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There is a battle between the two images in me.
Krishnamurti: I want to be free of the past
hurts, because I see logically, with reason, with sanity, that if the mind
keeps those hurts it has no contact with anything – I am afraid all the
time. Now do I see that very clearly? Do you understand it, see it as
clearly as you see this table or chair? – which means you are giving
attention to what is being said and watching it in yourself. Are you doing
it, or are you casually looking at it with your mind somewhere else? If
you give your attention to the past hurts, they’ll obviously fall away.
The next thing is, how are you going to prevent further images being put
together? Suppose I come along and say, ‘How very intelligent you are!’ or
‘You are such an ass, you’re half asleep.’ What will you do? How will you
prevent immediately making an image when I say that?
Student: You are creating an image of me by
your saying that.
K: Obviously I’m an ass myself when I tell
you you’re an ass! But I’m asking you how to prevent images being formed –
whether they are pleasurable or painful.
St: You have to be awake to the
image-making process.
K: Help me to find out how to! Suppose I
say to you, ‘What a nice person you are,’ that immediately brings a
reaction and an image, doesn’t it? Now, how will you prevent that taking
place?
St: The image is there already, it’s been
made – can we not just see that we have made this image?
K: No. There are two things involved. First
the past and secondly the prevention of new images being made. Because
otherwise I’m going to be hurt again and I don’t want to hurt because I
want to live freely, I want to have no walls around me. So what am I to
do?
St: I want to find out why I am flattered
or hurt by what you say.
K: One is pleasure, the other is fear.
St: But what is the basis of this?
K: You depend on my statement, I don’t know
why, but you do. That’s not the point. How do you prevent this image being
formed? Do you want to know? What will you pay for it?
St: My life.
K: What is the price of that life – do you
know what it means, sir? It means you are really very serious not to form
any image about anybody, whatever they say. Are you willing to do that?
How would you do it? I’ll tell you. Each give me ten dollars. (Laughter)
St: We haven’t got it.
K: Watch it carefully. I’ve said this is a
very serious matter, far more important than taking a degree. You pay a
great deal to get educated, but you neglect this. Without this, life has
no meaning and you don’t even pay a cent to find out. Which means, you
don’t even give that much energy to find out. Jimmy says, ‘I’ll give my
life to find out,’ which means he’s willing to go to the very end of it to
find out. I said, ‘Look, Jimmy, you’ve been hurt, and that hurt reacts in
many ways. The root of that hurt is an image you had of yourself, and that
image doesn’t want to get hurt.’ You saw the truth of that. You are
willing to go into it and you saw the truth of that and you said, ‘I
understood, I know how to deal with it. Any time it arises I’m going to be
aware of it, pay complete attention to every moment when anybody says, “Do
this, don’t do that”!’ Now why don’t you give the same attention when
somebody says, ‘You’re an ass’? Then you won’t form an image. Only when
you are inattentive, the old habit asserts itself. That means the mind
says, ‘As long as there is any form of resistance, all relationship has no
meaning.’ I see that very clearly. Not verbally, but I touch it, feel it.
And I say, resistance exists because I don’t want to be hurt. And why am I
hurt? Because I have an image about myself, and I see that there is not
only the image about myself but there is another image in me which says,
‘I must get rid of this image.’ So there is a battle between the two
images in me – the ‘higher’ image and the ‘lower’ image. Both images are
created by thought. So I see all of that very clearly – clearly in the
sense as I see anything dangerous. Therefore, the clarity of perception is
its own action. Then I’ve finished with it, the past never comes again.
Now with that same attention I’m going to
see that when you flatter me, or insult me, there is no image, because I’m
tremendously attentive. Will you do this? It doesn’t matter what is said,
I listen, I don’t say, ‘You are prejudiced’ or ‘You are not prejudiced.’ I
listen because the mind wants to find out if it is creating an image out
of every word, out of every contact. I’m tremendously awake, therefore I
find in myself a person who is inattentive, asleep, dull, who makes images
and gets hurt – not an intelligent man. Have you understood it at least
verbally? Now apply it. Then you are sensitive to every occasion, it
brings its own right action. And if anybody says something to you, you are
tremendously attentive, not to any prejudices, but you are attentive to
your conditioning. Therefore you have established a relationship with him,
which is entirely different from his relationship with you. Because if he
is prejudiced, you are not; if he is unaware, you are aware. Therefore you
will never create an image about him. You see the difference? Will you do
this? You have no idea what vitality you’ll have.
