~~~~~~~~
What is Listening?
Q: “Why is it so difficult to empty one's mind?
K: “Now just listen to that question. Why is it so difficult to empty the mind? Listen to this. The speaker stated: meditation is the emptying of the mind of the activity of the self. You heard it. You have drawn a conclusion from it, saying, "How am I to do it?" - and in the very doing of it, it has become very difficult. So you ask the question, "Why is it so difficult to empty the mind?" That is, you haven't listened to the statement at all. You have drawn a conclusion from that statement saying, "I'd like to do that, but by Jove, how difficult it is" - you have understood? If you listen to it and not draw an abstraction from it, that is, "I must empty the mind", then "How am I to do it and how difficult it is", then you have an immense problem, you can't empty the mind, do what you will you can't empty it, because the desire to empty it is part of the activity of the self.
But if you listen to it, listen to the statement, knowing you can't do a thing about it, just listen to it - look sirs, I listen to that aeroplane, listen to it. Listen to it without any resistance; listen to it saying, "I am trying to understand what he is talking about, how can I listen to that aeroplane, I want to listen to him" - you follow? Whereas if you just listen to that aeroplane without any resistance, then what takes place? You are just listening. There is no difficulty. But whereas if you listen to the statement that meditation is that, then you go into all kinds of tantrums, see all the difficulties, say, how can you do this living in this beastly world and so on and so on. Whereas if you listened totally and completely then that very act of listening has produced in the mind a movement which is not the activity of the self. And that movement operates in daily life without any difficulty.”
{Collected Works : Saanen, 7th Public Talk, 29th July, 1973}
What is Listening?
Q: “Why is it so difficult to empty one's mind?
K: “Now just listen to that question. Why is it so difficult to empty the mind? Listen to this. The speaker stated: meditation is the emptying of the mind of the activity of the self. You heard it. You have drawn a conclusion from it, saying, "How am I to do it?" - and in the very doing of it, it has become very difficult. So you ask the question, "Why is it so difficult to empty the mind?" That is, you haven't listened to the statement at all. You have drawn a conclusion from that statement saying, "I'd like to do that, but by Jove, how difficult it is" - you have understood? If you listen to it and not draw an abstraction from it, that is, "I must empty the mind", then "How am I to do it and how difficult it is", then you have an immense problem, you can't empty the mind, do what you will you can't empty it, because the desire to empty it is part of the activity of the self.
But if you listen to it, listen to the statement, knowing you can't do a thing about it, just listen to it - look sirs, I listen to that aeroplane, listen to it. Listen to it without any resistance; listen to it saying, "I am trying to understand what he is talking about, how can I listen to that aeroplane, I want to listen to him" - you follow? Whereas if you just listen to that aeroplane without any resistance, then what takes place? You are just listening. There is no difficulty. But whereas if you listen to the statement that meditation is that, then you go into all kinds of tantrums, see all the difficulties, say, how can you do this living in this beastly world and so on and so on. Whereas if you listened totally and completely then that very act of listening has produced in the mind a movement which is not the activity of the self. And that movement operates in daily life without any difficulty.”
{Collected Works : Saanen, 7th Public Talk, 29th July, 1973}
What is it to be “serious”?
“What does it mean to be serious - so that you are completely dedicated to something, to some vocation, that you want to go right to the end of it. … One wants to find out how to live quite a different kind of life, a life in which there is no violence, in which there is complete inward freedom; one wants to find out and intends giving time , energy, thought, everything, to that. I would call such a person a serious person. He is not easily put off - he may amuse himself, but his course is set. … He will listen to others, consider examine, observe… he has got to examine, to question constantly, which means he has to be highly sensitive. He has to find out how and to whom he listens. So he is all the time listening, pursuing, inquiring; he is discovering and with a sensitive brain, a sensitive mind, a sensitive heart - they are not separate things - he is inquiring with the totality and the sensitivity of all that. … One has to have a brain that is sensitive; that means a brain that is not functioning in habits, pursuing its own particular little pleasure, sexual or otherwise.”
{The Impossible Question, page 19}
* What is Consciousness?
“There is consciousness only when there is ‘becoming’, or trying ‘to be something’.”
(The Impossible Question, page 169)
“All consciousness, surely, whether it is of the past, the present, or the future, is within the field of thought;
and any change within that field, which sets the boundaries of the mind, is no real change.”
{Book of Life Daily Meditations, Outside of the field of thought, October 27 2007}
“There is in fact only one state, not two states such as the conscious and the unconscious; there is only a state of being, which is consciousness, though you may divide it as the conscious and the unconscious. But that consciousness is always of the past, never of the present; you are conscious only of things that are over. You are conscious of what I am trying to convey the second afterwards, are you not?
You understand it a moment later. You are never conscious or aware of the now.
Watch your own hearts and minds and you will see that consciousness is functioning between the past and the future and that the present is merely a passage of the past to the future. Consciousness is therefore a movement of the past to the future. If you watch your own mind at work, you will see that the movement to the past and to the future is a process in which the present is not. Either the past is a means of escape from the present, which may be unpleasant, or the future is a hope away from the present. So the mind is occupied with the past or with the future and sloughs off the present. It either condemns and rejects the fact or accepts and identifies itself with the fact. Such a mind is obviously not capable of seeing any fact as a fact. That is our state of consciousness which is conditioned by the past and our thought is the conditioned response to the challenge of a fact; the more you respond according to the conditioning of belief, of the past, the more there is strengthening of the past.
That strengthening of the past is obviously the continuity of itself, which it calls the future. So that is the state of our mind, of our consciousness - a pendulum swinging backwards and forwards between the past and the future.”
{Book of Life Daily Meditations, There is only consciousness, September 27 2007}
“So it is very important to understand not only the conscious, but also the unconscious mind. The unconscious mind is much more powerful, much more insistent much more directive and conservative than the conscious mind; because the conscious is merely the educated mind which adjusts itself to the environment. He is adjusting himself, as you do, to the environment, to the pressure from outside, but inwardly he is the same - that is, the unconscious is still the residue of the past.”
