It's an interesting test to read Krishnamurti, and in the past it's been a test I've failed. When I first came into contact with his work, when I stumbled onto the book On Fear many years ago, my experience involved more non-comprehension than enlightenment. His talks and his writing seemed to wander, they seemed caught in the weeds of semantic discussions and endless clarifications of what words and concepts mean. But then, once in a while, I would find some piece of tremendous wisdom and insight.
It's almost like I had to pay my dues first, pay careful attention despite the seeming wandering. If you don't read patiently, carefully, and take your time, you miss the insights. Thus I find I get tremendous value out of Krishnamurti when I read patiently and wait. Most of his themes and insights arrive indirectly: they don't lend themselves to the world of declarative knowledge, verbal forms and "the piling up of words."
What Krishnamurti seeks to teach is something rarely taught in modern institutionalized education: he is trying to help us learn "how to live in this monstrous world," how to live without fear, without resistance to what is, how to live with acceptance, but also with an integrity and a moral compass, as well as a rigorous method of careful volitional thinking about what actions you choose to take--and even what thoughts you choose to have.
In fact, it's fascinating to see the contempt Krishnamurti has for standard, regurgitated classroom "knowledge" when he tells students things like "Find out, don't be told." and "No. You haven't understood my question. Do listen to it before you answer." He also uses the phrase "Go into it" to cue students to think more deeply, to not resolve things right away with a too-quick and too-facile answer, to adopt a mindset of patient, epistemic humility: "You are too quick in answering, go into it." "Don't say no or yes, go into it." "Go a little deeper. What does it mean?"
I know for my part, after my more than two decades of my own institutionalized education, I "knew" so many answers that I too had lost the ability to let questions sit undisturbed and unresolved in my mind. I lost the ability to rotate those questions around, to wait, to look at them in new or unusual ways. I've spent many years since attempting to undo the damage.
The high school students portrayed in conversation with Krishnamurti throughout this book are incredibly fortunate: they have a level of meta-awareness and a knowledge of ego and self far beyond anything I could have possibly had at their age.
Finally, Beginnings of Learning is available free online at Krishnamurti.org, along with a tremendous collection of his other works, talks and videos. Enjoy!
[As always, a friendly warning: don't bother to read any further! The rest of this post contains notes, quotes, thoughts and reactions to the text--these are just to help me remember and integrate the ideas in the book. Life is short: go read your own books and write your own book reviews!]
Notes:
Table of Contents:
Notes/quotes:
Part I:
Chapter 1: Problems of living at Brockwood where there is no authority. Difference between sentiment and affection. The feeling of being 'at home.'
1) "The world makes you what it wants you to be: a cunning animal."
2) Discussing the idea of misunderstanding someone and being hurt by that misunderstanding, and then clearing up that misunderstanding; on how a level of affection is needed between the two people to be able to do this.
3) On the difference between being sentimental and having affection. Sentiment as a type of affectation, a feeling we have because we're supposed to have it: "yes this tree is beautiful because I'm supposed to think so." "You see, idealism is sentimentality and therefore it breeds hypocrisy..."
4) A discussion of what "home" means' discussion of applying agency towards your home, not just some place where you feel comfortable or safe; the home is where you self-actualize, and you make a home because of how you feel about it, therefore a home can be any place, as long as you exercise your volition into making it so.
Chapter 2: State of the world. Need to educate ourselves. Implications of learning. Learning about cooperation. Many and varied activities. Skill and action: Yoga.
5) There's an interesting discussion early in this chapter that scratches at how the media (and all the tragedies that are pumped through it at us) kind of narcotizes us by reflecting all the evils and sufferings of the world back at us, while we live within it and even contribute to it--and yet we remain participants in a system that leads to these things. The question is, then, what is your relationship to the confusion of this world? "The world is that way, deceptive... If you're not properly educated you'll just slip into it. So what do you think is education? Is it to help you to fit into the mechanism of the present order...?"
