, and there might be another approach, which is the flowering of life, which could express itself without accumulation. After all, we know when we are conscious of striving after something, of becoming something; that is ambition, the seeking of a r...