{(KH), 3rd Public Talk, Colombo, 1957}
“Can humility be practiced? Surely, to be conscious that you are humble, is not to be humble. You want to know that you have arrived. This indicates, does it not?, that you are listening in order to achieve a particular state, a place where you will never be disturbed, where you will find everlasting happiness, permanent bliss.
But as I said previously, there is no arriving, there is only the movement of learning - and that is the beauty of life. If you have arrived, there is nothing more. And all of you have arrived, or you want to arrive, not only in your business, but in everything you do; so you are dissatisfied, frustrated, miserable. Sirs, there is no place at which to arrive, there is just this movement of learning which becomes painful only when there is accumulation. A mind that listens with complete attention, will never look for a result because it is constantly unfolding; like a river, it is always in movement. Such a mind is totally unconscious of its own activity, in the sense that there is no perpetuation of a self, of a "me," which is seeking to achieve an end.”
{Book of Life Daily Meditations, There is no place at which to arrive, June 14 2007}
* What is Conditioning?
“So, everywhere society is conditioning the individual, and this conditioning takes the form of self-improvement, which is really the perpetuation of the ‘me’, the ego, in different forms.”
{Conditioning of self-improvement, Collected Works, Vol. IX, page 83}
“The intellect can reason, discuss, analyse, come to a conclusion from inferences, and so on, but intellect is limited, for intellect is the result of our conditioning.”
{Book of Life Daily Meditations, Intellect will not solve our problems, September 6 2007}
“You see, when the mind is totally aware of its conditioning, there is only the mind; there is no ‘you’ separate from the mind. But, when the mind is only partially aware of its conditioning, it divides itself, it dislikes its conditioning or says it is a good thing; and, as long as there is condemnation, judgment, or comparison, there is incomplete understanding of conditioning, and therefore the perpetuation of that conditioning. Whereas, if the mind is aware of its conditioning without condemning or judging, but merely watching it, then there is a total perception, and you will find, if you so perceive it, that the mind frees itself from that conditioning.”
{The mind frees itself, September 26th 2007, Collected Works, Vol. VIII, page 266}
* What is Sensitivity / Intelligence?
“Sensitivity in its highest form is intelligence. Without sensitivity to everything - to one's own sorrows; to the sorrow of a group of people, of a race; to the sorrow of everything that is - unless one feels and has the feeling highly sensitized, one cannot possibly solve any problem.”
{Collected Works, Volume 15, Madras, 2nd Public Talk, 20th December 1964}
“…There is a vast distinction between intellect and intelligence. Intellect is merely thought functioning independently of emotion. When intellect, irrespective of emotion, is trained in any particular direction, one may have great intellect, but one does not have intelligence, because in intelligence there is the inherent capacity to feel as well as to reason; in intelligence both capacities are equally present, intensely and harmoniously. ...”
{Book of Life Daily Meditations, Intellect vs. intelligence, May 4 2007}
“An intelligent mind acts in the field of thought intelligently, sanely, without resistance; it is free from the structure and implications of attachment, from the action of attachment, from the pursuit of power with all its complications, the ruthlessness of it. It sees the dividing process of thought, and seeing that clearly, totally, it has energy; that energy is intelligence. Having that energy, that intelligence, it can operate in the field of thought, not the other way round.”
{Talks in Saanen 1974, 2nd Public Talk, 16th July 1974}
* What is Insight?
Is insight the same as awareness? Yes. In the first quote insight is equated to “pure observation”. In the second quote it can clearly be seen that this insight can only arise from an empty mind. It is also apparent that insight, an empty mind, freedom and action are all intimately interrelated.
“When man becomes aware of the movement of his own consciousness he will see the division between the thinker and the thought, the observer and the observed, the experiencer and the experience. He will discover that this division is an illusion. Then only is there pure observation which is insight without any shadow of the past. This timeless insight brings about a deep radical change in the mind.”
{Core of the teaching, 1980}
‘What is the state of your mind when you are looking at “what is”? What is the state of your mind when you are not escaping, not trying to transform, or deform “what is”? What is the state of that mind that is looking and has insight? The state of the mind that has insight is completely empty. It is free from escapes, free from suppression , analysis and so on. When all these burdens are taken away - because you see the absurdity of them, it is like taking away a heavy burden - there is freedom. Freedom implies an emptiness to observe. That emptiness gives you an insight into violence - not the various forms of violence, but the whole nature of violence and the structure of violence; therefore there is immediate action about violence, which is to be free, completely, from all violence.”
{The Transformation of Man, pp. 179-80}
* What is Memory?
"When you see a beautiful thing, there is immediate joy; you see a sunset and there is an immediate reaction of joy. That joy, a few moments later, becomes a memory. That memory of the joy, is it a living thing? Is the memory of the sunset a living thing? No, it is a dead thing. So, with that dead imprint of a sunset, through that, you want to find joy. Memory has no joy; it is only the remembrance of something which created the joy. Memory in itself has no joy. There is joy, the immediate reaction to the beauty of a tree; and then memory comes in and destroys that joy.
So, if there is constant perception of beauty without the accumulation of memories, then there is the possibility of joy everlasting. But it is not so easy to be free from memory. The moment you see something very pleasurable, you make it immediately into something to which you hold on. You see a beautiful thing, a beautiful child, a beautiful tree; and when you see it, there is immediate pleasure; then you want more of it. The more of it is the reaction of memory. So, when you want more, you have already started the process of disintegration. In that there is no joy. Memory can never produce everlasting joy. There is everlasting joy only when there is the constant response to beauty, to ugliness, to everything - which means, great inward and outward sensitivity, which means, having real love.”
{Collected Works, Vol. VII, Talking to Boys and Girls, Rajghat India, 1952}
* What is Desire?
“All desire is contradiction, for every centre of desire is opposed to another centre.”
{Commentaries On Living, Series III, Chapter 51, 'Time, Habit And Ideals'}
“Will is the very essence of desire; and to the understanding of desire, will becomes a hindrance. Will in any form, whether of the upper mind or of the deep-rooted desires, can never be passive; and it is only in passivity, in alert silence, that truth can be. Conflict is always between desires, at whatever level the desires may be placed.
The strengthening of one desire in opposition to the others only breeds further resistance, and this resistance is will. Understanding can never come through resistance. What is important is to understand desire, and not to overcome one desire by another.”