St: I think we have to help each other to
do it.
K: That’s it, that is co-operation. You are
helping me and I am helping you. You are learning from me and I am
learning from you not to create images.
(Beginnings of Learning, ch.9, p.128-131)
But I do not want to see the truth of it…
Questioner: Is the power of understanding
the same in all persons?
Krishnamurti: Suppose something true is
presented to you and you see the truth of it very quickly; your
understanding is immediate because you have no barriers. You are not full
of your own importance, you are eager to find out, so you perceive
immediately. But I have many barriers, many prejudices. I am jealous, torn
by conflicts based upon envy, full of my own importance. I have
accumulated many things in life, and I really do not want to see;
therefore I do not see, I do not understand.
Questioner: Can’t one remove the barriers
slowly by constantly trying to understand?
Krishnamurti: No. I can remove the
barriers, not by trying to understand, but only when I feel the importance
of not having barriers – which means that I must be willing to see the
barriers. Suppose you and I hear someone say that envy is destructive. You
listen and understand the significance, the truth of it, and you are free
of that feeling of envy, of jealousy. But I do not want to see the truth
of it, because if I did it would destroy my whole structure of life.
Questioner: I feel the necessity of
removing the barriers.
Krishnamurti: Why do you feel that? Do you
want to remove the barriers because of circumstances? Do you want to
remove them because somebody has told you that you should? Surely, the
barriers are removed only when you see for yourself that to have barriers
of any kind creates a mind which is in a state of slow decay. And when do
you see this? When you suffer? But does suffering necessarily awaken you
to the importance of removing all barriers? Or does it, on the contrary,
lead you to create more barriers?
You will find that all barriers drop away
when you yourself are beginning to listen, to observe, to find out. There
is no reason for removing the barriers; and the moment you bring in
reason, you are not removing them. The miracle, the greatest blessing is
to give your own inward perception an opportunity to remove the barriers.
But when you say that the barriers must be removed and then practise
removing them, that is the work of the mind; and the mind cannot remove
the barriers. You must see that no attempt on your part can remove them.
Then the mind becomes very quiet, very still; and in this stillness you
discover that which is true.
(Krishnamurti in Life Ahead, p.132-133)
Order is learning.
“Our minds are so crowded with a thousand
ideas there is no space at all, even between two thoughts, between two
ideas; between two emotions there is no space, no interval. But unless you
have space there is no order. Order means learning, doesn’t it? Learning
about everything. So, if somebody tells me I am a fool, I want to learn
the truth of it; I want to find out. I don’t merely resist it and say,
“You’ re another”. I want to see, I want to listen, to learn. Therefore,
learning brings order and resistance brings disorder.
So though outwardly I may not have space,
because the world is getting more and more crowded, I want to see if I can
have space inwardly. If I have no space inwardly, then I am bound to
create disorder. What do you say to this? Here we are, a group of
teenagers and they revolt against the established order, which is natural,
inevitable. We have come here with those ideas, those feelings, and
anybody who tells us anything we call “authoritarian”. So what are we
going to do?
How do we live differently here, act
differently, be happy differently? Otherwise, you know what is going to
happen? You will be thrown into the jungle of the world, thrown to a lot
of wolves and you will be destroyed.”
(Krishnamurti in The Beginnings of
Learning, chapter 5, School Dialogue Brockwood Park)
Passion is free of the self.
“Passion is wholly different from lust,
interest or enthusiasm. Interest in something can be very deep and you can
use that interest for profit or for power, but that interest is not
passion. Interest may be stimulated by an object or by an idea. Interest
is self-indulgence. Passion is free of the self. Enthusiasm is always
about something. Passion is a flame of itself. Enthusiasm can be aroused
by another, something outside of you. Passion is the summation of energy
which is not the outcome of any kind of stimulation. Passion is beyond the
self.
Have the teachers this sense of passion? –
for out of this comes creation. In teaching subjects one has to find new
ways of transmitting information without this information making the mind
mechanical. Can you teach history – which is the story of mankind – not as
the Indian, the English, American and so on, but as the story of man which
is global? Then the educator’s mind is always fresh, eager, discovering a
wholly different approach to teaching. In this the educator is intensely
alive and with this aliveness goes passion.
