Question: Listening to you, one feels that you have read a great deal, and are also directly aware of reality. If this is so, then why do you condemn the acquisition of knowledge?

Krishnamurti: I will tell you why. It is a journey that must be taken alone, and there can be no journeying alone if your companion is knowledge. If you have read the Gita, the Upanishads, and modern psychology; if you have gathered information about yourself from the experts, and about what they say you should strive after - such knowledge is an impediment. The treasure is not in books, but buried in your own mind, and the mind alone can discover this treasure. To have self-knowledge is to know the ways of your mind, to be aware of its subtleties, with all their implications; and for that you don't have to read a single book. As a matter of fact, I have not read any of these things. Perhaps as a boy, or a young man, I casually looked at some of the sacred books, but I have never studied them. I do not want to study them, they are tiresome, because the treasure is somewhere else. The treasure is not in the books, nor in your guru, it is in yourself; and the key to it is the understanding of your own mind. You must understand your mind, not according to Patanjali, or according to some psychologist who is clever at explaining things, but by watching yourself, by observing how your mind works, not only the conscious mind, but the deep layers of the unconscious as well. If you watch your mind, play with it, look at it when it is spontaneous, free, it will reveal to you untold treasures; and then you are beyond all the books. But that again requires a great deal of attention, vigour, an intensity of pursuit - not the dilettantism of lazy explanations. So the mind must be free from knowledge; because a mind that is occupied with knowledge can never discover what is.