existential anguish

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We are supposed to be upbeat and full of optimism about how wonderful this world can be once we are liberated from all outer and inner bondage. And it probably can indeed be wonderful, but is that the point? How can I be released from bondage if I am not ready to face reality? 

So what is reality? First of all it is the fact of Eternity with a capital "E". This has all been going on for millions and billions and quadrillions of time. It did not start and there is no way it can end. 

quiet mind

"Para comprender lo inconmensurable, la mente debe estar extraordinariamente quieta, tranquila"

Krishnamurti

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Knowledge of Tomorrow

There is no knowledge of tomorrow.

Observation implies no accumulation of knowledge, even though knowledge is obviously necessary at a certain level: knowledge as a doctor, knowledge as a scientist, knowledge of history, of all the things that have been. After all, that is knowledge: information about the things that have been. There is no knowledge of tomorrow, only conjecture as to what might happen tomorrow, based on your knowledge of what has been. A mind that observes with knowledge is incapable of following swiftly the stream of thought. It is only by observing without the screen of knowledge that you begin to see the whole structure of your own thinking. And as you observe, which is not to condemn or accept, but simply to watch, you will find that thought comes to an end. Casually to observe an occasional thought leads nowhere, but if you observe the process of thinking and do not become an observer apart from the observed,if you see the whole movement of thought without accepting or condemning it,then that very observation puts an end immediately to thought, and therefore the mind is compassionate, it is in a state of constant mutation.

Jiddu Krisnamurti

Krishnamurti: Passion Without Motive – What is Love Part Two

Krishnamurti: Passion Without Motive – What is Love Part Two

So when you ask what love is, you may be too frightened to see the answer. It may mean complete upheaval; it may break up the family; you may discover that you do not love your wife or husband or children—do you?—you may have to shatter the house you have built, you may never go back to the temple.

But if you still want to find out, you will see that 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.

So if you eliminate all these, not by forcing them but by washing them away as the rain washes the dust of many days from a leaf, then perhaps you will come upon this strange flower, which man always hungers after.

If you have not got love—not just in little drops but in abundance—if you are not filled with it, the world will go to disaster. You know intellectually that the unity of mankind is essential and that love is the only way, but who is going to teach you how to love?

Will any authority, any method, any system, tell you how to love? If anyone tells you, it is not love. Can you say, “I will practice love. I will sit down day after day and think about it. I will practice being kind and gentle and force myself to pay attention to others”?

Do you mean that you can discipline yourself to love, exercise the will to love? When you exercise discipline and will to love, love goes out the window. By practicing some method or system of loving you may become extraordinarily clever or more kindly or get into a state of nonviolence, but that has nothing whatsoever to do with love.

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. Beauty is not something you see—not a beautiful tree, a beautiful picture, a beautiful building, or a beautiful woman. There is beauty only when your heart and mind know what love it.

Without love and that sense of beauty there is no virtue, and you know very well that, do what you will—improve society, feed the poor—you will only be creating more mischief, for without love there is only ugliness and poverty in your own heart and mind.

But when there is love and beauty, whatever you do is right, whatever you do is in order. If you know how to love, then you can do what you like because it will solve all other problems.

So we reach the point: Can the mind come upon love without discipline, without thought, without enforcement, without any book, any teacher or leader—come upon it as one comes upon a lovely sunset? It seems to me that one thing is absolutely necessary and that is passion without motive—passion that is not the result of some commitment or attachment, passion that is not lust. A man who does not know what passion is will never know love because love can only come into being when there is total self-abandonment.

A mind that is seeking is not a passionate mind and to come upon love without seeking it is the only way to find it—to come upon it unknowingly and not as the result of any effort or experience. Such a love, you will find, is not of time; such a love is both personal and impersonal, is both the one and the many.

Like a flower that has a perfume, you can smell it or pass it by. That flower is for everybody and for the one who takes the trouble to breath it deeply and to look at it with delight. Whether one is very near in the garden or very far away, it is the same to the flower because it is full of that perfume and, therefore, it is sharing with everybody.

