Freedom From The Known - Jiddu Krishnamurti Flashcards
“Order imposed from without must always breed disorder”
- Jiddu Krishnamurti -
“If I were foolish enough to give you a system and if you were foolish enough to follow it, you would merely be copying, imitating, conforming, accepting, and when you do that you have setup in yourself the authority of another and hence there is conflict between you and that authority.
You feel you must do such and such a thing because you have been told to do it and yet you are incapable of doing it. You have your own particular inclinations, tendencies and pressures which conflict with the system you think you ought to follow and therefore there is a contradiction.
So you will lead a double life between the ideology of the system and the actuality of your daily existence. In trying to conform to the ideology, you suppress yourself - whereas what is actually true is not the ideology but what you are.
If you try to study yourself according to another you will always remain a second hand human being.
…Order imposed from without must always breed disorder”
Jiddu Krishnamurti
Freedom From The Known -Page.12
“It is the struggle to repeat and perpetuate pleasure which turns it into pain”
Jiddu Krishnamurti
“The continuity of an experience that has given delight for a second is sustained by thought.
(But) thought is never new, for thought is the response of memory, experience, knowledge. (So) thought, because it is old, makes this thing which you have looked at with delight and felt tremendously for the moment, old.
…so if you look at all things without allowing pleasure to creep in …if you can look at it without wanting the experience to be repeated, then there will be no pain, no fear, and therefore tremendous joy.
…The very demand for the repetition of pleasure brings about pain, because it is not the same as it was yesterday. You struggle to achieve the same delight, not only to your aesthetic sense but the same inward quality of mind, and you are hurt and disappointed because it is denied to you.”
Jiddu Krishnamurti
Freedom from the Known - Page. 32/33/34
“You can penetrate deeply only if your mind is as sharp as a needle and as strong as a diamond”
Jiddu Krishnamurti
“You have to learn how to look at anger. To learn, to discover, something fundamental you must have the capacity to go deeply. If you have a blunt instrument, a dull instrument, you cannot go deeply.
So what we are doing is sharpening the instrument, which is the mind - the mind which has been made dull by all this justifying and condemning. You can penetrate deeply only if your mind is as sharp as a needle and as strong as a diamond.
Its no good just sitting back and asking, “how am I supposed to get such a mind?”. You have to want it as you want your next meal, and to have it you must see that what makes your mind dull and stupid is this sense of invulnerability which has built walls round itself and which is part of this condemnation and justification.
If the mind can be rid of that, then you can look, study, penetrate, and perhaps comes to a state that is totally aware of the whole problem”
JidduKrishnamurti
Freedom from the Known - Page. 53/54
“Freedom is a state of Mind”
Jiddu Krishnamurti
“Freedom is a state of mind - not freedom “from” something but a sense of freedom, a freedom to doubt and question everything and therefore so intense, active and vigorous that is throws away every form of dependence, slavery, conformity and acceptance.
Such freedom implies being completely alone.There is a difference between isolation and, cutting oneself off, and aloneness, solitude.
To be alone you must die to the past.
In solitude.. you will begin to understand the necessity of living with yourself as you are, not as you think you should be or as you have been.
See if you can look at yourself without any tremor, any false modesty, any fear, any justification or condemnation -
just live with yourself as you actually are.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
Freedom from the Known - Page. 69/70
“Time is the interval between the observer and the observed”
Jiddu Krishnamurti
“Man lives by time. Inventing the future has been his favorite game of escape.
We think that changes in ourselves can come about in time, that order in ourselves can be built up little by little, added to day by day. But time doesn’t bring order or peace, so we must stop thinking in terms of gradualness. This means that there is no tomorrow for us to be peaceful in.
We have to be orderly on the instant.
Time is a movement which man has divided into past, present and future, and as long as he divides it he will always be in conflict.
Time is the interval between the observer and the observed.
To discover that nothing is permanent is of tremendous importance for only then is the mind free, then you can look, and in that there is great joy.
To live completely, wholly, everyday as if it were a new lovliness, there must be dying to everything of yesterday, otherwise you live mechanically and a mechanical mind can never know what love is or what freedom is.
To die is to have a mind that is completely empty of itself, empty of its daily longings, pleasures and agonies.
