Jiddu Krishnamurti Quotes

Jiddu Krishnamurti

Jiddu Krishnamurti (/ˈdʒɪduːkrɪʃnəˈmɜːrti/; 12 May 1895 – 17 February 1986) was an Indian philosopher, speaker and writer. In his early life he was groomed to be the new World Teacher but later rejected this mantle and withdrew from the Theosophy organization behind it. His interests included psychological revolution, the nature of mind, meditation, inquiry, human relationships, and bringing about radical change in society. He stressed the need for a revolution in the psyche of every human being and emphasised that such revolution cannot be brought about by any external entity, be it religious, political, or social.

Krishnamurti said he had no allegiance to any nationality, caste, religion, or philosophy, and spent the rest of his life travelling the world, speaking to large and small groups and individuals. He wrote many books, among them The First and Last Freedom, The Only Revolution, and Krishnamurti’s Notebook. Many of his talks and discussions have been published. His last public talk was in Madras, India, in January 1986, a month before his death at his home in Ojai, California. His supporters — working through non-profit foundations in India, Great Britain and the United States — oversee several independent schools based on his views on education. They continue to transcribe and distribute his thousands of talks, group and individual discussions, and writings by use of a variety of media formats and languages.

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 Meditation Benefits and Stories

Jiddu Krishnamurti information source: Wikipedia

Jiddu Krishnamurti

 

1. “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”

2. “I don’t mind what happens. That is the essence of inner freedom. It is a timeless spiritual truth: release attachment to outcomes, deep inside yourself, you’ll feel good no matter what.”

3. “The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence.”

4. “So when you are listening to somebody, completely, attentively, then you are listening not only to the words, but also to the feeling of what is being conveyed, to the whole of it, not part of it.”

5. “You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing, and dance, and write poems, and suffer, and understand, for all that is life.”

6. “All living is energy. All life is energy. If that energy is allowed to flow without any contradictions, without any friction, without any conflict, then that energy is boundless, endless.”

7. “When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind.”

8. “Our present education is rotten because it teaches us to love success and not what we are doing. The result has become more important than the action.”

9. “It is truth that liberates, not your effort to be free.”

10. “To come upon love without seeking it is the only way to find it.”

11. “Freedom and love go together. Love is not a reaction. If I love you because you love me, that is mere trade, a thing to be bought in the market; it is not love. To love is not to ask anything in return, not even to feel that you are giving something- and it is only such love that can know freedom.”

12. “If you are simple deeply simple in yourself you will discover something extraordinary.”

13. “One is never afraid of the unknown; one is afraid of the known coming to an end.”

14. “We all want to be famous people, and the moment we want to be something we are no longer free.”

15. “Real learning comes about when the competitive spirit has ceased.”

16. “The moment you have in your heart this extraordinary thing called love and feel the depth, the delight, the ecstasy of it, you will discover that for you the world is transformed.”

17. “The more you know yourself, the more clarity there is. Self-knowledge has no end – you don’t come to an achievement; you don’t come to a conclusion. It is an endless river.”

18. “There is hope in men, not in society, not in systems, not in organized religions, but in you and me.”

19. “Governments want efficient technicians, not human beings, because human beings become dangerous to governments – and to organized religions as well. That is why governments and religious organizations seek to control education.”

20. “No book can teach you about yourself, no psychologist, none of the professors or philosophers. What they can teach you is what they think you are or what they think you should be.”

21. “Tradition becomes our security, and when the mind is secure it is in decay.”

22. “In obedience there is always fear, and fear darkens the mind.”

23. “To understand the immeasurable, the mind must be extraordinarily quiet, still.”

24. “The demand for more and more experiences shows the inward poverty of man. We think that through experiences we can escape from ourselves, but these experiences are conditioned by what we are.”

25. “You can only be afraid of what you think you know.”

26. “It is only when the mind is free from the old that it meets everything anew, and in that there is joy.”

27. “Do not repeat after me words that you do not understand. Do not merely put on a mask of my ideas, for it will be an illusion and you will thereby deceive yourself.”

28. “There is an art of seeing things as they are: without naming, without being caught in a network of words, without thinking interfering with perception.”