Can this be done in all our schools? – for
we are concerned with bringing about a different society, with the
flowering of goodness, with a nonmechanistic mind. True education is this,
and will you, the educators, undertake this responsibility? In this
responsibility lies the flowering of goodness in yourself and in the
student. We are responsible for the whole of mankind – which is you and
the student. You have to start there and cover the whole earth. You can go
very far if you start very near. The nearest is you and your student. We
generally start with the farthest – the supreme principle, the greatest
ideal, and get lost in some hazy dream of imaginative thought. But when
you start very near, with the nearest, which is you, then the whole world
is open, for you are the world and the world beyond you is only nature.
Nature is not imaginary: it is actual and what is happening to you now is
actual. From the actual you must begin – with what is happening now – and
the now is timeless.”
(Krishnamurti in Letters to the Schools I,
1st June, 1979)
Not wanting to be greedy is another form of greed, isn’t it?
STUDENT: You ask us to change, what do we
change into?
KRISHNAMURTI: You ask us to change, what is
it we change into? You cannot change into a monkey, probably you would
like to, but you cannot. Now when you say, “I want to change into
something” – listen to this carefully – if you say to yourself, “I must
change, I must change myself into something”, the “into something” is a
pattern which you have created, haven’t you? Do you see that? Look, you
are violent or greedy and you want to change yourself into a person who is
not greedy? Not wanting to be greedy is another form of greed, isn’t it?
Do you see that? But if I say, “I am greedy, I will find out what it
means, why I am greedy, what is involved in it”, then, when you understand
greed, you will be free of greed. Do you understand what I am talking
about?
Let me explain. I am greedy and I struggle,
fight, make tremendous efforts not to be greedy. I have already an idea, a
picture, an image of what it means not to be greedy. So I am conforming to
an ideal which I think is non-greed. You understand? Whereas if I look at
my greed, if I understand why I am greedy, the nature of my greed, the
structure of my greed, then, when I begin to understand all that, I am
free of greed. Therefore, freedom from greed is something entirely
different from trying to become non-greedy. Do you see the difference?
Freedom from greed is something which is entirely different from saying,
“I must be a great man so I must be non-greedy”. Have you understood?
I was thinking last night, that I have been
to this valley, off and on, for about forty years. People have come and
gone. Trees have died and new trees have grown. Different children have
come, passed through this school, have become engineers, housewives and
disappeared altogether into the masses. I meet them occasionally, at an
airport or at a meeting, very ordinary people. And if you are not very
careful, you are also going to end up that way.
STUDENT: What do you mean by ordinary?
KRISHNAMURTI: To be like the rest of men,
with their worries, with their corruption, violence, brutality,
indifference, callousness. To want a job, to want to hold on to a job,
whether you are efficient or not, to die in the job. That is what is
called ordinary – to have nothing new, nothing fresh, no joy in life,
never to be curious, intense, passionate, never to find out, but merely to
conform. That is what I mean by ordinary. It is called being bourgeois. It
is a mechanical way of living, a routine, a boredom.
(Krishnamurti in On Education, p.12-14)
The two can never come together.
“Ideas and ideals are one thing, and the
fact, the actual happening, is another. The two can never come together.
Ideals have been imposed upon facts and twist what is happening to conform
to what should be, the ideal. The utopia is a conclusion drawn from what
is happening and sacrifices the actual to conform to that which has been
idealised. This has been the process for millennia and every student and
all the intellectuals revel in ideations. The avoidance of what is, is the
beginning of the corruption of the mind. This corruption pervades all
religions, all human relationships. The understanding of this process of
avoidance and the going beyond it is our concern.
Ideals corrupt the mind: they are born of
ideas, judgments and hope. Ideas are abstractions of what is and any idea
or conclusions about what is actually happening distorts what is
happening, and so corruption takes place. It takes away attention from the
fact, what is, and so directs attention to the fanciful. This movement
away from the fact makes for symbols, images, which then take on
all-consuming importance. This movement away from the fact is corruption
of the mind. Human beings indulge in this movement in conversation, in
their relationships, in almost everything they do. The fact is instantly
translated into an idea or a conclusion which then dictates our reactions.
When something is seen, thought immediately makes a counterpart and that
becomes the real. You see a dog and instantly thought turns to whatever
image you may have about dogs, and so you never see the dog.
