Krishnamurti & the Art of Awakening

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Krishnamurti Quote of the Day

Ojai, California | Fifth Talk in The Oak Grove, 1946

Questioner: Is there anything that one can do to be aware?

Krishnamurti: Are you not in conflict, in sorrow? If you are, do you not search out its cause? The cause is the self, its torturing desires. To struggle with these desires only creates resistance, further pain, but if you are choicelessly aware of your craving, then there comes creative understanding. It is the truth of this understanding that liberates, not your struggle against resistance to envy, anger, pride, and so on. So awareness is not an act of will for will is resistance, the effort made by the self through desire to acquire, to grow, whether positively or negatively. Be aware of acquisitiveness, passively observing its ways on different levels; you will find this rather arduous, for thought-feeling sustains itself on identification, and it is this which prevents the understanding of accumulation. Be aware; take the journey of self-discovery. Do not ask what is going to happen on this journey, which only betrays anxiety, fear, indicating your desire for security, for certainty. This desire for refuge prevents self-knowledge, self-unfoldment, and so, understanding. Be aware of this inward anxiety and directly experience it; then you will discover what this awareness reveals. But unfortunately most of you only desire to talk about the journey without undertaking it.

Tags: awareness, time

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Any change within the field of time is the same movement modified and continued.
It is we human beings who are always concerned about death - because we are not living.
Creative emptiness is not possible so long as there is the thinker who is waiting, watching, observing in order to gather experience, in order to strengthen himself.
The thinker is a fictitious entity, an unreal state. There is only thought; and the bundle of thoughts creates the 'I', the thinker.
To control thought-feeling for a greater reward, for a greater result, is to make it petty, ignorant and sorrowful.
Patience is not time. Impatience is time. Patience has no time.
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Space and time are real for the man who is yet imperfect and space is divided for him into dimensions, time into past, present and future.
You see, death is destruction, it is final; you can't argue with it, you can't say, 'Nay, wait a few days more.'
If action is conditioned by an idea, by a formula, by a concept, action then is not important, but the idea is important, and therefore, there is a conflict between action and idea.
Time is merely the outcome of our not meeting the fact without knowledge.
As long as the mind is a slave to time, there must be the fear of death, the fear and the hope of a future life, and a constant inquiry into that question.
A fundamental question cannot be answered by somebody else.
A constant battle is going on within us, wearing us out in the process.
Is there time to overcome death; or is death always in harmony with life, with love, with pain; or is death something to be put far away, one day we have to face it but not now?
Time is a movement invented by thought.
Life is not what we would like it to be; life is not permanent at all.
What I have to say concerns the hindrances which prevent in you the instantaneous recognition of truth.
Consider the working of your own mind and heart and you will see that in the pursuit of achievement and progress you are living in the past and in the future and never fully in the present.
You must realize with your heart as well as with your mind that the cause of emptiness is craving.
Man in general sees life only through the tradition of time which he bears in his mind and his heart; whereas to me life is fresh, renewing, moving, never static.
If you perceive and live completely in the very thing that you are experiencing, then this idea of change from the unessential to the essential disappears
I say that time does not bring you understanding; when you look to time as a gradual process of unfoldment you are creating a hindrance.
The very inquiry into the future shows that you are already dying.
What is living fully in the present?
The future is nothing but an escape from actuality, through an ideal to which we try to adjust the present, the immediate action.
The "I" process that seeks to perpetuate itself is nothing but accumulated craving.
The past is the background of conditioned thought-action which is dominating and controlling the present and thereby creating a predetermined future.
Where there is intense interest there is full awareness.
In your eagerness you want immediate results, you are concerned with results and not with the ways and means; thus in your haste you become a plaything of empty promises.
Through time the Timeless cannot be realized.
Do not depend on time but be arduous in the search of self-knowledge.
The chain of sorrow is broken only when the becomer ceases to become, positively or negatively.
If you saw the truth about self-expansion problems would begin to fade away.
The sense of struggle and of not being able to do something creates frustration because there is in your mind an idea of achievement.
We use the present as a passage to the future.
The present is the door to time, to the understanding of time and the present exists in what you are thinking, not in the time indicated by the clock, the time-table, or your routine.
You need not worry about things that are beyond time.
If you consider that the cause is different from the effect, then you accept the time-interval for modification.
I am going to explain presently that truth can be understood instantaneously.
Perception can take place only in the present; but if you say, 'I will do it tomorrow', the wave of confusion overtakes you, and you are then always involved in confusion.
Our problem, yours and mine, is whether we can step out of this misery instantaneously.
Freedom is eternal; it is now, not tomorrow.
Understanding is non-continuous, it is from moment to moment, unresidual.
That which is spirituality, truth, godliness, is beyond time; therefore it is not the continuity we know of as tomorrow and the future.
Is it not possible for us to step out of time - all of us here, not by some self-hypnotic process, but actually?
Transformation must be always immediate and not left to time, i.e., to tomorrow.
Transformation must be only in the Now and any postponement is not conducive to transformation, as such postponement is really avoidance of action.