{Commentaries on Living, Series I}
* What is Sensation?
"Sensation is one thing, and happiness is another. Sensation is always seeking further sensation, ever in wider and wider circles. There is no end to the pleasures of sensation; they multiply, but there is always dissatisfaction in their fulfilment; there is always the desire for more, and the demand for more is without end. Sensation and dissatisfaction are inseparable, for the desire for more binds them together. Sensation is the desire for more and also the desire for less.
In the very act of the fulfilment or sensation, the demand for more is born. The more is ever in the future; it is the everlasting dissatisfaction with what has been. There is conflict between what has been and what will be. Sensation is always dissatisfaction. One may clothe sensation in religious garb, but it is still what it is: a thing of the mind and a source of conflict and apprehension. Physical sensations are always crying for more; and when they are thwarted, there is anger, jealousy, hatred. There is pleasure in hatred, and envy is satisfying; when one sensation is thwarted, satisfaction is found in the very antagonism that frustration has brought."
{Commentaries on Living, Series I, Chapter 85, 'Sensation and Happiness'}
* What is Relationship?
It is through our relationship with people and with ideas that we can observe ourselves as we actually are. We do not see ourselves clearly in isolation from others, sitting removed in a room in supposed meditation, cut off from the world. Observation is seeing ourselves in action in relationship. The difficulty with this is that what we see is highly uncomfortable, even disturbing. We see things we would normally cover up, escape from - loneliness, envy, hatred.
“So we have to understand what relationship is. Are we related? Is one human being related to another? We mean by relationship, don't we?, to be in contact intellectually, emotionally, psychologically. Are we in such contact? Or, is there contact, relationship, between the image that you have about yourself and the image you have about another? You have an image about yourself, ideas about yourself, concepts, experiences and so on. You have your particular idiosyncrasies, tendencies - all that has built an image about yourself. Please listen to it, observe it in yourself. Do not, as I said, merely listen to words - they have little meaning. But, in hearing the words, if the words reveal your own consciousness, your own state, then the words have meaning.
If you observe, you have an image about yourself: that you are this, you are that; that you had this experience and that experience; that you are ugly or you are beautiful; that you want to be this or you want to be that. You have an image, an idea, a conclusion about yourself: that you are spiritual, that you are the Atman, that you are the soul or whatever it is. You have an image carved by the mind, or carved through your experience, through tradition, through circumstances, through strange pressures. There is that image of yourself, and the other person also has an image about himself. So these two images come into contact, and that is what we call relationship. Whether it is the most intimate relationship between a husband and wife, or the image that you have created about Russia, about America, about Vietnam, about this or that, the contact between the two images is what we call relationship. Please do follow this. That is all the relationship we know.”
(Collected Works, VOL XVI, Bombay, 1st Public Talk, 13th February 1966}
* What is Learning?
“There is no movement of learning when there is the acquisition of knowledge; the two are incompatible, they are contradictory. The movement of learning implies a state in which the mind has no previous experience stored up as knowledge. Knowledge is acquired, whereas learning is a constant movement which is not an additive or acquisitive process; therefore, the movement of learning implies a state in which the mind has no authority. All knowledge assumes authority, and a mind that is entrenched in the authority of knowledge cannot possibly learn. The mind can learn only when the additive process has completely ceased.
… By learning I do not mean adding to what you already know. You can learn only when there is no attachment to the past as knowledge, that is, when you see something new and do not translate it in terms of the known. The mind that is learning is an innocent mind, whereas the mind that is merely acquiring knowledge is old, stagnant, corrupted by the past. An innocent mind perceives instantly, it is learning all the time without accumulating, and such a mind alone is mature.”
{Book of Life Daily Meditations, Knowledge assumes authority, September 21 2007}
“What do we mean by learning? Is there learning when you are merely accumulating knowledge, gathering information? That is one kind of learning, is it not? As a student of engineering, you study mathematics, and so on; you are learning, informing yourself about the subject. You are accumulating knowledge in order to use that knowledge in practical ways. Your learning is accumulative, additive.
Now, when the mind is merely taking on, adding, acquiring, is it learning? Or is learning something entirely different? I say the additive process which we now call learning is not learning at all. It is merely a cultivation of memory, which becomes mechanical; and a mind which functions mechanically, like a machine, is not capable of learning. A machine is never capable of learning, except in the additive sense.
Learning is something quite different, as I shall try to show you. A mind that is learning never says, "I know", because knowledge is always partial, whereas learning is complete all the time. Learning does not mean starting with a certain amount of knowledge, and adding to it further knowledge. That is not learning at all; it is a purely mechanistic process.
To me, learning is something entirely different. I am learning about myself from moment to moment, and the myself is extraordinarily vital; it is living, moving; it has no beginning and no end. When I say, "I know myself", learning has come to an end in accumulated knowledge. Learning is never cumulative; it is a movement of knowing which has no beginning and no end.”
{Book of Life, A Mind that is Learning, September 20 2007}
* What is Negation?
“For the complete mutation in consciousness to take place you must deny analysis and search, and no longer be under any influence - which is immensely difficult. The mind, seeing what is false, has put the false aside completely, not knowing what is true. If you already know what is true, then you are merely exchanging what you consider is false for what you imagine is true.
There is no renunciation if you know what you are going to get in return. There is only renunciation when you drop something not knowing what is going to happen. That state of negation is completely necessary. Please follow this carefully, because if you have gone so far you will see that in that state of negation you discover what is true; because, negation is the emptying of consciousness of the known. After all, consciousness is based on knowledge, on experience, on racial inheritance, on memory, on the things one has experienced.
Experiences are always of the past, operating on the present, being modified by the present and continuing into the future. All that is consciousness, the vast storehouse of centuries. It has its usefulness in mechanical living only. It would be absurd to deny all the scientific knowledge acquired through the long past. But to bring about a mutation in consciousness, a revolution in this whole structure, there must be complete emptiness. And that emptiness is possible only when there is the discovery, the actual seeing of what is false. Then you will see, if you have gone so far, that emptiness itself brings about a complete revolution in consciousness: it has taken place.”
{Book of Life Daily Meditations, Complete emptiness, October 25 2007}
K: … “So we come back to the basic question of whether it is possible in daily life to live in a state which, for the moment, let us call enlightenment?
