excerpts

To understand something completely, however trivial or great, one must give complete attention, untrammeled and free. Otherwise, one cannot understand - especially those things that demand careful study and intimate knowledge.

To give attention there must be freedom; otherwise, one cannot attend. You cannot give yourself completely over to something, if you are not free. And to understand the extraordinary thing called truth, which is yet simple and at the same time quite complex, one must give this untrammeled attention.

concentration is not the same as attention

Editor’s note: Elsewhere, K has spoken of ordinary concentration of the mind, which, he says, is a form of resistance, a condition which precludes discovery of the truth. However, here K speaks of “attention,” which is much different, and a necessary element in truth-discovery.

And, as I said, freedom is essential. For truth does not belong to any religion, to any system; nor is it to be found in any book. You cannot learn it from another, nor can another lead you to it. One must completely understand it and give oneself to it. So, you must come to it free, untrammelled and with a state of mind that has understood itself and, therefore, is free from all illusion…

So, for one who is serious enough to find out whether there is such a thing as reality, to find out what is truth - the truth not put together by man in his fear, in his despair; the truth that is not a tradition, a repetition, a thing that is an instrument of propaganda - to find that out, there must be complete freedom. Outwardly perhaps, there may not be freedom; but inwardly, there must be absolute freedom…

So, is it possible to be psychologically free so as to discover for oneself what is truth? Because in the very process of understanding or in the very act of understanding what is truth, you are able to help your fellow man; otherwise, you cannot help; otherwise, you bring more confusion, more misery to man - which again is obvious, which is shown by all these things.

Truth which is made manifest by another or described by another or told by another - however wise, however intelligent - is not truth [for you]. You have to find it, you have to understand it. I withdraw that word `find' - you cannot find truth; you cannot set about deliberately, consciously, to find it. You must come upon truth darkly, unknowingly. But you cannot come upon it if your mind, if your psyche, inwardly is not completely, totally free.

To discover anything, even in the scientific field, the mind must be free. The mind must be untrammelled to see something new. But most of our minds, unfortunately, are not fresh, young, innocent - to see, to observe, to understand. We are full of experiences, not only the experiences that one has gathered recently - I mean by `recently' within the last fifty, sixty, or a hundred years - but also the experience of man, ageless. We are cluttered with all that: which is our knowledge, conscious or unconscious; the conscious knowledge is what we have acquired through education in the modern world, at the present time…

If you listen - which is entirely different from hearing - then there is neither agreement nor disagreement. You are actually listening to find out what is true and what is false - which is not dependent on your judgment, or on your opinion, or on your knowledge, or on your conditioning… listen without agreement or disagreement, without comparing, without interpreting; you must actually give complete attention. Then you will see for yourself immediately, the whole significance of what is implied in that word `freedom'. One can understand it immediately. And all understanding, the act of understanding, is immediate, whether it is tomorrow or today. And the state of understanding is then timeless; it is not a gradual, accumulative process…

And if you merely hear the words and say, "This is your opinion", "This is my opinion", "I agree", "I disagree", "This is what Sankara or Buddha has said", then you and I are not communicating. Then we are merely indulging - at least you are - in opinions. So we must be very clear, from the very beginning that we are not only hearing the verbal communication - the word, the meaning of the word, and the nature of the word - but are also listening.

So you have a double job - hearing the words and listening. Naturally, when you hear the word, the word has a meaning, and that meaning evokes certain responses, certain memories, certain reactions. And at the same time you have to listen without reaction, without opinion, without judgment, without comparison. So, your task is much greater than the speaker`s; it is not the other way round which most of us are used to; the speaker does all the work and you just listen, agree or disagree, and go away elated, amused, intellectually alerted; and such a state has no validity at all, you can just as well go to a cinema.

But the man who is serious, has the seriousness that demands complete attention, an attention that will go right through. Such a man must know this art of listening. If you know the art of listening, there is nothing more to be said. Then you will listen to the crow, to the bird, to the whisper of the breeze among the leaves; and you will also listen to yourself, to the mutterings of your own mind, to your own heart, and to the intimation of your own unconsciousness. Then you are in a state of acute, intense listening and, therefore, you are no longer indulging in opinions.

So, if you are at all serious, you would listen that way; and you must listen that way. Because, as I said, freedom is absolutely necessary for the understanding of what is truth…

To look at a flower, though you may have seen it for the last ten years, to look at that flower anew, as though you were seeing it for the first time in your life, you must have a fresh mind - a fresh, innocent, tremendously alert mind. Otherwise, you cannot see - you see only the memories which you have projected into that flower, but you do not see the flower. Please do understand this.

Once you understand the act of seeing as the act of listening, you will have grasped something extraordinary in your life; it will never leave you again. As our minds are so jaded, made dull by society, by circumstances, by our own fears, despairs, by aIl the brutalities, the insults, the pressures, the mind has become mechanical, dull, stupid, heavy. And with that mind we want to understand; obviously we cannot.

