Notes from reading: Freedom from the Known by J Krishnamurti

Continuing with my quest of reading more on J Krishnamurti  I picked up Freedom from the Known. Its a series of discourse on various aspects of life.

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These are some of my clipped notes from the book:

  1.  If one wants to see a thing very clearly, one’s mind must be very quiet, without all the prejudices, the chattering, the dialogue, the images, the pictures – all that must be put aside to look.
  2. A living mind is a still mind, a living mind is a mind that has no centre and therefore no space and time. Such a mind is limitless and that is the only truth, that is the only reality.
  3. Thought is crooked because it can invent anything and see things that are not there. It can perform the most extraordinary tricks, and therefore it cannot be depended upon.
  4.  Sorrow is self-created, sorrow is created by thought, sorrow is the outcome of time.
  5. All our relationships are really imaginary – that is, based on an image formed by thought.
  6. We have reduced the world to its present state of chaos by our self-centred activity, by our prejudices, our hatreds, our nationalism, and when we say we cannot do anything about it, we are accepting disorder in ourselves as inevitable.
  7.  You recognize an experience as being good, bad, beautiful, holy and so on according to your conditioning, and therefore the recognition of an experience must inevitably be old.
  8. Meditation is the understanding of the totality of life in which every form of fragmentation has ceased.
  9.  Meditation is to be aware of every thought and of every feeling, never to say it is right or wrong but just to watch it and move with it.
  10. Fear is not love, dependence is not love, jealousy is not love, possessiveness and domination are not love, responsibility and duty are not love, self-pity is not love, the agony of not being loved is not love, love is not the opposite of hate any more than humility is the opposite of vanity.
  11. In this torn desert world there is no love because pleasure and desire play the greatest roles, yet without love your daily life has no meaning. And you cannot have love if there is no beauty.
  12. For most people love means comfort, security, a guarantee for the rest of their lives of continuous emotional satisfaction.
  13. Love is something that is new, fresh, alive. It has no yesterday and no tomorrow. It is beyond the turmoil of thought.
  14. THE DEMAND TO be safe in relationship inevitably breeds sorrow and fear.
  15. We have separated living from dying, and the interval between the living and the dying is fear.
  16. To live completely, wholly, every day as if it were a new loveliness, there must be dying to everything of yesterday, otherwise you live mechanically, and a mechanical mind can never know what love is or what freedom is.
  17. Most of us are frightened of dying because we don’t know what it means to live. We don’t know how to live, therefore we don’t know how to die.
  18. To die is to have a mind that is completely empty of itself, empty of its daily longings, pleasures and agonies.
  19. Time is a movement which man has divided into past, present and future, and as long as he divides it he will always be in conflict.
  20. Measuring ourselves all the time against something or someone is one of the primary causes of conflict.
  21. Man lives by time. Inventing the future has been his favourite game of escape.
  22. A mind that is confused, whatever it does, at any level, will remain confused; any action born of confusion leads to further confusion.
  23. The more we are confused and lost in life the more we chase around, searching, asking, demanding, begging.
  24. When you are alone, totally alone, not belonging to any family, any nation, any culture, any particular continent, there is that sense of being an outsider. The man who is completely alone in this way is innocent and it is this innocency that frees the mind from sorrow.
  25. Violence is not merely killing another. It is violence when we use a sharp word, when we make a gesture to brush away a person, when we obey because there is fear.
  26. A mind which is not crippled by memory has real freedom.
  27. If I am all the time measuring myself against you, struggling to be like you, then I am denying what I am myself. Therefore I am creating an illusion.