Q: I still don't know what you mean by enlightenment...
A: A state of negation. Negation is the most positive action, not positive assertion. This is a very important thing to understand.
Most of us so easily accept positive dogma, a positive creed, because we want to be secure, to belong, to be attached, to depend. The positive attitude divides and brings about duality. The conflict then begins between this attitude and others. But the negation of all values, of all morality, of all beliefs, having no frontiers, cannot be in opposition to anything. A positive statement in its very definition separates, and separation is resistance. To this we are accustomed, this is our conditioning. To deny all this is not immoral; on the contrary to deny all division and resistance is the highest morality. To negate everything that man has invented, to negate all his values, ethics and gods, is to be in a state of mind in which there is no duality, therefore no resistance or conflict between opposites. In this state there are no opposites, and this state is not the opposite of something else.
Q: Then how do you know what is good and what is bad? Or is there no good and bad? What is to prevent me from crime or even murder? If I have no standards what is to prevent me from God knows what aberrations?
A: To deny all this is to deny oneself, and oneself is the conditioned entity who continually pursues a conditioned good. To most of us negation appears as a vacuum because we know activity only in the prison of our conditioning, fear and misery. From that we look at negation and imagine it to be some terrible state of oblivion or emptiness. To the man who has negated all the assertions of society, religion, culture and morality, the man who is still in the prison of social conformity is a man of sorrow.
Negation is the state of enlightenment which functions in all the activities of a man who is free of the past. It is the past, with its tradition and its authority, that has to be negated. Negation is freedom, and it is the free man who lives, loves, and knows what it means to die.”
{Freedom, Love and Action, Eight Conversations, Second conversation}
* What is Meditation?
“Meditation is the emptying of the mind of all thought …”
{The Notebook, page 163}
“Meditation is really very simple. We complicate it. We weave a web of ideas round it
-what it is and what it is not. But it is none of these things. Because it is so very simple
it escapes us, because our minds are so complicated, so time-worn and time-based."
{JKTI: Why are we such tortured human beings…? - Meditations - 1969, page10}
“Meditation, … can never be a conscious thing, and one can see the reason for this.
If one meditates purposefully with a deliberate intention, consciousness then continues with all its content.…”
{Lutyens, Volume 2: Years of Fulfilment, pp. 212-13}
“So we are asking now: what is the movement of meditation? First of all we must understand the importance of the senses. Most of us react, or act according to the urges, demands and the insistence of our senses. And those senses never act as a whole but only as a part - right? Please understand this.
If you don’t mind enquiring into this a little more for yourself, talking over together, but all our senses never function, move, operate as a whole, holistically. If you observe yourself and watch your senses you will see that one or the other of the senses becomes dominant. One or the other of the senses takes a greater part in observation in our daily living, so there is always imbalance in our senses - right? May we go on from there?
Now is it possible - this is part of meditation, what we are doing now - is it possible for the senses to operate as a whole; to look at the movement of the sea, the bright waters, the eternally restless waters, to watch those waters completely, with all your senses? Or a tree, or a person, or a bird in flight, a sheet of water, the setting sun, or the rising moon, to observe it, look at it with all your senses fully awakened. … if you observe this, if you observe this operation of the whole senses acting you will find there is no centre from which the senses are moving. Are you trying this as we are talking together? To look at your girl, or your husband, or your wife or the tree, or the house, with all the highly active sensitive senses. Then in that there is no limitation. You try it. You do it and you will find out for yourself. That is the first thing to understand: the place of the senses. Because most of us operate on partial or particular senses. We never move or live with all our senses fully awakened, flowering. Because as most of us live, operate and think partially, so one of our enquiries into this is for the senses to function fully and realize the importance and the illusion that senses create - are you following all this? And to give the senses their right place, which means not suppressing them, not controlling them, not running away from them but to give the proper place to the senses.
This is important because in meditation, if you want to go into it very deeply, unless one is aware of the senses, they create different forms of neurosis, different forms of illusions, they dominate our emotions and so on and so on.
So that is the first thing to realize: if when the senses are fully awakened, flowering then the body becomes extraordinarily quiet. Have you noticed all this? Or am I talking to myself? Because most of us force our bodies to sit still, not fidget, not to move about and so on - you know. Whereas if all the senses are functioning healthily and normally, vitally then the body relaxes and becomes very, very quiet, if you do it. Do it as we are talking.”
{4th Public Talk, Brockwood Park, 1978 , Video and Audio Cassette}
“Meditation has nothing to offer; you may not come begging with folded hands. It doesn't save you from any pain. It makes things abundantly clear and simple; but to perceive this simplicity the mind must free itself, without any cause or motive, from all the things it has gathered through cause and motive. This is the whole issue in meditation. Meditation is the purgation of the known. To pursue the known in different forms is a game of self-deception, and then the meditator is the master, there is not the simple act of meditation. The meditator can act only in the field of the known; he must cease to act for the unknown to be. The unknowable doesn't invite you, and you cannot invite it. It comes and goes as the wind, and you cannot capture it and store it away for your benefit, for your use. It has no utilitarian value, but without it life is measurelessly empty.”
{Commentaries On Living, Series II, Chapter 52, 'Evaluation’}
“But meditation is none of these things: it is the absolute stillness of the mind, the absolute quietness of the brain. The foundation for meditation has to be laid in daily life; in how one behaves, in what one thinks. One cannot be violent and meditate; that has no meaning.
If there is, psychologically, any kind of fear, then obviously meditation is an escape.
For the stillness of the mind, its complete quiet, an extraordinary discipline is required; not the discipline of suppression, conformity, or the following of some authority, but that discipline or learning which takes place throughout the day, about every movement of thought; the mind then has a religious quality of unity; from that there can be action which is not contradictory.”
{Beyond Violence, Part IV, Chapter 2)
“What is important in meditation is the quality of the mind and the heart. It is not what you achieve, or what you say you attain, but rather the quality of a mind that is innocent and vulnerable.Through negation there is the positive state. Merely to gather, or to live in, experience, denies the purity of meditation. Meditation is not a means to an end. It is both the means and the end.
