We are easily persuaded by explanations to believe or not to believe, to accept or to deny, but we must neither accept nor disregard the explanations.

It seems to me that erudition and being familiar with various philosophies and ideals do not in any way resolve our immense psychological complexities and problems. To understand these problems, one must have a serious intention to examine very closely, not what is being said so much as what actually is taking place when one is listening.

As has been said, listening is one of the most difficult things to do: to actually listen, with neither pleasure nor displeasure, not bringing in one's idiosyncrasies, knowledge and petty little demands, which actually prevent listening. When one goes to a concert - and I don't know why one goes - one listens with pleasure. One says, "I have heard that music before; I like to hear it again; there are memories, certain pleasurable experiences that one has had; and these memories prevent the actual fact of listening to a note, or to the silence between two notes. The silence is far more important than the note; but the silence becomes filled with the noise of memory, and therefore one ceases to listen altogether.

To actually listen one needs attention, but not a forced, cultivated, drilled attention. Attention, and therefore listening can only come when there is freedom, not when there is a motive. Motive always projects its own demands, and therefore there is no attention.t Attention is not interest, either. If one us interested, then that attention becomes concentration, and concentration, if one observes, is always exclusive, limited. With a limited concentration, one seems to hide every thought and every feeling in order to listen, which prevents the actual act of listening.

When one really listens, an actual transformation takes place. If one ever observes oneself, one will see that one never actually listens. It is only when one is forced, cornered, bullied into listening that one listens with a resistance, or with pleasurable anticipation.

As we are so heavily conditioned, through propaganda, and also by our own fear and uncertainty, we easily accept. We want to be told what to do, how to think and what to think about.

Self-knowing is very important: Knowing for yourselves, not what you have been told about yourselves. You have to relearn about yourselves. Learning is not a movement of what has been accumulated as knowledge. Learning can only be in the active present all the time, and not what you have learned through experience, through your previous activity, through memory. If you are merely accumulating, there is no actual fact of learning, no seeing something for yourselves and moving from there.

There is this emptiness, this loneliness, this despair; and, to fill that, we are seeking.

Probably you are listening this evening, seeking something to fill that void of nothingness. This search is a terrible thing, because it will lead nowhere.

So the first thing, it seems to me, is to realize that there must be no seeking at all. That's a hard pill to swallow, because most of you have been accustomed, conditioned to seek, psychologically, inwardly. You say, "If I can't seek, if I see there is no meaning in seeking, then what am I to do? I'm lost!". Seeking becomes another escape from the actual fact of what you are.

Seeking is by a mind that is frightened of itself, of what it is. A man who is alive, in the deep sense of that word, completely fearless, is a light to himself; he has no need to seek.

In the midst of this loneliness, this sense of an utterly meaningless existence, can one find out ... if life has a significance at all?

And what is that significance, if there is one?

If one relies on stimulation of any kind, including the speaker here, that stimulation inevitably leads to dull minds.

Because of our despair and anguish, we have invented a network of escapes, beliefs, dogmas; or we just live for the time being, and die, rationalizing our whole existence. The mind must be free of belief to examine. To examine there must be freedom, obviously; otherwise we can't examine.

To see all this structure, and not escape either through a conclusion, through a word or through the movement of seeking an answer demands astonishing attention.

As we were saying the other day, an object creates space around itself. I have space round me physically, because the object is here.

But there is space in which there is complete. freedom, when there is no observer, when there is no centre.

This whole process is a kind of meditation, not a self-hypnosis, because there is no demand, no desire, no seeking, no saying, "I want this; I don't want that".

Then only can one come upon that thing which man has sought for centuries upon centuries, which has nothing to do with belief...

Questioner: The Lord Buddha, I think, did it without killing the animal in him.

Krishnamurti: Sir, one must really be rather careful in this. It is no good quoting authorities. One really does not know what the Buddha said or did, or Christ, and so on. Discard all authority and find out for oneself.

Questioner: Sir, so many millions of people are caught up in confusion and in a materialistic type of life that it seems to me almost hopeless to think that there will ever be enough people with enough clarity to do any good.

Krishnamurti: Why are you so concerned about the multitude? Are you one of the "do-gooders", and not really concerned about yourself and your relationship with the world?

Editor's note: K describes the problem of the "insane 500."