Awakening of Intelligence (J. Krishnamurti Book 1)

by J. Krishnamurti

Can thought work in any other field except in the field of the known? Needleman: No. KRISHNAMURTI: Obviously not. It can’t work in something I don’t know; it can only work in this field. Now why does it work in this? There it is, Sir—why? It is the only thing I know. In that there is security, there is protection, there is safety. That is all I know. So thought can only function in the field of the known. And when it gets tired of that, as it does, then it seeks something outside. Then what it seeks is still the known. Its gods, its visions, its spiritual states—all projected out of the known past into the future known. So thought always works in this field. Needleman: Yes, I see. KRISHNAMURTI: Therefore thought is always working in a prison. It can call it freedom, it can call it beauty, it can call it what is likes! But it is always within the limitations of the barbed-wire fence. Now I want to find out whether thought has any place except in there. Thought has no place when I say, “I don’t know.” “I really don’t know.” Right? Needleman:

Can thought work in any other field except in the field of the known? Needleman: No. KRISHNAMURTI: Obviously not. It can’t work in something I don’t know; it can only work in this field. Now why does it work in this? There it is, Sir—why? It is the only thing I know. In that there is security, there is protection, there is safety. That is all I know. So thought can only function in the field of the known. And when it gets tired of that, as it does, then it seeks something outside. Then what it seeks is still the known. Its gods, its visions, its spiritual states—all projected out of the known past into the future known. So thought always works in this field. Needleman: Yes, I see. KRISHNAMURTI: Therefore thought is always working in a prison. It can call it freedom, it can call it beauty, it can call it what is likes! But it is always within the limitations of the barbed-wire fence. Now I want to find out whether thought has any place except in there. Thought has no place when I say, “I don’t know.” “I really don’t know.” Right? Needleman:

KRISHNAMURTI: The beginning is the first step and the last step.

KRISHNAMURTI: The beginning is the first step and the last step.

KRISHNAMURTI: Even the company of the good doesn’t teach me what is good and what is false, or true. I have to see it.

KRISHNAMURTI: Even the company of the good doesn’t teach me what is good and what is false, or true. I have to see it.

So one must find a way of observing without analysis.

So one must find a way of observing without analysis.

As long as I say, “Anger is different from me, I must control anger, I must change, I must control my thoughts”, in that there is division, therefore there is conflict. Conflict implies suppression, conformity, imitation, all that is involved in it. If you really see the beauty of this, that the observer is the observed, that the two are not separate, then you can observe the totality of consciousness without analysis. Then you see the whole content of it instantly.

As long as I say, “Anger is different from me, I must control anger, I must change, I must control my thoughts”, in that there is division, therefore there is conflict. Conflict implies suppression, conformity, imitation, all that is involved in it. If you really see the beauty of this, that the observer is the observed, that the two are not separate, then you can observe the totality of consciousness without analysis. Then you see the whole content of it instantly.

Questioner: How can I change this identification of the observer with the observed? I can’t just agree with you and say “Yes, it’s true”, but have to do something about it. KRISHNAMURTI: Quite right. Sir, there is no identification at all. When you identify yourself with the observed, it is still the pattern of thought, isn’t it? Questioner: Precisely, but how do I get out of that? KRISHNAMURTI: You don’t get out of it, I’ll show it to you, Sir. Do you see the truth that the observer is the observed?—the fact of it, the logic of it. Do you see that? Or don’t you? Questioner: It is still only a comment which arises; the truth does not exist. KRISHNAMURTI: The fact does not exist? Questioner: No, a comment of agreement arises. KRISHNAMURTI: But you see that fact, don’t you? Don’t agree or disagree, this is a very serious thing; I wish I could talk about meditation, but not now, for this is implied in it. Sir, see the importance of this. The truth is that “I am anger”—not “I” am different from anger. That is the truth, that is a fact, isn’t it? I am anger; not “I” separate from anger. When I am jealous, I am jealousy; not “I” am different from jealousy. I make myself separate from jealousy because I want to do something about it, sustain it or get rid of it or rationalise it, whatever it is. But the fact is, the “me” is jealous, isn’t it? Now how am I to act when I am jealous, when “me” is jealousy? Before, I thought “I” could act when I separated myself from jealousy, I thou...