The mind can never be made innocent through experience. It is the negation of experience that brings about that positive state of innocency which cannot be cultivated by thought. Thought is never innocent.
Meditation is the ending of thought, not by the meditator, for the meditator is the meditation. If there is no meditation, then you are like a blind man in a world of great beauty, light and colour.
Wander by the seashore and let this meditative quality come upon you. If it does, don't pursue it. What you pursue will be the memory of what it was - and what was is the death of what is. Or when you wander among the hills, let everything tell you the beauty and the pain of life, so that you awaken to your own sorrow and to the ending of it. Meditation is the root, the plant, the flower and the fruit. It is words that divide the fruit, the flower, the plant and the root. In this separation action does not bring about goodness: virtue is the total perception.”
{The Second Penguin Krishnamurti Reader}
“… For the mind to be silent, all its contradictory corners must come together and be fused in the flame of understanding. The silent mind is not a reflective mind. To reflect, there must be the watcher and the watched. The experiencer heavy with the past. In the silent mind there is no centre from which to become, to be, or to think. All desire is contradiction, for every centre of desire is opposed to another centre. The silence of the total mind is meditation.”
{Commentaries On Living, Series III, Chapter 51, 'Time, Habit And Ideals'}
~~~~&~~~~
“What does it mean to be serious - so that you are completely dedicated to something, to some vocation, that you want to go right to the end of it. … One wants to find out how to live quite a different kind of life, a life in which there is no violence, in which there is complete inward freedom; one wants to find out and intends giving time , energy, thought, everything, to that. I would call such a person a serious person. He is not easily put off - he may amuse himself, but his course is set. … He will listen to others, consider examine, observe… he has got to examine, to question constantly, which means he has to be highly sensitive. He has to find out how and to whom he listens. So he is all the time listening, pursuing, inquiring; he is discovering and with a sensitive brain, a sensitive mind, a sensitive heart - they are not separate things - he is inquiring with the totality and the sensitivity of all that. … One has to have a brain that is sensitive; that means a brain that is not functioning in habits, pursuing its own particular little pleasure, sexual or otherwise.”
{The Impossible Question, page 19}
* What is Consciousness?
“There is consciousness only when there is ‘becoming’, or trying ‘to be something’.”
(The Impossible Question, page 169)
“All consciousness, surely, whether it is of the past, the present, or the future, is within the field of thought;
and any change within that field, which sets the boundaries of the mind, is no real change.”
{Book of Life Daily Meditations, Outside of the field of thought, October 27 2007}
“There is in fact only one state, not two states such as the conscious and the unconscious; there is only a state of being, which is consciousness, though you may divide it as the conscious and the unconscious. But that consciousness is always of the past, never of the present; you are conscious only of things that are over. You are conscious of what I am trying to convey the second afterwards, are you not?
You understand it a moment later. You are never conscious or aware of the now.
Watch your own hearts and minds and you will see that consciousness is functioning between the past and the future and that the present is merely a passage of the past to the future. Consciousness is therefore a movement of the past to the future. If you watch your own mind at work, you will see that the movement to the past and to the future is a process in which the present is not. Either the past is a means of escape from the present, which may be unpleasant, or the future is a hope away from the present. So the mind is occupied with the past or with the future and sloughs off the present. It either condemns and rejects the fact or accepts and identifies itself with the fact. Such a mind is obviously not capable of seeing any fact as a fact. That is our state of consciousness which is conditioned by the past and our thought is the conditioned response to the challenge of a fact; the more you respond according to the conditioning of belief, of the past, the more there is strengthening of the past.
That strengthening of the past is obviously the continuity of itself, which it calls the future. So that is the state of our mind, of our consciousness - a pendulum swinging backwards and forwards between the past and the future.”
{Book of Life Daily Meditations, There is only consciousness, September 27 2007}
“So it is very important to understand not only the conscious, but also the unconscious mind. The unconscious mind is much more powerful, much more insistent much more directive and conservative than the conscious mind; because the conscious is merely the educated mind which adjusts itself to the environment. He is adjusting himself, as you do, to the environment, to the pressure from outside, but inwardly he is the same - that is, the unconscious is still the residue of the past.”
{(KH), 3rd Public Talk, Colombo, 1957}
“Can humility be practiced? Surely, to be conscious that you are humble, is not to be humble. You want to know that you have arrived. This indicates, does it not?, that you are listening in order to achieve a particular state, a place where you will never be disturbed, where you will find everlasting happiness, permanent bliss.
But as I said previously, there is no arriving, there is only the movement of learning - and that is the beauty of life. If you have arrived, there is nothing more. And all of you have arrived, or you want to arrive, not only in your business, but in everything you do; so you are dissatisfied, frustrated, miserable. Sirs, there is no place at which to arrive, there is just this movement of learning which becomes painful only when there is accumulation. A mind that listens with complete attention, will never look for a result because it is constantly unfolding; like a river, it is always in movement. Such a mind is totally unconscious of its own activity, in the sense that there is no perpetuation of a self, of a "me," which is seeking to achieve an end.”
{Book of Life Daily Meditations, There is no place at which to arrive, June 14 2007}
* What is Conditioning?
“So, everywhere society is conditioning the individual, and this conditioning takes the form of self-improvement, which is really the perpetuation of the ‘me’, the ego, in different forms.”
{Conditioning of self-improvement, Collected Works, Vol. IX, page 83}
“The intellect can reason, discuss, analyse, come to a conclusion from inferences, and so on, but intellect is limited, for intellect is the result of our conditioning.”
{Book of Life Daily Meditations, Intellect will not solve our problems, September 6 2007}
“You see, when the mind is totally aware of its conditioning, there is only the mind; there is no ‘you’ separate from the mind. But, when the mind is only partially aware of its conditioning, it divides itself, it dislikes its conditioning or says it is a good thing; and, as long as there is condemnation, judgment, or comparison, there is incomplete understanding of conditioning, and therefore the perpetuation of that conditioning. Whereas, if the mind is aware of its conditioning without condemning or judging, but merely watching it, then there is a total perception, and you will find, if you so perceive it, that the mind frees itself from that conditioning.”
{The mind frees itself, September 26th 2007, Collected Works, Vol. VIII, page 266}
* What is Sensitivity / Intelligence?