6) On cooperation and what does it mean, exactly, when the needs or wishes people cooperating with each other happen to diverge. What do you do?
7) [Interesting section here on learning: the direct subject here is yoga, but the context here is on listening to the teacher and doing what he shows you, versus having an idea of yourself doing it or having an idea in your head of how it should be done and then doing that. The latter is a form of resistance, a type of epistemic resistance, like the idea that your way is somehow special, and likewise you are special; Krishamurti and the students are getting at this subject indirectly. It's interesting to think about.] "The moment you have an idea you are already resisting."
Chapter 3: What does it mean to live together intelligently? Freedom and being open to learn. Co-operation. Orderliness.
8) Interesting passages here on epistemic humility and intelligence; on how "knowing" already what freedom is is actually unintelligent, and it stops you from learning; when we label something with a word or take our own internal concept for something it can actually block understanding; you have to let go of things and ideas you think you know and come at them again with beginner's mind.
9) On the idea of living with other people, cooperating and following rules, yet still retaining your freedom.
Chapter 4: Education to face the world. The problem of sex. Affection.
10) Here Krishnamurti uses the topic of having a sexual relationship to get the students to think beyond their own minds, to think about their reputations, the school's reputation, the people who run the school, the concerns of their parents etc., the device here is to get the students to step outside themselves.
11) On coexisting with your urges, not repressing them nor resisting them, but neither yielding excessively to them.
12) On seeking affection when you have a lack of it, comparing this to the metaphor of a spring of water bubbling over all the time "giving, pouring out." An analogy for a person who has deep affection for everything and everyone and is therefore not lacking in affection. "A distorted mind says, 'That is what I want and I'm going after it.' Which means that it has no concern for the whole, but only for its own little demands--it has not been watching the whole process."
Chapter 5: Order, discipline and learning. Space and freedom. Need for security, confidence: the feeling of home. Learning to live together without authority. Responsibility for each other and the home. About meditation.
13) Interesting discussion here on freedom, on the idea of how we're influenced, that we're not necessarily consisting of a specific nature all to our own, but that there are influences on us like our family, our culture, etc., thus we cannot really understand what freedom means.
14) "You can only be free when you have understood how deeply you are conditioned and are free of that conditioning." It's almost as if the freedom can only be known in retrospect, or it involves a certain level of epistemic humility (for example realizing how ignorant you were about being programmed or conditioned in the past) in order to have that freedom.
15) On using your own agency to produce your own security rather than imposing it on others like the school headmaster; the school has a collective responsibility to produce a trust-filled and secure environment. On how the brain works best in a secure environment because it's not in conflict, it functions "beautifully, without friction" in a safe environment.
16) What makes a "home": a certain yielding, a certain elimination of resistance: "I have been traveling, talking, for the last fifty years. I go from country to country, from a room to a different room, different food, different climate. Wherever I am that little room is my home. You understand? I'm at home, I feel completely safe because I have no resistance."
17) A brief passage here at the end of this chapter on meditation: on looking and observing your surroundings but then looking inward after you've finished looking. "But first you must look. Then you can sit quietly." Then, on observing your thoughts without correcting them, on watching the mind. "Then you will see that there is a watcher and the watched... Now can you watch without the watcher?... It is the watcher that says, 'This is good and that is bad', 'This I like and that I don't like,' or 'I wish she hadn't said this or that', 'I wish I had more food.'" .. "An extraordinary thing takes place.. your body becomes very, very intelligent."
Chapter 6: Three kinds of energy. Conflict and wastage of energy. Action without conflict. The early morning meeting.
18) Energy of a healthy body, physical energy and then energy derived through tension and conflict.
19) On releasing conflict, "can you do something contrary to your desire and yet be in a state in which conflict doesn't exist"; on acting on facts rather than bringing your "emotional circus into it" with your preferences and your prejudices. Instead look at the facts and do what's necessary, and lose the energy wastage. "You know what it is to be pliable? Have you ever watched a river?"
