As One Is: To Free the Mind from All Condition

by J. Krishnamurti

But most of us do not love what we are doing and that is why we are occupied with our livelihood. I think there is a difference between the two if you really go into it. How can I love what I am doing if I am all the time driven by ambition, trying through my work to achieve an aim, to become somebody, to have a success? An artist who is concerned with his name, with his greatness, with comparison, with fulfilling his ambition, has ceased to be an artist; he is merely a technician like everybody else. Which means, really, that to love something there must be a total cessation of all ambition, of all desire for the recognition of society, which is rotten anyhow. [Laughter] Sirs, please don’t. And we are not trained for that, we are not educated for that; we have to fit into some groove which society or the family has given us. Because my forefathers have been doctors, lawyers, or engineers, I must be a doctor, a lawyer, or an engineer. And now there must be more and more engineers because that is what society demands. So we have lost this love of the thing itself, if we ever had it, which I doubt. And when you love a thing, there is no occupation with it. The mind isn’t conniving to achieve something, trying to be better than somebody else; all comparison, competition, all desire for success, for fulfillment, totally ceases. It is only the ambitious mind that is occupied.

One of the grave problems about which most of us must have thought is the complete control of the mind, because one can see that without a deep, rational, balanced control of the mind, there is not the conservation of energy which is so essential if one is to do anything, and especially in matters that pertain to so-called search—the search of truth, of reality, of God, or what you will. One is aware, I think, that this stability of mind is necessary to penetrate into fundamental problems, which a superficial mind cannot touch. And yet the difficulty lies in how to control the mind, does it not?

We are trying to control our thoughts, our desires, cultivate virtue, be watchful of our words, our actions, and so on, either with the intention of being good, respectable citizens or in the hope of canalizing all this extraordinary vitality of desire in order to find out what lies beyond; but we cannot find that out, however much we may struggle, as long as we do not understand the pettiness of the mind. When a petty mind seeks God, its God will also be petty, obviously; its virtues will be mere respectability. So, is it possible to break up this pettiness?

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.

Desiring to acquire a steady mind, you say, “I must control my mind, I must shape it, I must push away all conflicting desires,”

I am saying that there must be complete and absolute steadiness of the mind, and that any endeavor to achieve that state indicates a mind that is divided, a mind that says, “By Jove, I must have that steadiness, it will be marvelous,” and then pursues that state through discipline, through control, through various forms of sanction, and so on. But if the mind is capable of listening to the truth of that statement, if it sees the absolute necessity of complete control, then you will find there is no endeavor to achieve a state.

most of us think in terms of effort; there is always the entity who is making an effort to achieve a result, and hence there is conflict.

These are all tangents because the center is still petty. As long as the mind thinks in terms of acquiring something, of achieving a result, it is ambitious, and an ambitious mind is in its very nature small, shallow. Such a mind, like that of an ambitious man in this world, obviously has a certain amount of energy, but what we are discussing demands much deeper, wider, more unlimited energy in which the self is totally absent.

When you say, “I must think about this and nothing else,” then everything else is a distraction. 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.

Now, if one can really come to that state of saying, “I do not know,” it indicates an extraordinary sense of humility; there is no arrogance of knowledge; there is no self-assertive answer to make an impression. When you can actually say, “I do not know,” which very few are capable of saying, then in that state all fear ceases because all sense of recognition, the search into memory, has come to an end;

It is only when the mind ceases to think in terms of its own continuity that the unknowable comes into being.

After all, the self, the ego, the ‘I’ is expressing itself through ambition, through acquisitiveness, through envy, through being violent and trying to be nonviolent, and so on. These are all expressions of the ‘me’. I see all that, and going behind it, I also see that that very activity of the self arises from this extraordinary sense of emptiness. I do not know if you have noticed that when you have traced the ‘I’ in all its movements, you come to this point where the mind is totally aware of the self as being completely empty; but the mind has never really looked at this emptiness—it has always run away, taken flight.

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It is enormously important to meditate. If you do not know what meditation is, it is like having a flower without scent. You may have a marvelous capacity to talk or to paint or to enjoy life; you may have encyclopedic information and correlate all knowledge, but those things will have no meaning at all if you do not know what meditation is. Meditation is the perfume of life; it has immense beauty.

opens doors that the mind can never open; it goes to depths that the merely cultured mind can never touch. So meditation is very important. But we always put the wrong question and therefore get a wrong answer. We say, “How am I to meditate?” so we go to some swami, some foolish person, or we pick up a book, or follow a system, hoping to learn how to meditate.

it says, “I do not know”? That state is the beginning and the end of meditation because in that state every experience—every experience—is understood and not accumulated. Do you understand? You see, you want to control your thinking, and when you control your thinking, hold it from distraction, your energy has gone into the control and not into thinking.

Meditation is a process of purgation of the mind. There can be purgation of the mind only when there is no controller; in controlling, the controller dissipates energy. Dissipation of energy arises from the friction between the controller and the object he wishes to control. Now, when you say, “I do not know,” there is no movement of thought in any direction to find an answer; the mind is completely still. And for the mind to be still, there must be extraordinary energy. The mind cannot be still without energy—not the energy that is dissipated through conflict, suppression, domination, or through prayer, seeking, begging, which implies a movement, but the energy that is complete attention. Any movement of thought in any direction is a dissipation of energy, and for the mind to be completely still, there must be the energy of complete attention. Only then is there the coming into being of that which is not to be invited, that which is not to be sought after, that for which there is no respectability, which cannot be pursued through virtue or sacrifice. That state is creativity—that is the timeless, the real.