Can this be taught to the students: to
remain with the fact, the actual happening now, whether psychologically or
externally? Knowledge is not the fact; it is about the fact and that has
its proper place, but knowledge prevents perception of what actually is;
then corruption takes place.
This is really very important to
understand. Ideals are considered noble, exalted, of great purposeful
significance, and what is actually happening is considered merely sensory,
worldly and of lesser value. Schools the world over have some exalted
purpose, ideal; so they are educating the students in corruption.”
(Krishnamurti in Letters to the Schools,
volume one, p.43-44)
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Take every thought and study it to the end.
“Student: When I go for a walk by myself,
my mind wanders. How am I to control it?
K: You and I are both going to learn from
your question. I am not going to instruct you, and you are not going to
follow me. In discussing both of us are going to learn. Do not control the
mind when it wanders. I will tell you why. The mind wanders because it has
innumerable interests. If you control the mind so as to concentrate on any
one thing, you will build a resistance to all other things. That is not
understanding. To understand you have to explore every thought to its end.
For example, if you think about a friend when you want to do something
else, go into it and find out why you think about that friend; find out
what the motives are. When other thoughts come, just ask these thoughts to
wait while you go into the first thought. Your interest in finding out why
the thought about your friend arose will bring about a quality of
perception not only with regard to that thought, but also with regard to
all the other thoughts.
Suppose you have ten thoughts, and you want
the mind to have only one thought. How would you know which of these ten
thoughts is the right thought for the mind to hold on to? Not knowing it,
you would struggle, you would be in a state of conflict. You’d choose some
particular thought because you liked it or would have been told that that
was the right thought but, as other thoughts keep pouring in, there would
be conflict in your mind. Just like a machine soon gets worn out through
friction, so also, through friction, through conflict, the mind soon wears
out. When the mind understands the way conflict occurs, there will be no
friction, and the mind will not wear out.
Therefore take every thought – good or bad,
pleasant or unpleasant – and study it to the end. Then your mind will not
be a battlefield. Then you will begin to know yourself, and there will be
an extensive awareness which has no frontier.
What happens, in the case of most of you,
is that when there is an unpleasant thought, you say, ‘This is a terrible
thought, so I must concentrate on the other thoughts’. This does not lead
to the understanding of that thought. To understand that thought, you have
to investigate it even though you consider it terrible. And, unless the
mind is extraordinarily alert, it is very arduous to go into each thought,
to enquire into it and learn about it.”
(Krishnamurti in A Timeless Spring, p.78-79)
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Those who play a safe game die very safely.
“Sir, life is very strange. The moment you
are very clear about what you want to do, things happen. Life comes to
your aid – a friend, a relation, a teacher, a grandmother, somebody helps
you. But if you are afraid to try because your father may turn you out,
then you are lost. Life never comes to the aid of those who merely yield
to some demand out of fear. But if you say, “This is what I really want to
do and I am going to pursue it,” then you will find that something
miraculous takes place. You may have to go hungry, struggle to get
through, but you will be a worthwhile human being, not a mere copy, and
that is the miracle of it.
You know, in biology there is a phenomenon
called the sport, which is a sudden and spontaneous deviation from the
type. If you have a garden and have cultivated a particular species of
flower, one morning you may find that something totally new has come out
of that species. That new thing is called the sport. Being new it stands
out, and the gardener takes a special interest in it. And life is like
that. The moment you venture out, something takes place in you and about
you. Life comes to your aid in various ways. You may not like the form in
which it comes to you – it may be misery, struggle, starvation – but when
you invite life, things begin to happen. But you see, we don’t want to
invite life, we want to play a safe game; and those who play a safe game
die very safely. Is that not so?”
(Krishnamurti in Think on These Things,
ch.15, p.143-144)
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It is intelligence that brings order, not
discipline.
“Discipline is an easy way to control a
child, but it does not help him to understand the problems involved in
living. Some form of compulsion, the discipline of punishment and reward,
may be necessary to maintain order and seeming quietness among a larger
number of students herded together in a classroom; but with the right kind
of educator and a small number of students, would any repression, politely
called discipline, be required? If the classes are small and the teacher
can give his full attention to each child, observing and helping him, then
compulsion or domination in any form is obviously unnecessary. If, in such
a group, a student persists in disorderliness or is unreasonably
mischievous, the educator must inquire into the cause of his misbehaviour,
which may be wrong diet, lack of rest, family wrangles, or some hidden
fear.
