Total Freedom: The Essential Krishnamurti

by J. Krishnamurti

“When there is a total understanding of need, the outward and the inner, then desire is not a torture. Then it has a quite different meaning, a significance far beyond the content of thought and it goes beyond feeling, with its emotions, myths and illusions. With the total understanding of need, not the mere quantity or the quality of it, desire then is a flame and not a torture. Without this flame life itself is lost. It is this flame that burns away the pettiness of its object, the frontiers, the fences that have been imposed upon it. Then call it by whatever name you will, love, death, beauty. Then it is there without an end.”

“The Perfect man has no self; the Holy man has no merit; the Sage has no fame.”

I maintain that Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. That is my point of view, and I adhere to that absolutely and unconditionally. Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organization be formed to lead or to coerce people along any particular path. If you first understand that, then you will see how impossible it is to organize a belief. A belief is purely an individual matter, and you cannot and must not organize it. If you do, it becomes dead, crystalized; it becomes a creed, a sect, a religion, to be imposed on others.

Again, I maintain that no organization can lead man to spirituality. If an organization be created for this purpose, it becomes a crutch, a weakness, a bondage, and must cripple the individual, and prevent him from growing, from establishing his uniqueness, which lies in the discovery for himself of that absolute, unconditioned Truth.

The moment you follow someone you cease to follow Truth.

(How men love to be different from their fellowmen, however ridiculous, absurd, and trivial their distinctions may be! I do not want to encourage that absurdity.)

Again, you have the idea that only certain people hold the key to the Kingdom of Happiness. No one holds it. No one has the authority to hold that key. That key is your own self, and in the development and the purification and in the incorruptibility of that self alone is the Kingdom of Eternity. So you will see how absurd is the whole structure that you have built, looking for external help, depending on others for your comfort, for your happiness, for your strength. These can only be found within yourselves. So why have an organization? You are accustomed to being told how far you have advanced, what is your spiritual status. How childish! Who but yourself can tell you if you are beautiful or ugly within? Who but yourself can tell you if you are incorruptible? You are not serious in these things.

So long as there is a desire for self-continuance in any form, there must be fear, which creates authority, and from this there come the subtle cruelty and stupidity of submitting oneself to exploitation. This exploitation is so subtle, so refined, that one becomes enamored of it, calling it spiritual progress and advancement toward perfection.

After all, the “I,” the consciousness with which the mind identifies itself, is the result of environment. The struggle takes place between that “I” and the constantly changing environment.

If you look closely you will see that your search is nothing but a search for comfort and security and escape; not a search for understanding, not a search for truth, but rather a search for an evasion and, therefore, a search for the conquering of all obstacles; after all, all conquering is but substitution, and in substitution there is no understanding.

And no conflict will awaken that suffering, that acuteness of suffering, when the mind is trying to escape, for in escape there is no intelligence.

But if there is intelligence, then environment has no value, no significance, because intelligence is then freed from circumstance; it is functioning fully.

So what one has to do is to find out if one is dealing with the fundamental, or merely with the superficial. And to me the superficial will exist so long as you are merely concerned with the alteration of environment so as to alleviate conflict. That is, you still want to cling to the “I” consciousness as “mine,” but yet desire to alter the circumstances so that they will not create conflict in that “I.”

As long as there is conflict, it indicates that we have not understood the conditions placed about us; and that movement of environment remains false so long as we do not inquire into its significance, and we can only discover it in that state of acute consciousness of suffering.

In the present is eternity, and to understand that, mind must be free of the burden of the past; and to free the mind of the past there must be an intense questioning of the present, not the considering of how the “I” will continue in the future.

Before you try to change and alter thought and feeling, find out the manner of their working, and you will see that they are continually adjusting themselves within the limitations established by that point fixed by desire and the fulfillment of that desire. In awareness there is no discipline.

Every demand for a method indicates the desire to escape. You want me to lay down a system so that you may imitate that system. In other words, you want a system invented for you to superimpose on those conditions which are creating conflict, so that you can escape from all conflict.

It is fatal to meet life with the burden of certainty, with the conceit of knowledge, because, after all, knowledge is merely a thing of the past. So when you come to that life with a freshness, then you will know what it is to live without conflict, without this continual straining effort. Then you wander far on the floods of life.

so long as there is loneliness, shallowness, emptiness, insufficiency, which in its outer expression is dependence, there must be pain.

If I want to understand you, I must not condemn you, obviously.

There must be radical transformation of

the source and not mere modification of the result.

By learning I do not mean the mere cultivation of memory or the accumulation of knowledge, but the capacity to think clearly and sanely without illusion, to start from facts and not from beliefs and ideals.

Learning implies the love of understanding and the love of doing a thing for itself.