Love is something that is new, fresh, alive. It has no yesterday and no tomorrow. It is beyond the turmoil of thought. It is only the innocent mind which knows what love is, and the innocent mind can live in the world, which is not innocent.

To find this extraordinary thing which man has sought endlessly through sacrifice, through worship, through relationship, through sex, through every form of pleasure and pain, is only possible when thought comes to understand itself and comes naturally to an end. Then love has no opposite, then love has no conflict.

You may ask, “If I find such love, what happens to my wife, my children, my family? They must have security.” When you put such a question you have never been outside the field of thought, the field of consciousness. When once you have been outside that field you will never ask such a question because then you will know what love is in which there is no thought and therefore, no time. You may read this mesmerized and enchanted, but actually to go beyond thought and time—which means going beyond sorrow—is to be aware that there is a different dimension called love.

But you don’t know how to come upon this extraordinary fount, so what do you do? If you don’t know what to do, you do nothing, don’t you? Absolutely nothing. Then inwardly you are completely silent. Do you understand what that means? It means you are not seeking, not wanting, not pursuing; there is no center at all. Then there is love.

(Freedom from the Known in Total Freedom –The Essential Krishnamurti p.131 ff.)

Krishnamurti: What is Love?

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What is love? The word is so loaded and corrupted that I hardly like to use it. Everybody talks of love—every magazine and newspaper and every missionary talks everlastingly of love.

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So to go into the question of what love is we must first free it from the encrustation of centuries, put away all ideals and ideologies of what it should or should not be. To divide anything into what should be and what is is the most deceptive way of dealing with life.

Now how am I going to find out what this flame is which we call love—not how to express it to another but what it means in itself? I will first reject what the church, what society, what my parents and friends, what every person and every book, has said about it because I want to find out for myself what it is.

Here is an enormous problem that involves the whole of mankind. There have been a thousand ways of defining it and I myself am caught in some pattern or another according to what I like or enjoy at the moment—so shouldn’t I, in order to understand it, free myself from my own inclinations and prejudices?  I am confused, torn by my own desires, so I say to myself, “First clear up your own confusion. Perhaps you may be able to discover what love is through what it is not.”

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The government says go and kill for the love of your country. Is that love? Religion says give up sex for the love of God. Is that love? Is love desire? Don’t say no. For most of us it is desire with pleasure, the pleasure that is derived through the senses, through sexual attachment and fulfillment.

I am not against sex, but see what is involved in it. What sex gives you momentarily is the total abandonment of yourself, then you are back again with your turmoil, so you want a repetition over and over again of that state in which there is no worry, no problem, no self.

You say you love your wife. In that love is involved sexual pleasure, the pleasure of having someone in the house to look after your children, to cook. You depend on her; she has given you her body, her emotions, her encouragement, a certain feeling of security and well-being. Then she turns away from you; she gets bored or goes off with someone else, and your whole emotional balance is destroyed, and this disturbance, which you don’t like, is called jealousy. There is pain in it, anxiety, hate and violence.  

So what you are really saying is, “As long as you belong to me I love you but the moment you don’t I begin to hate you. As long as I can rely on you to satisfy my demands, sexual and otherwise, I love you, but the moment you cease to supply what I want I don’t like you.”So there is antagonism between you, there is separation, and when you feel separate from another there is no love. 

But if you live with your wife without thought creating all these contradictory states, these endless quarrels in yourself, then perhaps—perhaps—you will know what love is. Then you are completely free and so is she, whereas is you depend on her for all your pleasure you are a slave to her. So when one loves there must be freedom, not only from the other but from oneself.

This belonging to another, being psychologically nourished by another, depending on another—in all this there must always be anxiety, fear, jealousy, guilt; and so long as there is fear there is no love; a mind ridden with sorrow will never know what love is; sentimentality and emotionalism have nothing whatsoever to do with love. And so love is not to do with pleasure and desire.

Love is not the product of thought, which is the past. Thought cannot possibly cultivate love. Love is not hedged about and caught in jealousy, for jealousy is of the past. Love is always active, present. It is not “I will love” or "I have loved.” If you know love you will not follow anybody. Love does not obey. When you love there is neither respect not disrespect.