So the question is: Is it possible to be free of that? Otherwise, you cannot see even the flower. I do not know if when you get up early in the morning you see the Southern Cross - the stars in the heavens... But to wake up in the morning, look out of the window or step into the street and see it afresh with unclouded eyes, with an untrammeled mind - then only can you understand the beauty and the depth and the silence that is between you and that. Then only can you see. And for that, you must be free; you cannot bring all your experience, and look.

So, our question then is: Is it possible to be free of knowledge? Knowledge is the immediate past which accumulates. Every experience that you have is translated and stored and recorded; and with that record you approach the next experience. And, therefore, you never understand experience; you are merely translating each challenge according to the response of the past and, therefore, strengthening the record. This is what is taking place in the electronic brain, in the computer...

Knowledge becomes our authority - as tradition, as experience, as what you have read, as what you have learned, and as the authority asserted by those who say they know. The moment you say you know, you do not know! Truth is not something you can know about. It has to be perceived from moment to moment - as the beauty of the tree, the sky, the sunset.

So, knowledge becomes the authority which guides, which shapes, which gives us courage, which gives us the strength to go on. Please follow all this because we have to understand the anatomy of authority - the authority of the government, the authority of the law, the authority of the policeman, the psychological authority which is your own experiences and the traditions that have been handed down, consciously or unconsciously; they become the guide, they become a warning signal as to what to do and what not to do. It is all in the realm of memory.

And that is what we are actually. Our mind is the result of a thousand experiences with their memories and with their scratches, of the traditions handed down by society, by religion, and of the traditions of education. With that mind so burdened with memory, we try to understand something which cannot be understood through memory. So one has to be free from authority…

Now what an extraordinary weight of tradition the so-called spiritual leaders and saints have established in your minds - the Gita, the Upanishads, Sankara and other interpreters of the Gita! These interpreters take their stand on the Gita and interpret, and you go on interpreting. And that interpretation you consider to be most extraordinary; and the one who interprets you call a religious man. But that person is conditioned by his own fears; he worships a particular stone, either made by the hand or by the mind! That tradition is driven into you through the propaganda of a thousand years - not through recent propaganda - and you accept it; and that shapes your thinking.

So, if you would be free, you have to wipe away all that - wipe away Sankaras, Buddhas, all the religious books and teachers - and be yourself, to find out. Otherwise, you cannot know the extraordinary beauty and the significance of what is Truth, and you will never know what Love is.

So, can you, who have been shaped by Sankaras, by the many saints, by the temples, wipe them all out? You have to wipe them out. You have to stand completely alone, unaided, without despair, without fear; only then can you find out. But to wipe away, to deny totally - not negatively to say, "Let it go", but to deny completely - you have to understand this whole anatomy and structure, the being of authority; you have to understand the man that seeks authority.

You cannot remove authority from the man who wants it, because that is his only solace, that is his bread and butter - as it is of the politician, of the priest or of the philosopher. But if you want to understand the extraordinary thing called truth, you must have no authority [which is a mental conditioning by the past]. Because it is only the fresh mind, the innocent mind, the young vibrant mind, that can understand these things, not the mind driven, shaped, weakened, burdened by the past...

So the man who learns has no conflict; but the man who is merely gathering information in order to live according to a particular pattern established by himself or by his society or by some religious person whoever he is - that man is in contradiction and, therefore, in conflict.

And, as we said the other day, conflict is the very essence of disintegration. conflict arises not only from the past, but also in relation to the present. The conflict also arises when you have ideals - `that you must be this' or `that you must be in such and such a state', `marvellous, ennobling ideas'. It is very important to understand the nature of an ideal. The ideal is not the reality. An idea, projected by a mind which is in conflict, becomes an ideal according to which it must live; and therefore the mind is in conflict, in contradiction.

But a mind that is listening to a fact, not to an ideal - such a mind is not in conflict and, therefore, it is moving from fact to fact. And therefore, such a mind is in a state of energy. And without this energy you cannot go very far. You are merely dissipating it in contradictions, in trying to become this and not that.

So you have to observe, you have to listen, you have to see the fact - the `what is' - and remain with that fact. And this is an extraordinarily difficult thing to do…

It is only when the mind has understood the extraordinary nature of knowledge, freedom and learning, that conflict ceases; only then does the mind become very clear, precise. It is not caught in opinions, in judgments; it is in a state of attention; and therefore it is in a state of complete energy and learning. It is only when the mind is still that it can learn - not `learn about what?' It is only the still mind that can learn; and what is important is not what it learns about, but the state of learning, the state of silence, in which it is learning.