To experience what is solitude and what is meditation, one must be in a state of inquiry; only a mind that is in a state of inquiry is capable of learning. But when inquiry is suppressed by previous knowledge, or by the authority and experience of another, then learning becomes mere imitation, and imitation causes a human being to repeat what is learned without experiencing it.

A body that is not kept clean, that is sloppy and does not hold itself in good posture, is not conducive to sensitivity of mind and emotions.

Only the innocent mind can inquire into the unknown. But the calculated innocence which may wear a loincloth or the robe of a monk is not that passion of self-abandonment from which come courtesy, gentleness, humility, patience—the expressions of love.

If one gets used to disturbance it means that one’s mind has become dull, just as one can get so used to beauty around one that one no longer notices it.

So if you can look at all things without allowing pleasure to creep in—at a face, a bird, the color of a sari, the beauty of a sheet of water shimmering in the sun, or anything that gives delight—if you can look at it without wanting the experience to be repeated, then there will be no pain, no fear and, therefore, tremendous joy.

significance of pleasure. Then you will have tremendous joy in life. You cannot think about joy. Joy is an immediate thing and by thinking about it, you turn it into pleasure. Living in the present is the instant perception of beauty and the great delight in it without seeking pleasure from it.

We carry about with us the burden of what thousands of people have said and the memories of all our misfortunes. To abandon all that totally is to be alone, and the mind that is alone is not only innocent but young—not in time or age, but young, innocent, alive at whatever age—and only such a mind can see that which is truth and that which is not measurable by words.

If you know how to love, then you can do what you like because it will solve all other problems.

“If I may suggest, never under any circumstances ask ‘how.’ When you use the word how you really want someone to tell you what to do, some guide, some system, somebody to lead you by the hand so that you lose your freedom, your capacity to observe, your own activities, your own thoughts, your own way of life. When you ask ‘how’ you really become a secondhand human being; you lose integrity and also the innate honesty to look at yourself, to be what you are and to go beyond and above what you are. Never, never ask the question ‘how.’ We are talking psychologically, of course.

The observer is the observed and therein lies sanity, the whole, and with the holy is love.

This morning there wasn’t a cloud in the sky; the sun was in the valley and all things were rejoicing, except man. He looked at this wondrous earth and went on with his labor, his sorrow and passing pleasures. He had no time to see; he was too occupied with his problems, with his agonies, with his violence. He doesn’t see the tree and so he cannot see his own travail. When he’s forced to look, he tears to pieces what he sees, which he calls analysis, runs away from it or doesn’t want to see. In the art of seeing lies the miracle of transformation, the transformation of what is. The “what should be” never is. There’s vast mystery in the act of seeing. This needs care, attention, which is love.

Every challenge must always be new, and as long as the mind is conditioned, it responds to challenge according to its conditioning; therefore, there is never an adequate response.

The truth is that as long as there is a point in the mind which is moving toward another point, that is, as long as the mind is seeking security in any form, it will never be free from pain. Security is dependency, and a mind that depends has no love.

To see that one must begin with oneself is to realize an enormous truth; but most of us overlook it; we easily brush it aside because we are concerned with the collective, with changing the social order, with trying to bring about peace and harmony in the world.

The mind that is wishing to comprehend a problem must not be concerned with the problem, but with the workings of its own machinery of judgment.

The known is the tomorrow. Tomorrow is Sunday and

direct perception, insight, and the working out of it demand great logic, a great capacity to think clearly? But the capacity to think clearly will not bring about insight.

That very demand for excellence, how you demand it, brings the essence of it. You demand it passionately.

The uniqueness of the individual does not lie in the superficial but in the total freedom from the content of consciousness.

There is no thinker if you do not think.

Therefore, there must be observation of behavior. Do I behave according to a motive, according to circumstances? Is my behavior pragmatic, or is it under all circumstances the same? Not the same in the sense of copying a pattern; is it a behavior that is never relative, that is not based on reward and punishment? Inquire into it, observe it and you will find how terrible your behavior is, how you look to a superior and inferior and all the other things you do. There is never a constant movement free of the motive of reward and punishment.

Unless there is complete harmony in the material world in which I live, which is part of me, in me, which is my consciousness, the mind cannot possibly go beyond itself.

Without meditation and the coming upon that thing which is not able to be experienced, which is not to be put into words, which has no time, which has no continuity, life has very little meaning.

As long as you have an image about yourself, you are everlastingly hurt. You may resist it, you may build a wall around yourself, but when there is a wall around yourself, when you withdraw, there is a division, and where there is a division there must be conflict—as with the Arab and the Jew, the Hindu and the Muslim, the communist and the noncommunist. Where there is a division, it is the law that there must be conflict.

Thought as knowledge has its right place, but it has no place in the psyche.

When there is that total attention given to observation, that which is observed undergoes a fundamental transformation. Got it? Do it!