Spent last week reading J Krishnamurti, As one is. It is a discourse where Jiddu in his typical style takes questions and answers them. This book mostly consists of questions about conditioning, society & life.
These are some of my Kindle notes from it :
- When the mind is free from all conditioning, then you will find that there comes the creativity of reality, of God, or what you will, and it is only such a mind, a mind which is constantly experiencing this creativity, that can bring about a different outlook, different values, a different world.
- One must have immense patience to find out what is true.
- Most of us are impatient to get on, to find a result, to achieve a success, a goal, a certain state of happiness.
- It is one of the most difficult things to free the mind from this desire to find a result.
- As long as one’s instrument of thinking is not clear, is perverted, conditioned, whatever one thinks is bound to be limited, narrow.
- There is such a thing as God, only when the mind is free from all conditioning.
- When the mind is free from all conditioning, then you will find that there comes the creativity of reality, of God, or what you will, and it is only such a mind, a mind which is constantly experiencing this creativity, that can bring about a different outlook, different values, a different world.
- Self-knowledge is the beginning of wisdom. Self-knowledge is not according to some psychologist, book, or philosopher but it is to know oneself as one is from moment to moment.
- To know oneself is to observe what one thinks, how one feels, not just superficially, but to be deeply aware of what is without condemnation, without judgment, without evaluation or comparison.
- Our problem is not what societies you should belong to, what kind of activities you should indulge in, what books you should read, and all that superficial business, but how to free the mind from conditioning.
- The mind can be free only when it is completely still.
- Freeing the mind from conditioning is the ending of sorrow.
- the mind is incapable of looking at a fact like envy without bringing in the vast complex of opinions, judgments, evaluations with which the mind is occupied—so we never resolve the fact but multiply the problems.
- Whether a mind is occupied with God, with truth, with sex, or with drink, its quality is essentially the same.
- The present social structure is based on envy, on acquisitiveness, in which is implied conformity, acceptance of authority, the perpetual fulfillment of ambition, which is essentially the self, the ‘me’ striving to become something.
- You are the result of society.
- When a confused man seeks, his search is based on confusion, and therefore what he finds is further confusion.
- A mind that cannot stand alone, search will have no meaning at all. To stand alone is to be uncorrupted, innocent, free of all tradition, of dogma, of opinion, of what another says, and so on.
- Our opinions, our beliefs, our desires, ambitions, are so strong, we are so weighed down by them, that we are incapable of looking at the fact. The fact plus opinion, judgment, evaluation, ambition, and all the rest of it, brings about confusion.
- Any action born of confusion must lead to further confusion, further turmoil, all of which reacts on the body, on the nervous system, and produces illness.
- The understanding of the self brings about wisdom and right action.
- Creativity is something that comes into being only when the mind is in a state of no effort.
- Your mind is the known; it is shaped by memories, by reactions, by impressions of the known; and a mind that is held within the field of the known can never comprehend or experience the unknown, something which is not within the field of time.
- As long as we are seeking or giving a significance to life, we are missing something extraordinarily vital. It is like the man who wants to find the significance of death, who is everlastingly rationalizing it, explaining it—he never experiences what is death.
- When you are totally attentive, you have no time to compare,
- In the moment of attention the self, the ‘me’, is absent, and it is that moment of attention that is good, that is love.
- In grappling with this problem of progress and revolution, there must be an awareness, a comprehension of the total process of consciousness.
- If the problem is stated clearly and clearly understood, then you will find the absolute answer.
- A man who wishes to find out what is creativity must obviously be free from all envy, from all comparison, from the urges to be, to become.
- A man whose mind is occupied with God will never find God because God is not something to be occupied with; it is the unknown, the immeasurable.
- If you are occupied with your work, then you do not love your work.
- If I love what I am doing, I am not occupied with it, my work is not apart from me.
- To love something there must be a total cessation of all ambition, of all desire for the recognition of society, which is rotten anyhow.
- When you love a thing, there is no occupation with it.
- No culture helps man to find out what is true. Cultures only create organizations which bind man.
- Distraction exists only when you want to go in a certain direction.
- Cultures create religions but not the religious man. The religious man comes into being only when the mind rejects culture, which is the background, and is therefore free to find out what is true. Cultures only create organizations which bind man.
- It is only when the mind is free from all sense of inward dependence that it can find that which is immeasurable.
- What you call knowledge is essentially memory.
- The mind is always seeking something, and that very search brings violence, competition, the sense of utter dissatisfaction.