Questioner: How can I change this identification of the observer with the observed? I can’t just agree with you and say “Yes, it’s true”, but have to do something about it. KRISHNAMURTI: Quite right. Sir, there is no identification at all. When you identify yourself with the observed, it is still the pattern of thought, isn’t it? Questioner: Precisely, but how do I get out of that? KRISHNAMURTI: You don’t get out of it, I’ll show it to you, Sir. Do you see the truth that the observer is the observed?—the fact of it, the logic of it. Do you see that? Or don’t you? Questioner: It is still only a comment which arises; the truth does not exist. KRISHNAMURTI: The fact does not exist? Questioner: No, a comment of agreement arises. KRISHNAMURTI: But you see that fact, don’t you? Don’t agree or disagree, this is a very serious thing; I wish I could talk about meditation, but not now, for this is implied in it. Sir, see the importance of this. The truth is that “I am anger”—not “I” am different from anger. That is the truth, that is a fact, isn’t it? I am anger; not “I” separate from anger. When I am jealous, I am jealousy; not “I” am different from jealousy. I make myself separate from jealousy because I want to do something about it, sustain it or get rid of it or rationalise it, whatever it is. But the fact is, the “me” is jealous, isn’t it? Now how am I to act when I am jealous, when “me” is jealousy? Before, I thought “I” could act when I separated myself from jealousy, I thou...

Where the observer is the observed, conflict ceases and therefore jealousy ceases. Because jealousy is conflict, isn’t it?

Where the observer is the observed, conflict ceases and therefore jealousy ceases. Because jealousy is conflict, isn’t it?

If we examine our present relationship with each other closely, be it intimate or superficial, deep or passing, we see it is fragmented. Wife or husband, boy or girl, each lives in his own ambition, in personal and egotistic pursuits, in his own cocoon. All these contribute to the factor of bringing about an image in himself and therefore his relationship with another is through that image, therefore there is no actual relationship.

So we have come back to this question, which is: how to observe? How to observe ourselves, so that in that observation there is no conflict at all? Because conflict is corruption, is waste of energy, it is the battle of our life, from the moment we are born till we die. Is it possible to live without a single moment of conflict? To do that, to find that out for ourselves, one has to learn how to observe our whole movement. There is observation which becomes harmonious, which is true, when the observer is not, but only observation. We went into that the other day.

We know what sorrow is, the death of someone whom you consider you have loved. When we remain with that sorrow totally, without trying to rationalise it, without trying to escape from it in any form through words or through action, when you remain with it completely, without any movement of thought, then you will find, out of that sorrow comes passion. That passion has the quality of love, and love has no sorrow.

As you observe, thought does not want to think about it. It thinks about all the things it will do tomorrow—how to make new inventions, better bathrooms, all the things that thought can think about. But it does not want to think about death, because it does not know what it means.

Have you ever experimented to find out what it means to die psychologically, inwardly?—not how to find immortality, because eternity, that which is timeless, is now, not in some distant future. To enquire into that, one must understand the whole problem of time; not only chronological time, by the watch, but the time that thought has invented as a gradual process of change.

Love is something totally new every day, but pleasure is not, pleasure has continuity. Love is always new and therefore it is its own eternity.

If you can do that, then you can observe your conditioning totally; then you can look at it with a mind that is not spotted by the past, and therefore the mind itself is free of conditioning. To look at myself—as we generally do—I look as an observer looking at the observed: myself as the observed and the observer looking at it. The observer is the knowledge, is the past, is time, the accumulated experiences—he separates himself from the thing observed. Now, to look without the observer! You do this when you are completely attentive. Do you know what it means to be attentive? Don’t go to school to learn to be attentive! To be attentive means to listen without any interpretation, without any judgement—just to listen. When you are so listening there is no boundary, there is no “you” listening. There is only a state of listening. So when you observe your conditioning, the conditioning exists only in the observer, not in the observed. When you look without the observer, without the “me”—his fears, his anxieties and all the rest of it—then you will see, you enter into a totally different dimension.