29. “When I understand myself, I understand you, and out of that understanding comes love.”

30. “The self is the root of all fear.”

31. “If you begin to understand what you are without trying to change it, then what you are undergoes a transformation.”

32. “It is very difficult to be like the other guy, to be ordinary. Mediocrity takes a great deal of energy. But to be ourselves is very easy. You don’t have to do a thing.”

33. “The constant assertion of belief is an indication of fear.”

34. “There is great happiness in not wanting, in not being something in not going somewhere.”

35. “Happiness is strange; it comes when you are not seeking it. When you are not making an effort to be happy, then unexpectedly, mysteriously, happiness is there, born of purity, of a loveliness of being.”

36. “The only hope for humankind is in the transformation of the individual.”

37. “Do it or don’t do it but get on with it…”

38. “There is no such thing as living alone, for all living is relationship; but to live without direct relationship demands high intelligence, a swifter and great awareness for self-discovery.”

39. “Follow the wandering, the distraction, find out why the mind has wandered; pursue it, go into it fully. When the distraction is completely understood, then that particular distraction is gone. When another comes, pursue it also.”

40. “I don’t mind what happens, that is the essence of inner freedom. It is timeless spiritual truth: release attachment to outcomes, deep inside yourself, you’ll feel good no matter what.”

Jiddu Krishnamurti

41. “It is only when the mind is free from the old that it meets everything anew, and in that there is joy.”

42. “Identification is a form of escape from the self.”

43. “We carry about us the burden of what thousands of people have said and the memories of all our misfortunes. To abandon all that is to be alone, and the mind that is alone is not only innocent but young — not in time or age, but young, innocent, alive at whatever age — and only such a mind can see that which is truth and that which is not measurable by words.”

44. “Look within. You are the world.”

45. “If we can really understand the problem, the answer will come out of it, because the answer is not separate from the problem.”

46. “The ending of sorrow is the beginning of wisdom. Knowledge is always within the shadow of ignorance. Meditation is freedom from thought and a movement in the ecstasy of truth. Meditation is explosion of intelligence.”

47. “Thought tries to sustain pleasure & thereby nourishes fear.”

48. “I maintain that Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. … The moment you follow someone you cease to follow Truth.”

49. “It is essential to understand the seeker, before you try to find out what it is he is seeking.”

50. “Thought is so cunning, so clever, that it distorts everything for its own convenience.”

51. “If you are on right path & you are not facing difficulties then think for a while you may be on wrong path. Because right path contains difficulties.”

52. “When you once see something as false which you have accepted as true, as natural, as human, then you can never go back to it.”

53. “Do you want to know what my secret is? I don’t mind what happens.”

54. “It’s beautiful to be alone. To be alone does not mean to be lonely. It means the mind is not influenced and contaminated by society.”

55. “A man who says, ‘I want to change, tell me how to’, seems very earnest, very serious, but he is not. He wants an authority whom he hopes will bring about order in himself. But can authority ever bring about inward order? Order imposed from without must always breed disorder.”

56. “Without self-knowledge, experience breeds illusion.”

57. “Find out for yourself what are the possessions and ideals that you do not desire. By knowing what you do not want, by elimination, you will unburden the mind, and only then will it understand the essential which is ever there.”

58. “Without freedom from the past, there is no freedom at all, because the mind is never new, fresh, innocent.”
59. “It is love alone that leads to right action. What brings order in the world is to love and let love do what it will.”

60. “The only path by which another person can upset you is through your own thought.”

61. “The following of authority is the denial of intelligence. [It] may help us temporarily to cover up our difficulties and problems; but to avoid a problem is only to intensify it, and in the process, self-knowledge and freedom are abandoned.”
62. “One of the functions of thought is to be occupied all the time with something. Most of us want to have our minds continually occupied so that we are prevented from seeing ourselves as we actually are. We are afraid to be empty. We are afraid to look at our fears.”

63. “All ideologies are idiotic, whether religious or political, for it is conceptual thinking, the conceptual word, which has so unfortunately divided man.”

64. “Freedom from the desire for an answer is essential to the understanding of a problem.”