“Sensitivity in its highest form is intelligence. Without sensitivity to everything - to one's own sorrows; to the sorrow of a group of people, of a race; to the sorrow of everything that is - unless one feels and has the feeling highly sensitized, one cannot possibly solve any problem.”
{Collected Works, Volume 15, Madras, 2nd Public Talk, 20th December 1964}
“…There is a vast distinction between intellect and intelligence. Intellect is merely thought functioning independently of emotion. When intellect, irrespective of emotion, is trained in any particular direction, one may have great intellect, but one does not have intelligence, because in intelligence there is the inherent capacity to feel as well as to reason; in intelligence both capacities are equally present, intensely and harmoniously. ...”
{Book of Life Daily Meditations, Intellect vs. intelligence, May 4 2007}
“An intelligent mind acts in the field of thought intelligently, sanely, without resistance; it is free from the structure and implications of attachment, from the action of attachment, from the pursuit of power with all its complications, the ruthlessness of it. It sees the dividing process of thought, and seeing that clearly, totally, it has energy; that energy is intelligence. Having that energy, that intelligence, it can operate in the field of thought, not the other way round.”
{Talks in Saanen 1974, 2nd Public Talk, 16th July 1974}
* What is Insight?
Is insight the same as awareness? Yes. In the first quote insight is equated to “pure observation”. In the second quote it can clearly be seen that this insight can only arise from an empty mind. It is also apparent that insight, an empty mind, freedom and action are all intimately interrelated.
“When man becomes aware of the movement of his own consciousness he will see the division between the thinker and the thought, the observer and the observed, the experiencer and the experience. He will discover that this division is an illusion. Then only is there pure observation which is insight without any shadow of the past. This timeless insight brings about a deep radical change in the mind.”
{Core of the teaching, 1980}
‘What is the state of your mind when you are looking at “what is”? What is the state of your mind when you are not escaping, not trying to transform, or deform “what is”? What is the state of that mind that is looking and has insight? The state of the mind that has insight is completely empty. It is free from escapes, free from suppression , analysis and so on. When all these burdens are taken away - because you see the absurdity of them, it is like taking away a heavy burden - there is freedom. Freedom implies an emptiness to observe. That emptiness gives you an insight into violence - not the various forms of violence, but the whole nature of violence and the structure of violence; therefore there is immediate action about violence, which is to be free, completely, from all violence.”
{The Transformation of Man, pp. 179-80}
* What is Memory?
"When you see a beautiful thing, there is immediate joy; you see a sunset and there is an immediate reaction of joy. That joy, a few moments later, becomes a memory. That memory of the joy, is it a living thing? Is the memory of the sunset a living thing? No, it is a dead thing. So, with that dead imprint of a sunset, through that, you want to find joy. Memory has no joy; it is only the remembrance of something which created the joy. Memory in itself has no joy. There is joy, the immediate reaction to the beauty of a tree; and then memory comes in and destroys that joy.
So, if there is constant perception of beauty without the accumulation of memories, then there is the possibility of joy everlasting. But it is not so easy to be free from memory. The moment you see something very pleasurable, you make it immediately into something to which you hold on. You see a beautiful thing, a beautiful child, a beautiful tree; and when you see it, there is immediate pleasure; then you want more of it. The more of it is the reaction of memory. So, when you want more, you have already started the process of disintegration. In that there is no joy. Memory can never produce everlasting joy. There is everlasting joy only when there is the constant response to beauty, to ugliness, to everything - which means, great inward and outward sensitivity, which means, having real love.”
{Collected Works, Vol. VII, Talking to Boys and Girls, Rajghat India, 1952}
* What is Desire?
“All desire is contradiction, for every centre of desire is opposed to another centre.”
{Commentaries On Living, Series III, Chapter 51, 'Time, Habit And Ideals'}
“Will is the very essence of desire; and to the understanding of desire, will becomes a hindrance. Will in any form, whether of the upper mind or of the deep-rooted desires, can never be passive; and it is only in passivity, in alert silence, that truth can be. Conflict is always between desires, at whatever level the desires may be placed.
The strengthening of one desire in opposition to the others only breeds further resistance, and this resistance is will. Understanding can never come through resistance. What is important is to understand desire, and not to overcome one desire by another.”
{Commentaries on Living, Series I}
* What is Sensation?
"Sensation is one thing, and happiness is another. Sensation is always seeking further sensation, ever in wider and wider circles. There is no end to the pleasures of sensation; they multiply, but there is always dissatisfaction in their fulfilment; there is always the desire for more, and the demand for more is without end. Sensation and dissatisfaction are inseparable, for the desire for more binds them together. Sensation is the desire for more and also the desire for less.
In the very act of the fulfilment or sensation, the demand for more is born. The more is ever in the future; it is the everlasting dissatisfaction with what has been. There is conflict between what has been and what will be. Sensation is always dissatisfaction. One may clothe sensation in religious garb, but it is still what it is: a thing of the mind and a source of conflict and apprehension. Physical sensations are always crying for more; and when they are thwarted, there is anger, jealousy, hatred. There is pleasure in hatred, and envy is satisfying; when one sensation is thwarted, satisfaction is found in the very antagonism that frustration has brought."
{Commentaries on Living, Series I, Chapter 85, 'Sensation and Happiness'}
* What is Relationship?
It is through our relationship with people and with ideas that we can observe ourselves as we actually are. We do not see ourselves clearly in isolation from others, sitting removed in a room in supposed meditation, cut off from the world. Observation is seeing ourselves in action in relationship. The difficulty with this is that what we see is highly uncomfortable, even disturbing. We see things we would normally cover up, escape from - loneliness, envy, hatred.
“So we have to understand what relationship is. Are we related? Is one human being related to another? We mean by relationship, don't we?, to be in contact intellectually, emotionally, psychologically. Are we in such contact? Or, is there contact, relationship, between the image that you have about yourself and the image you have about another? You have an image about yourself, ideas about yourself, concepts, experiences and so on. You have your particular idiosyncrasies, tendencies - all that has built an image about yourself. Please listen to it, observe it in yourself. Do not, as I said, merely listen to words - they have little meaning. But, in hearing the words, if the words reveal your own consciousness, your own state, then the words have meaning.
