Total Freedom: The Essential Krishnamurti

by J. Krishnamurti

The moment you follow someone you cease to follow Truth.

True criticism lies in trying to understand the full significance of values without the hindrance of defensive reactions.

There can be fundamental and lasting change in the world, there can be love and intelligent fulfillment, only when you wake up and begin to free yourself from the net of illusions, the many illusions which you have created about yourself through fear.

To have this profound revolution, you must become fully conscious of the structure which you have created about yourself and in which you are now caught.

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.

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.

the significance of sorrow. Intelligence begins to function in the

That is, when one ceases to escape, through the well-known channels, then in that acuteness of suffering, intelligence begins to function.

To put it again differently, so long as we are seeking solutions, so long as we are seeking substitutions, authorities for the cause and the alleviation of conflict, there must be identification of the mind with the particular; whereas if the mind is in that state of intense suffering in which all the avenues of escape are blocked, then intelligence will be awakened, will function naturally and spontaneously.

The mind, which is really intelligent, is free of self-discipline, for intelligence is born out of the questioning of environment and the discovery of the true significance of environment. In that discovery is true adjustment, not the adjustment to a particular pattern or condition, but the adjustment through understanding, which is, therefore, free of the particular condition.

That is why I said the other day that if environment is driving you to a certain action, it is no longer righteous. It is only when there is action born out of the understanding of that environment that there is righteousness.

Most minds are biased through vanity, through the desire to impress others by being somebody, or through the desire to attain truth, or to escape from their environment, or expand their own consciousness—only they call this by a special spiritual name—or through their national prejudices.

So to live each moment now without the burden of the past or of the present, without that crippling memory created by the lack of understanding, mind must ever meet things anew. 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.

You react to the past because the present has lost its significance, or because you want to avoid the present; so you go back to the past and live in that emotional thrill,

Where the mind and heart are held by fear, by lack of understanding, by compulsion, such a mind, though it can think within the confines, within the limitations of that fear, is not really thinking, and its action must ever throw up new barriers. Therefore, its capacity to think is ever being limited. But if the mind frees itself through the understanding of circumstances and, therefore, acts, then that very action is creative thinking.

Therefore, in becoming aware of that, you create a conflict, and that very conflict will dissolve the cause of accumulation.

After all, environment is of the present as well as of the past. One does not understand the present because of the clouding of the mind by the past; and to free the mind from the subconscious, the unconscious hindrances of the past, is not to roll memory back into the past, but to be fully conscious in the present.

How then can you understand environment? How can you understand its full worth, significance? What prevents you from seeing its significance? First of all, fear. Fear is the cause of the search for protection or security, security which is either physical, spiritual, religious, or emotional.

To acknowledge, to be aware of what one is, is already the beginning of wisdom, the beginning of understanding, which releases you from time.

It takes an extraordinarily astute mind, an extraordinarily pliable heart, to be aware of and to follow what is: because what is is constantly moving, constantly undergoing a transformation, and if the mind is tethered to belief, to knowledge, it ceases to pursue, it ceases to follow the swift movement of what is. What is is not static, surely it is constantly moving, as you will see if you observe it very closely. To follow it, you need a very swift mind and a pliable heart—which are denied when the mind is static, fixed in a belief, in a prejudice, in an identification; and a mind and heart that are dry cannot follow easily, swiftly, that which is.

Those sects which offer you a system for the solution of suffering—economic, social, or religious—are the worst; because then system becomes important and not man—whether it be a religious system, or a system of the left or of the right. System becomes important—the philosophy, the idea, becomes important—and not man; and for the sake of the idea, of the ideology, you are willing to sacrifice all mankind, which is exactly what is happening in the world.

Problems bring us together, but ideas separate us.

Why are we so frightened of our loneliness, of our emptiness?

Our conflict becomes more and more complex and insoluble because we do not face what is. There is no complexity in what is, but only in the many escapes that we seek.

A man who relies on time as a means through which he can gain happiness or realize truth or God is merely deceiving himself; he is living in ignorance and, therefore, in conflict. A

because then the mind is capable of perceiving what is true; and it is truth that liberates, not your effort to be free.

as long as education does not cultivate an integrated outlook on life, it has very little significance.

subservient,

A disciplined mind is never a free mind, nor can a mind that has suppressed desire ever be free. It is only through understanding the whole process of desire that the mind can be free. Discipline always limits the mind to a movement within the framework of a particular system of thought or belief, does it not? And such a mind is never free to be intelligent. Discipline brings about submission to authority.

If you do not follow somebody you feel very lonely. Be lonely then. Why are you frightened of being alone? Because you are faced with yourself as you are and you find that you are empty, dull, stupid, ugly, guilty, and anxious—a petty, shoddy, secondhand entity. Face the fact; look at it, do not run away from it. The moment you run away fear begins.

Most of us walk through life inattentively, reacting unthinkingly according to the environment in which we have been brought up, and such reactions create only further bondage, further conditioning, but the moment you give your total attention to your conditioning you will see that you are free from the past completely, that it falls away from you naturally.

A mind which is not crippled by memory has real freedom.

you can look at it without wanting the experience to be repeated, then there will be no pain, no fear and, therefore, tremendous joy. It is the struggle to repeat and perpetuate pleasure which turns it into pain. Watch it in yourself. The very demand for the repetition of pleasure brings about pain, because it is not the same as it was yesterday.

It appears that man has always escaped from himself, from what he is, from where he is going, from what all this is about—the universe, our daily life, the dying and the beginning.

With most of us, the difficulty is that we are unaware of our escapes. We are so conditioned, so accustomed to our escapes, that we take them as realities. But if we will look more deeply into ourselves, we will see how extraordinarily lonely, how extraordinarily empty, we are under the superficial covering of our escapes. Being aware of that emptiness, we are constantly covering it up with various activities, whether artistic, social, religious, or political.

So it is very important, not for me alone but for all of us, to find out if we can keep our minds from being this storehouse of the past, and whether the mind can be stable on the waters of life and let the memories float by without clinging to any particular memory, and when necessary to use that memory as we do use it when we communicate. Which means the mind constantly letting the past float by, never identifying itself with it, never being occupied with it; so that the mind is firm, not in experience, not in memory, not in knowledge, but firm, stable in the process, in the way of experiencing continuously.

It is only when the mind is totally free, then only is there a possibility of immense profound stillness; and in that stillness that which is eternal comes into being. That is meditation.

“Look, listen to all this, listen to all the noise that is going on in the world. Don’t take sides, don’t jump to any conclusions, but just listen. Don’t say one noise is better than another noise; they are all noises, so just listen first. And listen also to your own noise, your chattering, your wishes—‘I want to be this and I don’t want to be that’

Watch yourself, but don’t become self-centered in that watching. Be tremendously concerned, in watching, about further enlargement