As One Is: To Free the Mind from All Condition

by J. Krishnamurti

As long as one’s instrument of thinking is not clear, is perverted, conditioned, whatever one thinks is bound to be limited, narrow.

In attention there is no focusing, no choice; there is complete awareness without any interpretation. And if we can listen so attentively, completely, to what is being said, then that very attention brings about the miracle of change within the mind itself.

Freeing the mind from conditioning is the ending of sorrow.

Whether a mind is occupied with God, with truth, with sex, or with drink, its quality is essentially the same. The man who thinks about God and becomes a hermit may be socially more significant; he may have a greater value to society than the drunkard, but both are occupied, and a mind that is occupied is never free to discover what is truth.

The mind that gives soil to problems can never find that which is real. So the issue is not how to resolve desire but to understand it, and one can understand it only when there is no condemnation of it. Only the mind that is not occupied with desire can understand desire.

What matters is to understand for oneself, not through the direction of others, the total content of consciousness, which is conditioned, which is the result of society, of religion, of various impacts, impressions, memories—to understand all that conditioning and be free of it. But there is no “how” to be free.

What is confusion? Confusion exists only when there is the fact plus what I think about the fact: my opinion about the fact, my disregard of the fact, my evasion of the fact, my evaluation of the fact, and so on. If I can look at the fact without the additive quality, then there is no confusion.

If you want to find a meaning, give full attention.

In the moment of attention the self, the ‘me’, is absent, and it is that moment of attention that is good, that is love.

There is progress in self-improvement—I can be better tomorrow, more kind, more generous, less envious, less ambitious. But does self-improvement bring about a complete change in one’s thinking? Or is there no change at all, but only progress?

Sorrow may be controlled, disciplined, subjugated, rationalized, super-refined, but the potential quality of sorrow is still there; and to be free from sorrow, there must be freedom from this potentiality, from this seed of the ‘I’, the self, from the whole process of becoming.

To go beyond, there must be the cessation of this process. But if you say, “How am I to go beyond?” then the “how” becomes the method, the practice, which is still progress, therefore there is no going beyond but only the refinement of consciousness in sorrow. I hope you are getting this.

That is the beauty of truth; it remains timelessly the unknown, and a mind that is the result of the known can never grasp it.

What is significant is not with what the mind is occupied but the fact of its occupation, whether it be with the kitchen, with the children, with amusement, with what kind of food you are going to have, or with virtue, with God.

Now, what makes the mind petty? Surely, the mind is narrow, limited, shallow, petty, as long as it is acquisitive. It may give up worldly things and become acquisitive in the pursuit of knowledge, wisdom, but it is still petty because in acquiring, it develops the will to achieve, to gain, and this very will to achieve constitutes pettiness.

But when you are completely attentive with that attention in which there is no object because there is no process of acquiring, no cultivation of the will to achieve a result, then you will find that the mind is extraordinarily steady, inwardly still—and it is only the still mind that is free to discover or let that reality come into being.

Anything I fight, I am giving life to. If I fight an idea, I am giving life to that idea; if I fight you, I am giving you life to fight me.

The mind hates to be uncertain, so it must have habits as a means of security.

So, the questioner wants to know why it is that he cannot go beyond all these superficial wrangles of the mind. For the simple reason that, consciously or unconsciously, the mind is always seeking something, and that very search brings violence, competition, the sense of utter dissatisfaction. It is only when the mind is completely still that there is a possibility of touching the deep waters.

A man who lives never asks, “What is living?” and he has no theories about living. It is only the half-alive who talk about the purpose of life.