Chapter 7: On sitting quietly with a still mind.
20) On forcing your mind to "do something" versus having a quiet mind and doing something naturally; on deeply understanding effort, control, suppression; on watching your thoughts, not forcing yourself to be still, rather being attentive to your movements and your thoughts, watching them with attention.
Chapter 8: The sense of beauty.
21) On thinking something is beautiful because you have been "told" or because there's some aspect of your egoic self caught up in your opinion; how these problems are obstacles to beauty.
22) "You see that tree--do you say it is beautiful? Why do you say it is beautiful, who has told you? ...if you have an image either about yourself, or an artist, or a great man, then that image is going to dictate what is beautiful... So the image you have prevents the sense of beauty."
23) 'So, not to have images at all! You follow? The image is the 'me'. When there is no 'me' there is the sense of beauty... You are just reacting to the image you have about what is beautiful."
Chapter 9: What is it that wants to fulfill? What is 'myself'? What in me gets hurt? Walls of resistance. Learning about attention, awareness and sensitivity. Learning about image-making.
24) "What is the thing behind it, the 'me' the 'self' that says, 'I must express myself, I must fulfill'? On understanding that this is the ego, and it is a reaction; on the idea of finding out if there was a way which isn't influenced by the 'me,' the ego, and this only happens if you understand that this me "is always projecting itself, thrusting itself forward."
25) "When I said there is a 'me', I've already stabilized it."
26) "Why do we have such strong opinions about such trivial things?" On not wanting to be hurt, and then considering what is the thing that is going to be hurt (the me/ego), what is it that fears being hurt, etc.
27) On being sensitive to a situation both objectively and inwardly, paying attention to the external situation but also your internal reaction to it and the arising of your ego itself. "That's the only way to function. You are very quick then, adjusting..."
28) On the central act of resistance, when we react to things under the reaction of our false self, essentially saying "I must protect myself."
29) On being asleep or being awake: having awareness of the situation. "Habit means conditioning, a mechanical repetition, which is obviously not being sensitive. Now are you aware of what you're doing?... Are you aware of the implications of all that's going on? If you're not, you become a hypocrite."
30) "...most of us don't know how to give complete attention to the moment. All that we remember is that we've been hurt and don't want to be hurt again... See what happens when you've got these hurts, they respond much more quickly than your reason does." "If you understand the whole mechanism of hurt, you will never be hurt again."
31) "...there is no such thing as 'I'--it's just a series of memories. Actually, there is no 'I' except your memories of being hurt. But you have said, 'That is the "I" about which I'm going to learn.' What is there to learn about the 'I'?--it's just a bundle of memories, there's nothing to learn about it." [In other words, don't bother to navel gaze, rehash the past, etc.]
32) Questioner: "You have to find a way of living where you are not building an image of yourself all the time."
Krishnamurti: "First of all, you have built an image; the next step is to prevent adding to it."
33) "Do you see the two problems? I have memories of being hurt, which create a wall of resistance; and I see that prevents every form of relationship. The other is, can the mind not make any more images at all?... I want to be free of the past hurts, because I see logically, with reason, with sanity, that as the mind keeps those hurts it has no contact with anything--I am afraid all the time... I've said this is a very serious matter, far more important than taking a degree. You pay a great deal to get educated, but you neglect this. Without this, life has no meaning and you don't even pay a cent to find out."
Chapter 10: What do you think about all day? Watching thoughts. Identifying. Habits of thought and behavior. The beginning and ending of thought.
34) Good insight in here on the difference between regurgitated, declarative knowledge and practice-based, procedural knowledge about the self: "Are you quoting what I said? Be quite clear that you don't say anything that you don't know yourself, don't say it if you haven't thought it out and worked it out, otherwise you get verbal and theoretical, so be careful."