When we are asking for any kind of spiritual, religious, or transcendental experience, we must try to find out first of all whether there is such an experience, and also what experience itself means. If you experience something and you cannot recognise it, then that experience ceases to be. One of the essential meanings of experience is recognition. And when there is recognition, it has already been known, has already been experienced, otherwise you could not recognise it.

When you want experience in the religious field, you want it because you have not solved your problems, your daily anxieties, despairs, fears and sorrows, therefore you want something more. In that demand for more lies deception. That is fairly logical and true, I think. Not that logic is always true, but when one uses logic and reason healthily, sanely, one knows the limitations of reason. The demand for wider, deeper, more fundamental experiences only leads to a further extension of the path of the known. I think that is clear, and I hope we are communicating, sharing with each other.

Now all this is to lay the foundation for meditation. If you don’t lay the foundations, meditation then becomes an escape. You can play with that kind of meditation endlessly. And that is what most people are doing—leading ordinary, confused, messy lives and somehow finding a corner to bring about a quiet mind. And there are all these people who promise to give you a quiet mind, whatever that may mean. So for a serious mind—and it is a very serious thing, not a game—one must have this freedom from all belief, from all commitments, because one is committed to the whole of life, not to one fragment of it. Most of us are committed to physical or political revolution, or to a religious activity, to some kind of religious, monastic life and so on. Those are all fragmentary commitments. We are talking of freedom, so that you can commit your whole being, your whole energy, vitality and passion to the whole of life, not to one part of it. Then we can proceed to find out what it means to meditate. I don’t know if you have gone into this at all. Probably some of you have played with it, have tried to control your thoughts, followed various systems, but that is not meditation. One has to dispose of the systems one has been offered: Zen, Transcendental Meditation, the various things that have been brought over from India and Asia, in which people are caught. One has to go into this question of systems, of methods, and I hope you will; we are sharing this problem together.

Thought springs from that storehouse of memory. So thought is never free, it is always old, there is no such thing as freedom of thought. Thought can never be free in itself, it can talk about freedom, but in itself it is the result of past memories, experiences and knowledge; therefore it is old. Yet one must have this accumulation of knowledge, otherwise one could not function, one could not speak to another, could not go home, and so on. Knowledge is essential.

For most of us, beauty is in something, in a building, in a cloud, in the shape of a tree, in a beautiful face. Is beauty “out there”, or is it a quality of mind that has no self-centred activity? Because like joy, the understanding of beauty is essential in meditation. Beauty is really the total abandonment of the “me”, and the eyes that have abandoned the “me” can see the trees, the beauty of it all, and the loveliness of the cloud; that happens when there is no centre as the “me”.

My consciousness is the world. Now the crisis is in this consciousness, not in organisation, not in bettering the roads—tearing down the hills to build more roads.

My consciousness is the world and the consciousness of the world is me. When there is a change in this consciousness it affects the whole consciousness of the world. I don’t know if you see that?

It is consciousness that is in disorder; there is no disorder anywhere else.

Now when I realise that my consciousness is the consciousness of the world, and the consciousness of the world is me, whatever change that takes place in me affects the whole of consciousness.

So what you are speaking about is in fact that health, that sanity, and that wholeness of consciousness, which always has been in fact an indivisible entity.

So that the world, the consciousness and the entity who supposedly will change it, are all the same entity, masquerading, as it were in three different roles.

Also, the exercise of will upon consciousness is again a division within consciousness.

Yes, that the exercise of will is simply the tyranny of one fragment over another.

What has happened to the mind that has seen all this? Not theoretically but actually felt it and says, “No more will in my life”. Which means no more resistance in my life.

