Krishnamurti & the Art of Awakening

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Krishnamurti Quote of the Day

Group Discussion 8th November, 1947 | Madras, India

Awareness is not of anything abstract or being aware of Reality, God or Truth; we must be aware of what we are doing, what we are thinking and feeling. Have you ever watched you mind? One thought precipitates on another before the original one is complete. All these thoughts relate either to the past memories or to the hopes of the future. The mind wanders, ceaselessly and restlessly, back to the past or forward to the future. In longing to find out what it is which we are thinking, we find that most of us are merely accepting, not thinking, and automatically responding according to our particular profession or reacting to a particular conditioning.

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The process of recognition is a process of the continued known.
The 'observer' exists only when you accumulate in the observation;
What is the relationship of attention to inattention, and to awareness?
You can never know what the unknown is because the moment you recognise it as the unknown you are back in the known.
This is what we mean when we speak of awareness.
Every habit, repetition, rituals strengthened by belief and dogma, sensory responses, can be and are refined, but the alert awareness, sensitivity, is quite another matter.
Yoga exercises are excellent; the speaker does them every day, for an hour or more; but that is merely physical exercise, to keep the body healthy, and so on.
Let the thing that you are watching tell its story, rather than you tell it what it should be.
Will you please explain what you mean by awareness?
If you don't know about yourself, actually what you are, you have no basis for any action which will be true, not fragmentary, not miserable, regretting, and so on.
When the mind is aware that it is conditioned and does not battle against it, only then is the mind free to give its complete attention to this conditioning.
For beauty to come into being, the mind must be choicelessly aware of its own pettiness;
Awareness is not a matter of determination, for purposive direction is resistance, which tends towards exclusiveness.
I cannot live in the present if the present is in the shadow of the past. To understand this the mind must be capable of looking and you can only look when there is no condemnation, no identification, no judgement - as you can look at a tree, a cloud - simply look at it.
You do not have to tell me or another what you are, but be aware of what you are, whatever it is, pleasant or unpleasant; live with it without justifying or resisting it.
The reaction, the response of your relationship with other people, may be external; but that response is the outcome of an inward suspense, an inward anxiety, an inward fear.
Awareness is the complete and unconditional surrender to what is, without rationalization, without the division of the observer and the observed.
I wonder if we really are aware of anger, sadness, happiness? Or are we aware of these things only when they are all over?
You must be free from the sentimentality of emotion, which does not mean you must be free of emotion; on the contrary, you must have great intensity of emotion without being entangled in it.
Awareness is not a constant repetition of the idea that you must be aware, which becomes but a memory.
To become fully aware is not to yield to the layer after layer of craving, thinking you must go through all experience, which is but another sensation.
Awareness does not result from the struggle to be aware; it comes of its own accord when you are conscious with your whole being, when you realize the futility of choice.
When you become fully aware with your mind and your heart of the cause of incompleteness, then incompleteness ceases.
Because there is in us a longing, a want, a craving, we cannot know true perception or discernment.
If you seek consolation, be honest, be frank, be aware of what you want and conscious that you are seeking it.
To be a theist or an atheist, to me, are both absurd.
You can find out the cause of insufficiency only through awareness.
To be aware is not to alter.
If you are aware of your actions, you will notice that this is what is happening to most of you, that you are functioning through an established background of tradition, or of fear, and therefore increasing your conflict, your struggles.
It is very good of you, sirs, to have invited me and I thank you for listening to me.
Sir, merely to know one's limitations is surely not enough, is it?
Awareness is not occupation with one's own thoughts and feelings.
Awareness is constant discernment of what is true.
Awareness is not that directive power of a higher comprehension over a lower, which is but a trick of the mind, but that choiceless comprehension which is the outcome of persistent action without fear and want.
Do not seek the bliss of reality, for the mere search for reality only leads to illusion, but comprehend that process of thought, consciousness, focussed in yourself.
The questioner has not understood what I mean by awareness.
It is futile to ask how to get rid of the "I", the "me", with its many layers of wants, fears, without fully comprehending the process of resistance.
When we are integrally aware of the process of ignorance, voluntarily, spontaneously, there is the beginning of that intelligence which meets all conditioning influences.
The beginning of awareness is the natural concentration of interest in which there is no conflict of desires and choice, and therefore there is a possibility of understanding different and opposing desires.
In awareness there is only the present, that is, being aware, you see the past process of influence which controls the present and modifies the future.
Awareness is not mere analysis or self-examination.
Self-analysis and awareness are two different things; the one is morbid. but awareness is joyous.
We must become aware of this complex problem of duality through constant watchfulness, not to correct but to understand;
What is important is to become aware of every thought-feeling, from which arises self-knowledge.