35) What is identification: on identification with the self, not with the thing itself. On the idea of being frightened of being alone and therefore identifying with someone else or with a group, this is the core of it: it makes me feel safe. Identifying yourself with another person or with a belief is both to reduce uncertainty, give you protection, help you feel less alone, help you feel less confused, etc.
36) Once you've identified with, say, an ideology or a group, you must protect that: if it is threatened you go back again to your insecurity. "Look: I have identified myself with an ideology. I must protect it because it is my security and I resist anybody who threatens that, in a sense of having a contradictory ideology. So where I have identified myself with an ideology there must be resistance, I build a wall round what I have identified myself with."
37) On habit as a sort of lure or honeypot for the ego: on identification itself (egoic or mind-identification) as a habit: because you're insecure and also unaware that you're operating by habit. Why are we so often in a state of habit? It's easier; we are lazy; we avoid loneliness and a fear of the unknown (the egoic mind feels more secure in habit); it provides a certain order; the mind itself may be threatened if you cause yourself to think in a new way or change yourself somehow, etc.
38) Interesting exchange here thinking of love in the context of habit of thought:
"Questioner: what do you mean by love, Sir?
Krishnamurti: I don't know. I will tell you what it is not, and when that is not in you, the other is. Listen to this: where the known is, love is not."
[One way perhaps to interpret this is that we often love the things that we "expect" in the person we claim to love, but when that person changes or evolves or grows, our impression of them (to which we are mind-identified) is therefore threatened. We are actually in love with ourselves, in our image that we have in our minds of that person! Thus we have to love the whole person across their linear lives, growing, changing, becoming different, perhaps even if they leave us because of their changes, and love them without experiencing any threat to any given mind-identified image of them, which isn't actually them.]
Chapter 11: Opposition and conformity. Can we educate ourselves to meet life fully? The limitations of personal like and dislike. To be watchful.
39) On the idea that conformity and opposition are pretty much the same thing: one is mindless agreement, the other is mindless opposition, and both are comfort-seeking behaviors.
40) "You are going to be educated--I don't know why, but you are going to be--and then what? Lead a comfortable life? Not that one is against comfort, but if one is seeking comfort in life it becomes rather shoddy, rather shallow, and you have to conform to a tremendous extent to the structure of the culture in which you live. ...and the mind wanting something much more than that, they are discontented, running from one thing to another."
41) On learning according to others (following other thinkers like Freud or Jung), or learning according to existing patterns (like following a given established religion), all of these are pre-arranged patterns, but none of them is you learning about yourself. "Find out, don't be told."
42) On watching yourself (here, meaning paying attention to who is teaching you, what they're teaching you, how you're being conditioned, etc.), but also on watching the danger of self-centeredness from watching yourself, "a tremendous danger."
Chapter 12: Learning about fear. Be awake to your conditioning. Dependence and standing alone. The state of creativity. To be sensitive. Awareness of beauty.
43) "Do you know what fear does? It makes you aggressive, violent. Or, you withdraw and become slightly neurotic, odd, peculiar; you live in a darkness of your own, resisting any kind of relationship with anybody, building a wall around yourself, with this nagging fear always going on. So if you don't solve these fears now, when you are young, fresh, have plenty of vitality and energy, later on you won't be able to, it will become much more difficult." [Yet another example of how you lose neuroplasticity as you get older, your habits--mental, emotional or otherwise--get harder to break, it gets harder and harder to change, etc.]
44) "That is one of our fears, isn't it? One of the great fears in our life is about conforming. If you conform, then you become like the rest--and that is much easier. But if you don't conform then the whole world is against you. And this is very serious, unless you have the intelligence to withstand the world; otherwise you will be destroyed."
45) "Find out, don't agree, find out if you are dependent. And then find out why you depend and see what are the implications of that dependence--fear, loneliness, lack of comfort... And not only on people, on drink, tobacco, chatter, talking endlessly about nothing."