No fragmentation within consciousness. Which means consciousness only exists when there is conflict between fragments.

Consciousness is its fragments and consciousness is the battle between the fragments.

When is consciousness active? Naudé: When it is in conflict. KRISHNAMURTI: Obviously. Otherwise there is freedom, freedom to observe. So radical revolution in consciousness, and of consciousness, takes place when there is no conflict at all.

Now what is good? I feel goodness is total order. Not only outwardly, but especially inwardly. I think that order can be absolute, as in mathematics I believe there is complete order. And it is disorder that leads to chaos, to destruction, to anarchy, to the so-called evil. Naudé: Yes. KRISHNAMURTI: Whereas total order in one’s being, order in the mind, order in one’s heart, order in one’s physical activities—the harmony between the three is goodness. Naudé: The Greeks used to say that perfected man had attuned in total harmony his mind, his heart and his body.

KRISHNAMURTI: Adharma, yes. So is order something put together according to a design drawn by knowledge, thought? Or is order outside the field of thought and knowledge? One feels there is absolute goodness, not as an emotional concept, but one knows, if one has gone into oneself deeply, that there is such a thing: complete, absolute, irrevocable goodness, or order. And this order is not a thing put together by thought; if it is, then it is according to a blueprint, but if it is imitated then the imitation leads to disorder, or to conformity. Conformity, imitation, and the denial of what is, is the beginning of disorder, leading ultimately to what may be called evil.

Naudé: You are saying that goodness is order and order is not planned. KRISHNAMURTI: When we talk about order, don’t we mean order in behaviour, in relationship, not an abstract order, not a goodness in heaven, but order, goodness in relationship and action in the now. When we talk about planning, obviously there must be planning at a certain level. Naudé: Architecture. KRISHNAMURTI: Architecture, building railways, going to the moon and so on, there must be a design, a planning, a very coordinated, intelligent operation taking place. We are surely not mixing up the two: there must be planning, order, cooperation, the carrying out together of certain plans, a well laid-out city, a community—all that demands planning. We are talking of something entirely different. We are asking if there is absolute order in human behaviour, if there is absolute goodness, as order, in oneself and therefore in the world. And we said order is not planned, can never be planned. If it is planned, then the mind is seeking security, because the brain demands security; seeking security it will suppress, or destroy, or pervert what is and try to conform, imitate. This very imitation and conformity is disorder, from which all the mischief begins, the neuroses and various distortions of the mind and the heart. Planning implies knowledge. Naudé: Thinking. KRISHNAMURTI: Knowledge, thinking and ordering the thought as ideas. So we are asking: is virtue the outcome of planning? Obviously it is not. The m...

The disciple with the keenest perception is given instruction in silence, or with a brief awakening word like Tat- Twam-Asi. He is called Uttamadhikari. The disciple with the mediocre ability is given more elaborate treatment; he is called Madhyamadhikari. The dull-witted is entertained with stories, rituals, etc., hoping for greater maturity; he is called Adhamadhikari.

What do you think is maturity? Does it depend on age, time? Swamiji: No. KRISHNAJI: So we can remove that. Time, age is not an indication of maturity. Then there is the maturity of the very learned man, the man who is highly, intellectually capable. Swamiji: No, he may twist and turn the words. KRISHNAJI: So, we will eliminate that. Whom would you consider as a mature, ripe man? Swamiji: The man who is able to observe. KRISHNAJI: Wait. Obviously the man who goes to churches, to temples, to mosques is out; so is the intellectual, the religious and the emotional. We should say, if we eliminate all that, maturity consists in being not self-centred—not “me” first and everybody else second, or my emotions first. So maturity implies the absence of the “me”.