If you observe, you have an image about yourself: that you are this, you are that; that you had this experience and that experience; that you are ugly or you are beautiful; that you want to be this or you want to be that. You have an image, an idea, a conclusion about yourself: that you are spiritual, that you are the Atman, that you are the soul or whatever it is. You have an image carved by the mind, or carved through your experience, through tradition, through circumstances, through strange pressures. There is that image of yourself, and the other person also has an image about himself. So these two images come into contact, and that is what we call relationship. Whether it is the most intimate relationship between a husband and wife, or the image that you have created about Russia, about America, about Vietnam, about this or that, the contact between the two images is what we call relationship. Please do follow this. That is all the relationship we know.”
(Collected Works, VOL XVI, Bombay, 1st Public Talk, 13th February 1966}
* What is Learning?
“There is no movement of learning when there is the acquisition of knowledge; the two are incompatible, they are contradictory. The movement of learning implies a state in which the mind has no previous experience stored up as knowledge. Knowledge is acquired, whereas learning is a constant movement which is not an additive or acquisitive process; therefore, the movement of learning implies a state in which the mind has no authority. All knowledge assumes authority, and a mind that is entrenched in the authority of knowledge cannot possibly learn. The mind can learn only when the additive process has completely ceased.
… By learning I do not mean adding to what you already know. You can learn only when there is no attachment to the past as knowledge, that is, when you see something new and do not translate it in terms of the known. The mind that is learning is an innocent mind, whereas the mind that is merely acquiring knowledge is old, stagnant, corrupted by the past. An innocent mind perceives instantly, it is learning all the time without accumulating, and such a mind alone is mature.”
{Book of Life Daily Meditations, Knowledge assumes authority, September 21 2007}
“What do we mean by learning? Is there learning when you are merely accumulating knowledge, gathering information? That is one kind of learning, is it not? As a student of engineering, you study mathematics, and so on; you are learning, informing yourself about the subject. You are accumulating knowledge in order to use that knowledge in practical ways. Your learning is accumulative, additive.
Now, when the mind is merely taking on, adding, acquiring, is it learning? Or is learning something entirely different? I say the additive process which we now call learning is not learning at all. It is merely a cultivation of memory, which becomes mechanical; and a mind which functions mechanically, like a machine, is not capable of learning. A machine is never capable of learning, except in the additive sense.
Learning is something quite different, as I shall try to show you. A mind that is learning never says, "I know", because knowledge is always partial, whereas learning is complete all the time. Learning does not mean starting with a certain amount of knowledge, and adding to it further knowledge. That is not learning at all; it is a purely mechanistic process.
To me, learning is something entirely different. I am learning about myself from moment to moment, and the myself is extraordinarily vital; it is living, moving; it has no beginning and no end. When I say, "I know myself", learning has come to an end in accumulated knowledge. Learning is never cumulative; it is a movement of knowing which has no beginning and no end.”
{Book of Life, A Mind that is Learning, September 20 2007}
* What is Negation?
“For the complete mutation in consciousness to take place you must deny analysis and search, and no longer be under any influence - which is immensely difficult. The mind, seeing what is false, has put the false aside completely, not knowing what is true. If you already know what is true, then you are merely exchanging what you consider is false for what you imagine is true.
There is no renunciation if you know what you are going to get in return. There is only renunciation when you drop something not knowing what is going to happen. That state of negation is completely necessary. Please follow this carefully, because if you have gone so far you will see that in that state of negation you discover what is true; because, negation is the emptying of consciousness of the known. After all, consciousness is based on knowledge, on experience, on racial inheritance, on memory, on the things one has experienced.
Experiences are always of the past, operating on the present, being modified by the present and continuing into the future. All that is consciousness, the vast storehouse of centuries. It has its usefulness in mechanical living only. It would be absurd to deny all the scientific knowledge acquired through the long past. But to bring about a mutation in consciousness, a revolution in this whole structure, there must be complete emptiness. And that emptiness is possible only when there is the discovery, the actual seeing of what is false. Then you will see, if you have gone so far, that emptiness itself brings about a complete revolution in consciousness: it has taken place.”
{Book of Life Daily Meditations, Complete emptiness, October 25 2007}
K: … “So we come back to the basic question of whether it is possible in daily life to live in a state which, for the moment, let us call enlightenment?
Q: I still don't know what you mean by enlightenment...
A: A state of negation. Negation is the most positive action, not positive assertion. This is a very important thing to understand.
Most of us so easily accept positive dogma, a positive creed, because we want to be secure, to belong, to be attached, to depend. The positive attitude divides and brings about duality. The conflict then begins between this attitude and others. But the negation of all values, of all morality, of all beliefs, having no frontiers, cannot be in opposition to anything. A positive statement in its very definition separates, and separation is resistance. To this we are accustomed, this is our conditioning. To deny all this is not immoral; on the contrary to deny all division and resistance is the highest morality. To negate everything that man has invented, to negate all his values, ethics and gods, is to be in a state of mind in which there is no duality, therefore no resistance or conflict between opposites. In this state there are no opposites, and this state is not the opposite of something else.
Q: Then how do you know what is good and what is bad? Or is there no good and bad? What is to prevent me from crime or even murder? If I have no standards what is to prevent me from God knows what aberrations?
A: To deny all this is to deny oneself, and oneself is the conditioned entity who continually pursues a conditioned good. To most of us negation appears as a vacuum because we know activity only in the prison of our conditioning, fear and misery. From that we look at negation and imagine it to be some terrible state of oblivion or emptiness. To the man who has negated all the assertions of society, religion, culture and morality, the man who is still in the prison of social conformity is a man of sorrow.
Negation is the state of enlightenment which functions in all the activities of a man who is free of the past. It is the past, with its tradition and its authority, that has to be negated. Negation is freedom, and it is the free man who lives, loves, and knows what it means to die.”
{Freedom, Love and Action, Eight Conversations, Second conversation}
* What is Meditation?
“Meditation is the emptying of the mind of all thought …”
{The Notebook, page 163}
“Meditation is really very simple. We complicate it. We weave a web of ideas round it
-what it is and what it is not. But it is none of these things. Because it is so very simple
it escapes us, because our minds are so complicated, so time-worn and time-based."