Implicit in right education is the
cultivation of freedom and intelligence, which is not possible if there is
any form of compulsion, with its fears. After all, the concern of the
educator is to help the student to understand the complexities of his
whole being. To require him to suppress one part of his nature for the
benefit of some other part is to create in him an endless conflict which
results in social antagonisms. It is intelligence that brings order, not
discipline.”
(Krishnamurti in Education and the
Significance of Life, p.33)
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This understanding of the hidden frees the total mind from
conflict.
The conscious mind is occupied with the
immediate, the limited present, whereas the unconscious is under the
weight of centuries, and cannot be stemmed or turned aside by an immediate
necessity. The unconscious has the quality of deep time, and the conscious
mind, with its recent culture, cannot deal with it according to its
passing urgencies. To eradicate self-contradiction, the superficial mind
must understand this fact and be quiescent – which does not mean giving
scope to the innumerable urges of the hidden. When there is no resistance
between the open and the hidden, then the hidden, because it has the
patience of time, will not violate the immediate.
The hidden, unexplored and un-understood
mind, with its superficial part which has been ‘educated’, comes into
contact with the challenges and demands of the immediate present. The
superficial may respond to the challenge adequately; but because there is
a contradiction between the superficial and the hidden, any experience of
the superficial only increases the conflict between itself and the hidden.
This brings about still further experience, again widening the chasm
between the present and the past. The superficial mind, experiencing the
outer without understanding the inner, the hidden, only produces deeper
and wider conflict.
(…)
What
is important is the understanding of the hidden, and not the mere
education of the superficial mind to acquire knowledge, however necessary.
This understanding of the hidden frees the total mind from conflict, and
only then is there intelligence.
(Krishnamurti in On Learning, p.32-33)
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The hidden mind is far more vital than the
superficial.
“In seeking to bring about a total
development of the human being, we must obviously take into full
consideration the unconscious mind as well as the conscious. Merely to
educate the conscious mind without understanding the unconscious brings
self-contradiction into human lives, with all its frustrations and miseries.
The hidden mind is far more vital than the superficial. Most educators are
concerned only with giving information or knowledge to the superficial mind,
preparing it to acquire a job and adjust itself to society. So the hidden
mind is never touched. All that so-called education does, is to superimpose
a layer of knowledge and technique, and a certain capacity to adjust to
environment.”
(Krishnamurti in On Learning, the
introduction to Life Ahead, p.30)
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Your mind is
society.
“To know how one’s mind works is a basic
purpose of education. If you don’t know how your mind reacts, if your mind
is not aware of its own activities, you will never find out what society
is. You may read books on sociology, study social sciences, but if you
don’t know how your own mind works you cannot actually understand what
society is, because your mind is part of society; it is society. Your
reactions, your beliefs, your going to the temple, the clothes you wear,
the things you do and don’t do and what you think – society is made up of
all this, it is the replica of what is going on in your own mind. So your
mind is not apart from society, it is not distinct from your culture, from
your religion, from your various class divisions, from the ambitions and
conflicts of the many. All this is society, and you are part of it. There
is no “you” separate from society.
Now, society is always trying to control,
to shape, to mould the thinking of the young. From the moment you are born
and begin to receive impressions, your father and mother are constantly
telling you what to do and what not to do, what to believe and what not to
believe; you are told that there is God, or that there is no God but the
State and that some dictator is its prophet. From childhood these things
are poured into you, which means that your mind – which is very young,
impressionable, inquisitive, curious to know, wanting to find out – is
gradually being encased, conditioned, shaped so that you will fit into the
pattern of a particular society and not be a revolutionary. Since the
habit of patterned thinking has already been established in you, even if
you do “revolt” it is within the pattern. It is like prisoners revolting
in order to have better food, more conveniences – but always within the
prison.
That is not revolt, that is not revolution:
it is merely heightened activity, a more valiant struggle within the
pattern. Real revolt, true revolution is to break away from the pattern
and to inquire outside of it.
And that is real education: not merely to
require you to pass examinations for which you have crammed up, or to
write out something which you have learnt by heart, but to help you to see
the walls of this prison in which the mind is held.”
(Krishnamurti in Think on These Things,
ch.11, p.97-99)
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