Do you know what it really means to love somebody, to love without hate, without jealousy, without anger, without wanting to interfere with what he is doing or thinking, without condemning, without comparing—don’t you know what it means? Where there is love is there comparison? When you love someone with all your heart, with all your mind, with all your body, with your entire being, is there comparison? When you totally abandon yourself to that love there is not the other.

(excerpt from Freedom from the Known, in Total Freedom: The Essential Krishnamurti, p.126 ff.)

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Krishnamurti: Not Crippled By Memory

"Of course, memory has a place at a certain level. In everyday life we could not function at all without it. In its own field it must be efficient, but there is a state of mind where it has very little place. A mind which is not crippled by memory has real freedom."

(Freedom from the Known, in Total Freedom: The Essential Krishnamurti, p. 116)

The Anatomy of Silence – Krishnamurti

Krishnamurti

Krishnamurti: Isn't it important for you to find out for yourself whether you are asking for the more, or whether you are trying to see exactly what is? The two are incompatible. If you can put aside the more, then we are concerned only with what is when the mind is silent.

What actually takes place when the mind is really quiet? That is the real question, isn't it – not what is transcendental or what lies beyond?

Questioner: What lies beyond is my question.

K: What lies beyond can be found only if the mind is still. There may be something or there may be nothing at all.

So the only thing that is important is for the mind to be still. Again, if you are concerned with what lies beyond, then you are not looking at what the state of actual stillness is. If stillness to you is only a door to that which lies beyond, then you are not concerned with that door, whereas what is important is the very door itself, the stillness itself.

Therefore you cannot ask what lies beyond. The only thing that is important is for the mind to be still. Then what takes place? That is all we are concerned with, not with what lies beyond.

Q: You are right. The silence has no importance to me except as a doorway.

K: How do you know it is a doorway and not the thing itself? The means is the end, they are not two separate things. Silence is the only fact, not what you discover through it. Let us remain with the fact and see what that fact is.

It is of great importance, perhaps of the greatest importance, that this silence be silence in itself and not something induced as a means to an end, not something induced through drugs, discipline, or the repetition of words.

Q: The silence comes of its own, without a motive and without a cause.

K: But you are using it as a means.

Q: No, I have known silence and I see that nothing happens.

K: That is the whole point. There is no other fact but silence which has not been invited, induced, sought after, but which is the natural outcome of observation and of understanding oneself and the world about one.

In this there has been no motive which has brought silence. If there is any shadow or suspicion of a motive, then that silence is directed and deliberate, so it is not silence at all.

If you can honestly say that that silence is free, then what actually takes place in that silence is our only concern. What is the quality and the texture of that silence? Is it superficial, passing, measurable  Are you aware of it after it is over, or during the silence? If you are aware that you have been silent, then it is only a memory, and therefore dead.

If you are aware of the silence while it is happening, then is it silence? If there is no observer – that is, no bundle of memories – then is it silence? Is it something intermittent that comes and goes according to your body chemistry? Does it come when you are alone, or with people, or when you are trying to meditate?

What we are trying to find out is the nature of this silence. Is it rich of poor? I don’t mean rich with experience, or poor because uneducated. Is it full or shallow? Is it innocent or put together?

A mind can look at a fact and not see the beauty, the depth, the quality of that fact. Is it possible to observe silence without the observer? When there is silence, there is silence and nothing else. Then in that silence what takes place? Is this what you are asking?

Q: Yes.

K: Is there an observation of silence by silence in silence?

Q: That’s a new question.

K: It is not a new question if you have been following. The whole brain, the mind, the feelings, the body, everything is quiet. Can this quietness, stillness, look at itself, not as an observer who is still?

Can the totality of this silence watch its own totality? 

The silence becomes aware of itself – in this there is no division between an observer and an observed. That is the main point. The silence does not use itself to discover something beyond itself. There is only that silence. Now see what happens.

(Excerpt from "Freedom, Love, and Action" J. Krishnamurti, p. 45 ff)

Svarupa