Freedom from the known is death, and then you are living”
Jiddu Krishnamurti
Freedom from the known - Page. 72 - 78
“The observer is the observed”
Jiddu Krishnamurti
“Is the observer different from (the images) he observes? Isn’t he just another image? The observer is also the image, only he has separated himself and observes.
This observer who has come into being through various other images thinks himself permanent himself and the images he has created there is a division, a time interval.
Awareness of all of this, which is real meditation, has revealed that there is a central image put together by all the other images, and the central image, the observer, is the censor, the experiencer, the evaluator, the judge who wants to conquer or subjugate the other images or destroy them altogether.
The other images are the result of judgments, opinions and conclusions by the observer, and the observer is the result of all those images -
therefore the observer is the observed.
…it is the awareness itself (not some superior entity or higher self) which has revealed that the observer is the observed.
…when the observer realises that the thing about which he is acting is himself, then there is no conflict between himself and the image.
…you will then find that there is an awareness that has become tremendously alive and the mind extraordinarily sensitive and highly intelligent”
JidduKrishnamurti
Freedom from the Known - Page. 98 - 102
“It is only when we give complete attention to a problem and solve it immediately … that there is solitude”
Jiddu Krishnamurti
“There is a rather nice story of two monks walking from one village to another and they come upon a young girl sitting on the bank of a river, crying.
One of the monks goes up to her and says, “Sister, what are you crying about?” She says “you see that house over there across the river? I came over this morning early and had no trouble wading across but now the river has swollen and I can’t get back. There is no boat”
“oh”, says the monk, “that is no problem at all” and he picks her up and carries her across the river and leaves her on the other side.
And the two monks go on together. After a couple of hours, the other monk says “Brother, we have taken a vow never to touch a woman. What you have done is a terrible sin, didn’t you have pleasure, a great sensation, in touching a woman?” And the other monk replies,
“I left her behind 2 hours ago. You are still carrying her, aren’t you?”
That is what we do. We carry our burdens all the time; we never die to them, we never leave them behind. It is only when we give complete attention to a problem and solve it immediately - never carrying it over to the next day, the next minute - that there is solitude.
Then, even if we live in a crowded house or are in a bus, we have solitude. And that solitude indicates a fresh mind, an innocent mind”
Jiddu Krishnamurti
Freedom From the Known -Page - 109/110
“You must know yourself so completely that the mind is no longer seeking”
Jiddu Krishnamurti
“Demand is born out of duality; “I am unhappy and I must be happy”. In that very demand that I must be happy is unhappiness. When one makes an effort to be good, in that very goodness is its opposite (evil).
Everything affirmed contains its own opposite, and effort to overcome strengthens that against which it strives.
When you demand an experience of truth or reality, that very demand is born out of your discontent with what is and therefore the demand creates the opposite. And in the opposite there is what has been.
So one must be free of this incessant demand, otherwise there will be no end to the corridor of duality.
This means knowing yourself so completely that the mind is no longer seeking”
Jiddu Krishnamurti”
Freedom from the Known -Page.118
“Meditation is one of the greatest arts in life - perhaps the greatest, and one cannot possibly learn it from anybody”
Jiddu Krishnamurti
“Meditation demands an astonishingly alert mind; meditation is the understanding of the totality in which every form of fragmentation has ceased.
Meditation is not control of thought for when thought is controlled it breeds conflict in the mind, but when you understand the structure and origin of thought …then thought will not interfere.
That very understanding of the structure of thinking is its own discipline which is meditation.
Meditation is to be aware of every thought and of every feeling, never to say it is right or wrong but just to watch it and move with it. In that watching you begin to understand the whole movement of thought and feeling.
And out of this awareness comes silience. Silence put together by thought is stagnation, is dead, but the silence that comes when thought has understood its own beginning, the nature of itself, understood how all thought is never free but always old - this silence is meditation in which the meditator is entirely absent, for the mind has emptied itself of the past.
Meditation is one of the greatest arts in life - perhaps the greatest, and one cannot possibly learn it from anybody.
It has no technique and therefore no authority. To understand this movement of thought and feeling there can be no condemnation in observing it. To observe in such a way is the discipline and that kind of discipline is fluid, free, not the discipline of conformity”
Jiddu Krishnamurti
Freedom from the Known -Page 120 - 122
