Direct Observation - of ideas & facts

Direct Observation

Why do ideas take root in our minds? Why do not facts become all-important, not ideas? Why do theories, ideas, become so significant rather than the fact? Is it that we cannot understand the fact, or have not the capacity, or are afraid of facing the fact? Therefore, ideas, speculations, theories are a means of escaping away from the fact.
You may run away, you may do all kinds of things; the facts are there the fact that one is angry, the fact that one is ambitious, the fact that one is sexual, a dozen things. You may suppress them, you may transmute them, which is another form of suppression; you may control them, but they are all suppressed, controlled, disciplined with ideas. Do not ideas waste our energy? Do not ideas dull the mind? You may be clever in speculation, in quotations; but it is obviously a dull mind that quotes, that has read a lot and quotes.
You remove the conflict of the opposite at one stroke if you live with the fact and therefore liberate the energy to face the fact. For most of us, contradiction is an extraordinary field in which the mind is caught. I want to do this, and I do something entirely different; but if I face the fact of wanting to do this, there is no contradiction; and therefore, at one stroke I abolish altogether all sense of the opposite, and my mind then is completely concerned with what is, and with the understanding of what is.

J. Krishnamurti, The Book of Life

Active self knowledge for experience

Active Self-Knowledge

Without self-knowledge, experience breeds illusion; with self-knowledge, experience, which is the response to challenge, does not leave a cumulative residue as memory. Self-knowledge is the discovery from moment to moment of the ways of the self, its intentions and pursuit, its thoughts and appetites. There can never be "your experience" and "my experience"; the very term "my experience" indicates ignorance and the acceptance of illusion.

J. Krishnamurti, The Book of Life

Authority , Leader Follower

Authority Corrupts Both Leader and Follower

Self-awareness is arduous, and since most of us prefer an easy, illusory way, we bring into being the authority that gives shape and pattern to our life. This authority may be the collective, the State; or it may be the personal, the Master, the savior, the guru. Authority of any kind is blinding, it breeds thoughtlessness; and as most of us find that to be thoughtful is to have pain, we give ourselves over to authority. Authority engenders power, and power always becomes centralized and therefore utterly corrupting; it corrupts not only the wielder of power, but also him who follows it. The authority of knowledge and experience is perverting, whether it be vested in the Master, his representative or the priest. It is your own life, this seemingly endless conflict, that is significant, and not the pattern or the leader. The authority of the Master and the priest takes you away from the central issue, which is the conflict within yourself.

J. Krishnamurti, The Book of Life

on the idea of happiness and what it's not

It's not what you know, or believe you know, that brings meaning and happiness. It's how you touch and relate to yourself, others, and the world that matters. Do you hide behind concepts and beliefs and philosophies, however grand they may seem? Or do you live genuinely in the thick of life, however messy and confusing that might feel? Whatever your answer, it's always revealing, and freeing, to be present to yourself--just as you are.
   

Prayer Is a Complex Affair

Like all deep human problems, prayer is a complex affair and not to be rushed at; it needs patience, careful and tolerant probing, and one cannot demand definite conclusions and decisions. 

Without understanding himself, he who prays may through his very prayer be led to self-delusion. 

We sometimes hear people say, and several have told me, that when they pray to what they call God for worldly things, their prayers are often granted. If they have faith, and depending upon the intensity of their prayer, what they seek -health, comfort, worldly possessions-they eventually get. 

If one indulges in petitionary prayer it brings its own reward, the thing asked for is often granted, and this further strengthens supplications. 

Then there is the prayer, not for things or for people, but to experience reality, God, which is also frequently answered; and there are still other forms of petitionary prayer, more subtle and devious, but nevertheless supplicating, begging and offering. 

All such prayers have their own reward, they bring their own experiences; but do they lead to the realization of the ultimate reality?

Are we not the result of the past, and are we not therefore related to the enormous reservoir of greed and hate, with their opposites? Surely, when we make an appeal, or offer a petitionary prayer, we are calling upon this reservoir of accumulated greed, and so on, which does bring its own reward, and has its price.

Does supplication to another, to something outside, bring about the understanding of truth?

J. Krishnamurti, The Book of Life

Transmitting Compassion

If I am concerned with compassion, with love, with the real feeling of something sacred, then how is that feeling to be transmitted? 

Please follow this. If I transmit it through the microphone, through the machinery of propaganda, and thereby convince another, his heart will still be empty. The flame of ideology will operate, and he will merely repeat, as you are all repeating, that we must be kind, good, free -all the nonsense that the politicians, the socialists, and the rest of them talk. 

So, seeing that any form of compulsion, however subtle, does not bring this beauty, this flowering of goodness, of compassion, what is the individual to do?


What is the relationship between the man who has this sense of compassion, and the man whose mind is entrenched in the collective, in the traditional? 

How are we to find the relationship between these two, not theoretically, but actually?

That which conforms can never flower in goodness. 

There must be freedom, and freedom comes only when you understand the whole problem of envy, greed, ambition, and the desire for power. It is freedom from those things that allows the extraordinary thing called character to flower. Such a man has compassion, he knows what it is to love -not the man who merely repeats a lot of words about morality.

So the flowering of goodness does not lie within society, because society in itself is always corrupt. Only the man who understands the whole structure and process of society, and is freeing himself from it, has character, and he alone can flower in goodness.

J. Krishnamurti, The Book of Life

What is outside the field of thought ?

Outside the Field of Thought

You have changed your ideas, you have changed your thought, but thought is always conditioned. Whether it is the thought of Jesus, Buddha, X, Y, or Z, it is still thought, and therefore one thought can be in opposition to another thought; and when there is opposition, a conflict between two thoughts, the result is a modified continuity of thought. In other words, the change is still within the field of thought, and change within the field of thought is no change at all. One idea or set of ideas has merely been substituted for another.
Seeing this whole process, is it possible to leave thought and bring about a change outside the field of thought? 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. A radical change can take place only outside the field of thought, not within it, and the mind can leave the field only when it sees the confines, the boundaries of the field, and realizes that any change within the field is no change at all. This is real meditation.
J. Krishnamurti, The Book of Life