What Are You Doing With Your Life?

by J. Krishnamurti

man has to

free himself of fear, conditioning, authority, and dogma through self-knowledge.

life of goodness, love, and compassion

education should emphasize the understanding of the mind and heart,

Goodness is contagious.

What is this self that is the root of the trouble,

We need to learn to understand the self to understand that it is the source of our problems.

psychological freedom

We are usually taught what to think, but not how to think.

Each one of us is conditioned by various influences, and from that conditioning, from those limited and unconscious influences, our thoughts spring and take the form of a Communist, a Hindu, a Muslim, or a scientist.

Life is always in movement, never static.

Good

only the free mind that can meet life,

If we are miserable, confused, chaotic within, by projection that becomes the world, that becomes society, because the relationship between yourself and myself, between myself and another is society—society is the product of our relationship—and if our relationship is confused, egocentric, narrow, limited, national, we project that and bring chaos into the world.

Relationship is action, and self-knowledge is the result of awareness in action.

we are still within the field of thought, which is within the field of the ‘me’, of the ‘I’, of the ego, or what you will.

There is a difference between happiness and gratification.

Perhaps you can find gratification but surely you cannot find happiness.

There is a search for something permanent, is there not, in most of us?

Are we not seeking lasting happiness, lasting gratification, lasting certainty?

The moment you are conscious that you are happy, it is not happiness, is it?

there is dependence, there is fear, there is exclusion, and

To know real joy, one must go much deeper.

That very desire for continuity is corruption.

When we are seeking, we are always finding. Unfortunately, we will always find when we are seeking.

Think it out fully, feel it out and discover for yourself what happens.

But thought is the result of time, and time is this consciousness.

What one comes to do is to observe the fact—to observe the fact without any translation, interpretation, identification, condemnation, evaluation—just to observe.

look at the fact without any pressure,

mind is capable of being aware without any sense of demand, without any pressure—just to be aware.

It cannot be learned. It cannot be practiced. Right thinking is a movement of self-knowledge from moment to moment.

Right thinking can only come into being when there is awareness of every thought and feeling,

intelligence is not, for to understand there must be complete unity of mind and heart in action…

Intelligence, Awareness May

it will be real only when you are intensely aware at the moment of the functioning of your thought and emotion;

We have hardly any independent thoughts and feelings.

This imitation of what we should be, breeds fear; and fear kills creative thinking.

Please, I have not taken any drug, because to me any form of stimulant—any form, listening to the speaker and therefore being stimulated, or drink, or sex, or a drug, or going to mass and getting into a certain state of emotional tension—is utterly detrimental, because any stimulant in any form, however subtle, makes the mind dull, because it depends

on that stimulant. The stimulant establishes a certain habit and makes the mind dull.

So, all of us, as we mature, as we grow older, want to forget ourselves, and so we try to find something greater with which to be identified.

there is the constant longing for more of the self-free state.

deeply, psychologically.

To conserve energy we must be aware of ourselves,

how to conserve this energy,

And perhaps when the mind is free from its own conditioning, that very freedom itself is the purpose.

first requisite is freedom,

Surely a man who is living richly, a man who sees things as they are and is content with what he has, is not confused; he is clear, therefore he does not ask what is the purpose of life.

Life is relationship, life is action in relationship; when I do not understand relationship, or when relationship is confused, then I seek a fuller meaning. Why are our lives so empty? Why are we so lonely, frustrated?

Love can be found only in action, which is relationship.

So we run away from what we are, which is fear; and what we run away to increases fear. And we have developed, unfortunately, a network of escapes.

So thought always projects itself in time, because thought is time.