Questioner: Is awareness only possible during waking hours?
Is it not possible to be aware of what is?
Awareness is the process of freeing the conscious mind from the bondages which cause conflict and pain and thus making it open and receptive to the hidden.
Awareness is necessary for comprehension; a strenuous attention is needed if we would grasp the full significance of a problem.
Understanding comes when your whole being is deeply and silently aware.
The confidence of which I speak is understanding, not the 'I understand', but understanding without self-identification.
Questioner: Is there a technique for being aware?
We can at any time be aware without the will to become aware.
Awareness is not the result of practice for practice implies the formation of habit; habit is the denial of awareness.
The very awareness of what is is a liberative process.
Questioner: Is not this process of awareness, of self-unfoldment, another form of acquisition? Is not probing another means of self-expansive acquisitiveness?
Questioner: Is there anything that one can do to be aware?
If you are interested in painting then every light, every shade has meaning; you do not have to exert to be interested, you do not have to force yourself to observe but through the very intensity of interest even unconsciously you are observing, discovering, experiencing.
The comprehension of the past lies through the present.
What is awareness? There is objective awareness. Then, there is the emotional response to each other or to truth.
The sense of struggle and of not being able to do something creates frustration because there is in your mind an idea of achievement.
It must begin with us, that is with you and me, not merely by saying 'I must begin', but in action, by becoming aware of what we are doing, of all the process and the repetition of ideas, and the absurdities in which we sometimes indulge, our class and communal divisions, national and racial divisions.
.. what is of primary importance is to be aware, so choicelessly, so penetratingly aware of every thought, every feeling that is revealed.
Environment is the past in conflict, in modification, or in conjunction with the present.
... in order to begin following the stream of self-knowledge there must be a clarification of the conscious, that is one must be aware of what is consciously taking place.
all of us who really want to experiment, who really want to undertake the journey must free the thoughts in our conscious mind.
... what we want first is that extraordinary beginning of taking a step.
It is as though we are watching a mirror in from to us, which is not distorting our thoughts and our feelings and actions, but is showing exactly 'what is' and not what we would like them to be.
Introspection is a constant struggle to change what is, whereas awareness is the recognition of what is and therefore the understanding of what is.
... if you really go into it very deeply you will see the extraordinary creative quality of being aware and the destructive quality of introspection.
The moment you are aware, which is neither to condemn nor justify, the moment you accept, look and observe what is, there is no effort; then the thing that you observe, that which is, that which you are aware of, has an extraordinary significance.
If you begin to inquire, to be aware choicelessly of yourself in everything that you do, you will soon discover what extraordinary depths thought can plumb and how free this awareness is.
To understand the disturbing state in which you find yourself, you must first stop the fighting with the opposite which is non-existent, i.e. you must give up the struggle to become the opposite.
When you yourself interpret the dream, who is the interpreter?
Is it possible for the conscious mind to be so alert, so passively aware during the day that all the intimations are translated as they arise?
To find out what is behind the wall, you have to climb over the wall or go through the wall.
Surely, Sirs, to be aware means very simply, to be aware of yourself in relation to your neighbour, to the flower, to the bird, to the tree; to be aware of your own thoughts, feelings and actions, because you must begin very near, mustn't you, to go very far.
Question: What is the awareness that you speak of? Is it the awareness of the supreme universal consciousness?
Awareness is not condemnation or identification but a process of understanding of what is.
Awareness is that state of choicelessness, because if you want to understand something you must not condemn or identify, it must tell you its story.
Your psychological inward intention is to be free so that you may meet a new challenge without any conditioning;
You should all of you live a personal life of inner awareness which is possible only through love and understanding.
Awareness demands an extraordinarily persistent watchfulness to see how the mind works when there is suffering, to follow the swift movement of every thought and thereby comprehend the whole process of effort, of thought and of memory.
All that I can do is to be aware, passively aware of my process of becoming.
It is only the righteous man that is confused, that is in conflict, it is only the righteous man that develops his will as a means of resistance;
Why can't we experience what is, directly, immediately and swiftly?
Those of us who are seriously intentioned can investigate our own lives, we can see how we are violent in daily life, in our speech, in our thoughts, in our actions, in our feelings, and we can be free of that violence, not because of an ideal not by trying to transform it into nonviolence, but by actually facing it, by merely being aware of it;
Question: What is the difference between awareness and introspection? And who is aware in awareness?
At the moment of experience, there is neither the observer nor the observed: there is only the experiencing.
if you say, 'I must be aware in order to get a result', then it becomes tedious.
This finding of the whole meaning of what you do, is what is meant by being aware.
Attention is not exclusive. If I exclude, there is effort and effort leads to distortion.
It is sufficient if you are aware even momentarily.