65. “Be a light unto oneself”

66. “Truth is that which is, it is nameless. And so, the mind cannot approach it. Truth is that which is.”

67. “There is no end to education. It is not that you read a book, pass an examination, and finish with education. The whole of life, from the moment you are born to the moment you die, is a process of learning.”

68. “Theories and beliefs do not change one’s life-man has had them for thousands of years and he has not changed.”

69. “Passion is a rather frightening thing because if you have passion you don’t know where it will take you.”

70. “A man who is not afraid is not aggressive, a man who has no sense of fear of any kind is really a free, a peaceful man.”

71. “Analysis does not transform consciousness.”

72. “What is needed, rather than running away or controlling or suppressing or any other resistance, is understanding fear; that means, watch it, learn about it, come directly into contact with it. We are to learn about fear, not how to escape from it.”

73. “Identification with the rag called the national flag is an emotional and sentimental factor and for that factor you are willing to kill another – and that is called, the love of your country, love of the neighbor . . .? One can see that where sentiment and emotion come in, love is not.”

74. “The beauty of listening lies in being highly sensitive to everything about you.”

75. “The primary cause of disorder in ourselves is the seeking of reality promised by another.”

76. “Nature is busy creating absolutely unique individuals, whereas culture has invented a single mold to which all must conform. It is grotesque.”

77. “To ask the ‘right’ question is far more important than to receive the answer. The solution of a problem lies in the understanding of the problem; the answer is not outside the problem; it is in the problem.”

78. “If your eyes are blinded with your worries, you cannot see the beauty of the sunset.”

79. “The significance of life is living.”

80. “The man who is not frightened of life is not frightened of being completely insecure for he understands that inwardly, psychologically, there is no security.”

81. “To understand life is to understand ourselves, and that is both the beginning and the end of education.”

82. “Love will arise in your heart when you have no barrier between yourself and another, when you meet and observe people without judging them, when you just see the sail boat on the river and enjoy the beauty of it.”

83. “And the idea of ourselves is our escape from the fact of what we really are.”

84. “Change in society is of secondary importance; that will come about naturally inevitably, when you as a human being bring about the change in yourself.”

85. “When one loses the deep intimate relationship with nature, then temples, mosques and churches become important.”

86. “Only when the brain has cleansed itself of conditioning, greed, envy, ambition, then only it can comprehend that which is complete. Love is this completeness.”

87. “The very desire to be certain, to be secure, is the beginning of bondage. It’s only when the mind is not caught in the net of certainty, and is not seeking certainty, that it is in a state of discovery.”

88. “You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing, and dance, and write poems, and suffer, and understand, for all that is life.”

89. “Do you know that even when you look at a tree and say, `That is an oak tree’, or `that is a banyan tree’, the naming of the tree, which is botanical knowledge, has so conditioned your mind that the word comes between you and actually seeing the tree? To come in contact with the tree you have to put your hand on it and the word will not help you to touch it.”

90. “The world is not something separate from you and me; the world, society, is the relationship that we establish or seek to establish between each other. So you and I are the problem, and not the world, because the world is the projection of ourselves, and to understand the world we must understand ourselves. That world is not separate from us; we are the world, and our problems are the world’s problems.”

91. “Intelligence is the capacity to perceive the essential, the what is; and to awaken this capacity, in oneself and in others, is education.”

92. “From innumerable complexities we must grow to simplicity; we must become simple in our inward life and in our outward needs.”

93. “The word ‘innocence’ means a mind that is incapable of being hurt.”

94. “If one observes, one will see that the body has its own intelligence; it requires a great deal of intelligence to observe the intelligence of the body.”

95. “Order cannot possibly be brought about through conformity to a pattern, under any circumstances.”

96. “What you are the world is. And without your transformation, there can be no transformation of the world.”

97. “Action has meaning only in relationship, and without understanding relationship, action on any level will only breed conflict. The understanding of relationship is infinitely more important than the search for any plan of action.”

98. “The ending is the beginning, and the beginning is the first step, and the first step is the only step.”

99. “Happy is the man who is nothing.”

Jiddu Krishnamurti