{JKTI: Why are we such tortured human beings…? - Meditations - 1969, page10}
“Meditation, … can never be a conscious thing, and one can see the reason for this.
If one meditates purposefully with a deliberate intention, consciousness then continues with all its content.…”
{Lutyens, Volume 2: Years of Fulfilment, pp. 212-13}
“So we are asking now: what is the movement of meditation? First of all we must understand the importance of the senses. Most of us react, or act according to the urges, demands and the insistence of our senses. And those senses never act as a whole but only as a part - right? Please understand this.
If you don’t mind enquiring into this a little more for yourself, talking over together, but all our senses never function, move, operate as a whole, holistically. If you observe yourself and watch your senses you will see that one or the other of the senses becomes dominant. One or the other of the senses takes a greater part in observation in our daily living, so there is always imbalance in our senses - right? May we go on from there?
Now is it possible - this is part of meditation, what we are doing now - is it possible for the senses to operate as a whole; to look at the movement of the sea, the bright waters, the eternally restless waters, to watch those waters completely, with all your senses? Or a tree, or a person, or a bird in flight, a sheet of water, the setting sun, or the rising moon, to observe it, look at it with all your senses fully awakened. … if you observe this, if you observe this operation of the whole senses acting you will find there is no centre from which the senses are moving. Are you trying this as we are talking together? To look at your girl, or your husband, or your wife or the tree, or the house, with all the highly active sensitive senses. Then in that there is no limitation. You try it. You do it and you will find out for yourself. That is the first thing to understand: the place of the senses. Because most of us operate on partial or particular senses. We never move or live with all our senses fully awakened, flowering. Because as most of us live, operate and think partially, so one of our enquiries into this is for the senses to function fully and realize the importance and the illusion that senses create - are you following all this? And to give the senses their right place, which means not suppressing them, not controlling them, not running away from them but to give the proper place to the senses.
This is important because in meditation, if you want to go into it very deeply, unless one is aware of the senses, they create different forms of neurosis, different forms of illusions, they dominate our emotions and so on and so on.
So that is the first thing to realize: if when the senses are fully awakened, flowering then the body becomes extraordinarily quiet. Have you noticed all this? Or am I talking to myself? Because most of us force our bodies to sit still, not fidget, not to move about and so on - you know. Whereas if all the senses are functioning healthily and normally, vitally then the body relaxes and becomes very, very quiet, if you do it. Do it as we are talking.”
{4th Public Talk, Brockwood Park, 1978 , Video and Audio Cassette}
“Meditation has nothing to offer; you may not come begging with folded hands. It doesn't save you from any pain. It makes things abundantly clear and simple; but to perceive this simplicity the mind must free itself, without any cause or motive, from all the things it has gathered through cause and motive. This is the whole issue in meditation. Meditation is the purgation of the known. To pursue the known in different forms is a game of self-deception, and then the meditator is the master, there is not the simple act of meditation. The meditator can act only in the field of the known; he must cease to act for the unknown to be. The unknowable doesn't invite you, and you cannot invite it. It comes and goes as the wind, and you cannot capture it and store it away for your benefit, for your use. It has no utilitarian value, but without it life is measurelessly empty.”
{Commentaries On Living, Series II, Chapter 52, 'Evaluation’}
“But meditation is none of these things: it is the absolute stillness of the mind, the absolute quietness of the brain. The foundation for meditation has to be laid in daily life; in how one behaves, in what one thinks. One cannot be violent and meditate; that has no meaning.
If there is, psychologically, any kind of fear, then obviously meditation is an escape.
For the stillness of the mind, its complete quiet, an extraordinary discipline is required; not the discipline of suppression, conformity, or the following of some authority, but that discipline or learning which takes place throughout the day, about every movement of thought; the mind then has a religious quality of unity; from that there can be action which is not contradictory.”
{Beyond Violence, Part IV, Chapter 2)
“What is important in meditation is the quality of the mind and the heart. It is not what you achieve, or what you say you attain, but rather the quality of a mind that is innocent and vulnerable.Through negation there is the positive state. Merely to gather, or to live in, experience, denies the purity of meditation. Meditation is not a means to an end. It is both the means and the end.
The mind can never be made innocent through experience. It is the negation of experience that brings about that positive state of innocency which cannot be cultivated by thought. Thought is never innocent.
Meditation is the ending of thought, not by the meditator, for the meditator is the meditation. If there is no meditation, then you are like a blind man in a world of great beauty, light and colour.
Wander by the seashore and let this meditative quality come upon you. If it does, don't pursue it. What you pursue will be the memory of what it was - and what was is the death of what is. Or when you wander among the hills, let everything tell you the beauty and the pain of life, so that you awaken to your own sorrow and to the ending of it. Meditation is the root, the plant, the flower and the fruit. It is words that divide the fruit, the flower, the plant and the root. In this separation action does not bring about goodness: virtue is the total perception.”
{The Second Penguin Krishnamurti Reader}
“… For the mind to be silent, all its contradictory corners must come together and be fused in the flame of understanding. The silent mind is not a reflective mind. To reflect, there must be the watcher and the watched. The experiencer heavy with the past. In the silent mind there is no centre from which to become, to be, or to think. All desire is contradiction, for every centre of desire is opposed to another centre. The silence of the total mind is meditation.”
{Commentaries On Living, Series III, Chapter 51, 'Time, Habit And Ideals'}
~~~~&~~~~
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
“What you understand, of that you are free.”
{Collected Works : London, 4th Public Talk, 23rd October 1949}
{Collected Works : London, 4th Public Talk, 23rd October 1949}
 |
 |
 |
{Page last updated on April 23, 2008}
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
"Means and end are not separate, they are a joint phenomenon; the means create the end."
{Commentaries on Living Series I; Chapter 32, 'Separateness'}
{Commentaries on Living Series I; Chapter 32, 'Separateness'}
 |
 |
 |
 |
Note: Site best viewed through Internet Explorer; there are some page display issues with Firefox.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Copyright © 2007, beyondthemindsite. All Rights Reserved.
This site went online on November 22, 2007. It is undergoing continual development.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