 

When someone hurts or betrays us, how can we forgive in a deep sense, how can we regain an unblemished, pristine image of that person? fresh – innocent – young Allow me to draw our attention to an extremely important concept introduced in Krishnamurti's lecture of Jan 15, 1964. He speaks of the unsullied mind, the uncontaminated, the undefiled and unblemished mind. Five times he refers to this pristine state as the “fresh” mind, three times to the “innocent” mind, and twice to the “young” mind. This is a mind, he says, spotless and unpolluted, that is not burdened by sordid images of the past. We look at a flower, a cloud, a tree, but we do not see these as they are but, so often, immediately overlay them with associated memories of something unpleasant. And, of course, the most troublesome example here is how we view others. We see them, or might bring them to mind, and immediately recall some insult, a slighting, an infraction. We may even want to forgive and forget, but the tarnished image, like the tentacles of a jellyfish which enwrap and enfold, will not let go and settles in with an indelible permanence. When this happens concerning, let’s say, someone at work, some difficult person at school even a long time ago, or other extraneous person in life, we solace ourselves by saying, “I don’t have to endure that abuse again, our paths need never cross again.” This distancing of oneself from the malefactor does not bring total peace of mind, but at least it’s on the back-burner and we can attempt to move on. But how shall we deal with memory of disturbing incident when it occurs within the sphere of love? when the perpetrator is not a random person but the one we were meant to love intimately, above all others, and for all time? What if that person betrays, attacks, and becomes one more “rogues gallery image” of the burdened mind? This can be a severe problem, one of highest importance. If the betraying person, as one is informed by one’s own soul, is meant to be an eternal source of joy and happiness, but now, when mentally viewed, all you see is the betrayal, the insult, the viciousness, how does one recover from this? How can we change the image? How can there ever be redemption is such case when the person is now seen, in essential essence, as sullied, blemished, defiled? We remember, with dismay, how it was at an earlier time when things were better, and we lament, “How can we have a future now? You’ve become an image of betrayal, of viciousness. I could pretend to ‘go along to get along’ but we both know what happened. And now I despair that I can never regain my original delight to know you. You seem ruined to me now. How can you inspire my heart and soul now? How can I be happy with you and love you, when I don't even trust you now?” The remedy, as put forward by Krishnamurti, but as we ourselves know too well, must be nothing less than the mind recapturing a sense of freshness, innocence, and youth. We want and need to go back to the “original file,” the original image, of the other person as pristine, uncomplicated source of joy and happiness in one’s life. Only this will satisfy. But, with this assessment, we fall into darkest malaise and despair. We do not even believe that the “original person” even exists anymore, so great has been the ruin. With Emily Dickinson we cry out, “I feel a funeral in my brain!” It is like a death in the family of a closest loved one, and now we are terrorized that we can never get that person, that source of love, back to our lives. Is there an answer to this? It occurred to me that there must be an answer for (1) every human being, to various degrees, will fail to make us happy at times; everyone has fallen into human failing; but, further, without substantive solution here, (2) how would anyone ever receive a complete happiness and joy in eternal life if the one specifically made for us to love has irretrievably descended into ruin? And so, the core issue remains: How can we recapture, regarding that other person in question, a sense of mental freshness, innocence, and youth? How can we regain the “original image” of pristine wholeness, a fullness of source of joy and happiness? The answer here involves a higher level of consciousness, an evolved state of being. This is not something we can simply read about or learn from another - even if that other is our own counsel! Knowledge alone will not help us. In our deepest persons, we already possess this better perspective and sightedness – it’s already there due to our oneness with God, as we share God’s own energies at the center of self. But our response might be, “I don’t feel the better perspective. I cannot know or grasp the freshness, innocence, and youth. I am still very much burdened by the images of ruin and blemish.” The counter-response will be this: There will be no one-minute makeover, and do not expect it. The dysfunctional ego, like that jellyfish, has had its tentacles tightly around us all of our lives, and it’s not going away so easily. We have work to do in terms of spiritual practice, to bring to the surface of consciousness the “inner riches.” This will not be resolved in a day. But the good news is that we will yet regain that lost loved one: regain, not in the superficial sense of meeting again in the new world – that, by itself, without something more, will not solve the problem – but regain in the sense of recapturing the “original image” of the loved one. We need that "original person," as anything less will not stop our bereavement, our profound sense of loss. It is absolutely possible to recapture the freshness, innocence, and youth. This is the good news, our key to enjoying supreme happiness in the next world. It is possible because this is how God thinks and sees us – God sees no ruin in us, God sees no sin in us -- and because we are linked to God we will yet share the divine perspective; a perspective unburdened by any images of past failings, a recognition of the perfected, mature sacred person within, even if that perfection still resides in potentia. This is the ultimate reality. But we must do the work to bring the inner life into manifest being:   Breakthrough: “Spiritual practice must be uninterrupted. We may be anxious because we see very little happening on a daily basis, but we must be patient… After long self-cultivation, one’s accumulated energy reaches a threshold and then bursts out, like a swan rising from the water… Once you have reached this level of stored energy, you will be a different person.” Deng Ming-Dao, 365 Tao   E. I agree with everything stated here. I know that God does not see us as ruined, and I also believe that we can rise to this level of perception. But none of this idealism should blind us to certain unpleasant elements that we must deal with, especially, while still residing on planet Earth. K. It is true… we’re not living on the “seventh level of heaven” quite yet. E. We've been over this and over this, and honesty is required to have any sort of real relationship. Certain bad things happened between us over the years, and they’ve still not been resolved. We talked about this here and here, and other places. Again, I must be open and frank, because the fact remains, I do not trust you, Kriss. Trust can be restored, but it takes time. And until we are healed in this way, we can’t think about being married in Summerland.