Krishnamurti & the Art of Awakening

«« previous quote

next quote »

Krishnamurti Quote of the Day

Madras, India | First Public Talk, December 12, 1956

To find out what this life is all about, to know the whole content of it and not just the superficial layers which we call living, to be aware of its joy, its extraordinary depths, its width and beauty, which includes the squalor, the misery, the strife, the degradation - to understand the significance of all that, your mind must obviously be free. If that is clearly understood, then your relationship with me, and my relationship with you, is not based on authority. I cannot lead you to truth, nor can anyone else; you have to discover it every moment of the day as you are living. It is to be found when you are walking in the street or riding in a tramcar, when you are quarreling with your wife or husband, when you are sitting alone or looking at the stars. When you know what is right meditation, then you will find out what is true; but a mind that is prepared, so-called educated, that is conditioned to believe or not to believe, that calls itself a Hindu, a Christian, a communist, a Buddhist - such a mind will never discover what is true, though it may search for a thousand years. So the important thing is for the mind to be free, and can the mind ever be free?

Tags: freedom

Related Quotes
We should go into this question of freedom and enquire whether it is at all possible to be free, or if it is an ideological utopia, a concept which has no reality whatsoever.
Only in total freedom does bliss exist.
From the known you cannot possibly see the unknown;
Freedom is to stand alone, unattached and unafraid, free in the understanding of desire which breeds illusion.
Only the mind that has emptied itself of the known is creative.
Self-knowledge is not a conclusion, an end; it has no beginning and no end.
It is only the righteous man that develops his will as a means of resistance, and a man of will can never find truth, because he is never free.
Meditation is seeing the constant touching the ever-changing movement of life.
We have divided life into dying and living. And this division has brought about great fear. And out of that fear we invent all kinds of theories, very comforting, may be illusory, but it is very comforting, illusions are comfortably neurotic.
The 'me' is created by thought and the 'me' says: "I am independent of thought".
Freedom is born of the perception that freedom is essential.
Everything we see, every thought we have, shapes our mind; whatever you think now, whatever you have thought in the past and whatever you are going to think in the future, it all shapes the mind.
The mind is never free, pliable, for it is always anchored; it moves within the radius, narrow or wide, of its own centre.
If I have the whole picture in mind then I can take in the detail; but if my mind only operates in a detail then I cannot take in the whole.
How can one stimulate a desire for freedom?
To live without comparison is to remove a tremendous burden.
To examine, explore, anything, there must be the quality of freedom from all your prejudices, conditioning and so on, even from your own experience;
You may say there is a part of you - the watcher, the super-soul, the Atman - which is not conditioned; but because you think about it, it is within the field of thought, therefore it is conditioned.
I am talking of that living reality in which there is utter freedom from all ideas.
We are influenced not only by external conditions, but also by an inner condition which we develop.