Commentaries on Living: First Series

by J. Krishnamurti

When it was over, very few of the brown talked to the white, or the white to the brown, and we all went our different ways.

You can be converted from one belief to another, from one dogma to another, but you cannot be converted to the under standing of reality. Belief is not reality.

Memory is always dead, coming to life only in contact with the living present.

They offer you a better cage. It may or may not be comfortable, depending on your temperament, but in any case it is a prison.

If you would discover the supreme happiness of truth, you must break away from all ceremonies and ideological patterns.

The mind finds security and strength in religious and political patterns, and this is what gives stamina to the organizations.

but if one looks more closely into this process, one sees that rituals are vain repetition which offer a marvelous and respectable escape from self-knowledge.

Truth is not an end, a result, a goal; it cannot be invited, for it is not a thing of the mind.

Knowledge is a flash of light between two darknesses; but knowledge cannot go above and beyond that darkness. Knowledge is essential to technique, as coal to the engine; but it cannot reach out into the unknown. The unknown is not to be caught in the net of the known. Knowledge must be set aside for the unknown to be; but how difficult that is!

Addiction to knowledge is like any other addiction; it offers an escape from the fear of emptiness, of loneliness, of frustration, the fear of being nothing.

Understanding of the self is freedom from knowledge.

To know is to deny the unknown.

Respectability is a curse; it is an "evil" that corrodes the mind and heart. It creeps upon one unknowingly and destroys love.

This exclusiveness of assurance breeds hatred and antagonism in human relationship, which is society.

The respectable, like the despised, are always at the mercy of circumstances; the influences of environment and the weight of tradition are vastly important to them, for these hide their inward poverty.

The respectable can never be open to reality, for, like the despised, they are enclosed in the concern for their own self improvement.

To be generous with the hand is one thing, but to be generous of heart is another.

To forgive, there must have been a wound; and to be wounded, there must have been the gatherings of pride. There is no generosity of heart as long as there is a referential memory, the "me" and the "mine."

It is so much easier to throw oneself into social and political activity than to understand life as a whole; to be associated with any organized thought, with political or religious activity, offers a respectable escape from the pettiness and drudgery of everyday life.

Life is a total process, the inner as well as the outer; the outer definitely affects the inner, but the inner invariably overcomes the outer.

it is to be found beyond causes and effects.

it comes into being only through extensive and deep awareness.

This awareness must go into the deeper layers of consciousness and not be content with surface responses.

Experience must cease for experiencing to be.

Virtue is of the heart and not of the mind. When the mind cultivates virtue, it is cunning calculation; it is a self-defence, a clever adjustment to environment.

There must be vulnerability to meet life, and not the respectable wall of self enclosing virtue. The highest can not be attained; there is no path, no mathematically progressive growth to it. Truth must come, you cannot go to truth, and your cultivated virtue will not carry you to it. What you attain is not truth, but your own self projected desire; and in truth alone is there happiness.

Virtue is not accumulated resistance; it is the spontaneous awareness and the understanding of what is. Mind can not understand; it may translate what is understood into action, but it is not capable of understanding.

To understand, there must be the warmth of recognition and reception, which only the heart can give when the mind is silent.

Simplicity of the heart is of far greater importance and significance than simplicity of possessions.