KRISHNAJI: Look, Sir, I have not read anything. Now here I am: I know nothing. I only know that I am in sorrow and that I have got a fairly good mind. I have no authority—Sankara, Krishna, Patanjali, nobody—I am absolutely alone. I have got to face my life and I have got to be a good citizen—not according to the Communists, Capitalists, or Socialists—Good citizenship means behaviour, which is not one thing in the office and different at home. First, I want to find out how to be free of this sorrow. Then being free, I shall find out if there is such a thing as God or whatever it is. So how am I to learn to be free of this enormous burden? That is my first question. I can only understand it in relationship with another. I cannot sit by myself and dig into it because I may pervert it; my mind is too silly, prejudiced. So, I have to find out in relationship—with nature, with human beings—what is this fear, this sorrow; in relationship, because if I sit by myself I can deceive myself very easily. But by being awake in relationship, I can spot it immediately.

Swamiji: “Cut down all these cravings. Even the craving to be one with God, cut it down”, he says. KRISHNAJI: Yes, I understand. Now look, Sir. If I—if the mind—can free itself from this agony, then what is the need of asking for an experience of the Supreme? There won’t be. Swamiji: No. Certainly. KRISHNAJI: It is no longer caught in its own conditioning. Therefore it is something else; it is living in a different dimension. Therefore the desire to experience the highest is essentially wrong. Swamiji: If it is a desire.

KRISHNAJI: Whatever it is! How do I know the highest? Because the sages have talked of it? I don’t accept the sages. They might be caught in illusion, they might be talking sense or nonsense. I don’t know; I am not interested. I find that as long as the mind is in a state of fear, it wants to escape from it, and it projects an idea of the Supreme, and wants to experience that. But if it frees itself from its own agony, then it is altogether in a different state. It doesn’t even ask for the experience because it is at a different level.

To see, not partially but totally. “The act of seeing is the only truth.” Of the vast mind only a fragment is used. The fragmentary influence of culture, tradition. “Living in a little corner of a distorted field.” “You cannot understand through a fragment.” Freedom from “the little corner”. The beauty of seeing.

WE WERE SAYING the other day how very important it is to observe. It is quite an art to which one must give a great deal of attention. We only see very partially, we never see anything completely, with the totality of our mind, or with the fullness of our heart. And unless we learn this extraordinary art, it seems to me that we shall be functioning, living, through a very small part of our mind, through a small segment of the brain. We never see anything completely, for various reasons, because we are so concerned with our own problems, or we are so conditioned, so heavily burdened with belief, with tradition, with the past, that this actually prevents us from seeing or listening. We never see a tree, we see the tree through the image that we have of it, the concept of that tree; but the concept, the knowledge, the experience, is entirely different from the actual tree. Here one is surrounded by a great many trees, fortunately, and if you look around you, as the speaker is going on with the subject of seeing, if you actually look at it, you will find how extraordinary difficult it is to see it all, so that no image, no screen, comes between the seeing and the actual fact. Please do this, don’t watch me—look at the tree, find out whether you can see it completely. By completely I mean with the totality of your mind and heart, not a fragment of it, because what we are going to go into this evening demands such observation, such seeing. Unless you actually do this (not theori...

And, as we said, we see everything fragmentarily and we are trained from childhood to look, to observe, to learn, to live in a fragment. And there is the vast expanse of the mind which we never touch or know; that mind is vast, immeasurable, but we never touch it, we don’t know the quality of it because we have never looked at anything completely, with the totality of our mind, of our heart, of our nerves, of our eyes, of our ears. To us the word, the concept is extraordinarily important, not the acts of seeing and doing. But having the concept, which is a belief, an idea—having this—conceptual living, prevents us from a...

Perhaps this is a new question to you, probably you have never asked yourself about it. Because we are all satisfied to live with as little trouble and conflict as possible, in that little part of that field which is our life, appraising the marvellous culture of that little part as opposed to other cultures, Western, ancient or any other. We are not even aware what the implications of this are—of living in a tiny fragment, a corner of a very vast field. We don’t see for ourselves how deeply we are concerned with the little part, and we are trying to find answers to the problem within that fragment, within that little corner of this vast life. We ask ourselves, how can the mind (which is now half asleep in this vast field, because we are only concerned with the little part), how can we become totally aware of this whole thing, become completely sensitive?