46) On the idea of creativity that is based on a motive (or has a motive behind it) is not actually creativity.
Chapter 13: Can one live sanely in this insane world? Is education at Brockwood bringing about an intelligence that will function in this world? Can one learn to look objectively and see the whole? The demand for security.
47) "How to live in this world without belonging to it, that is the question. How to live in this insanity and yet be sane?"
48) "I never said it's wrong to earn a livelihood; one has to earn a livelihood. I earn my livelihood by talking to people in many places. I have been doing it for fifty years and I am doing what I love to do. What I am doing is really what I think is right, is true; it is the way of living for me--not imposed on me by somebody--and that is my way of earning a livelihood."
49) "People don't see the whole, they are pursuing their little desires, their little pleasures, their little vanities and brutalities, but if they saw the whole and understood their place in it, their relationship to the whole would be totally different... If you don't see the whole and merely pursue your particular instinct or tendency or desire, that is the essence of mediocrity, that's what is happening in the world."
50) On seeking security; what is security; what do we seek it for, etc.: "If you see you depend on somebody for your security then you begin to question, then you begin to learn. You begin to learn what is implied in dependency, in attachment. Insecurity, fear and pleasure are involved. When there is no security you feel lost, you feel lonely; and when you feel lonely you escape, through drink, women or whatever you do. You act neurotically because you haven't really solved this problem."
51) "Questioner: To earn this money I depend on someone.
Krishnamurti: You depend on society, on your patron, on your employer. He chases you around, he is brutal, and you put up with it because you depend on him. That is what is happening right around the world. Please look at it first, as you look at a map...
Questioner: So knowing all that I won't marry. I see the dependency, all the trouble that will come.
Krishnamurti: You are not learning. Don't say you won't marry, see what the problem is first." [What he gets at here is that you have to discover the self-sufficiency in yourself but also accept certain dependencies among which we sometimes have to accept in order to live in the real world.]
52) More on the map metaphor: "You cannot observe this map if you have the slightest distortion in your mind, if your mind is distorted by prejudice, by fear. To look at this map is to look without prejudice. So learn in meditation what it is to be free of prejudice; that is part of meditation, not just sitting cross-legged in some place. It makes you tremendously responsible, not only for yourself and your relationship but for everything else, the garden, the trees, the people around you--everything becomes tremendously important."
Chapter 14: Violence in the world. The understanding of disorder and the roots of violence. Real work is 'to understand whether you live in disorder'.
53) On violence in the literal sense, but also obedience and conformity as possible forms of violence, at times.
54) "There is nothing you have to do. If you are forced by circumstances, that is violence. To belong to a sect, to a group, to a country, that is really violence because it separates people. I see this happening--am I doing this? To find out if I am doing it, that is real work, that is what I mean by work, not merely gardening, cooking and studying; that is part of it, but the real work is to see, to understand whether you live in disorder. You may have tremendous order outwardly, put on clean clothes, wash and be punctual at all meals, but the real order is inside."
Chapter 15: What is the function of a teacher? Three streams of work. The function of Brockwood.
55) Is it possible to teach without conditioning the mind? "Is it possible to teach students and ourselves to free the mind from knowledge and yet use knowledge without causing the mind to function mechanically?"
56) One of the teachers says: "What I want to know is, what kind of education, what approach do we have to the child that would make him not want to run down the corridor any longer." [This, in a nutshell, is what institutionalized education is: basically getting the children to sit still, or in Krishnamurti's terms, conditioning the enthusiasm, the desire to run, in fact conditioning life, out of these children.]
57) "Now there are three things I'm involved in: academic learning, telling [the student] what to do, and at the same time I say to him, 'Look, if you get the insight everything falls into place.' I have all the three streams harmoniously running together."
58) "Don't say it's difficult, don't say anything, but first see the thing. If you say it is very difficult, it is finished." [On judging, on egoic interference, deciding in advance what something is, etc.]
Part II: Conversations with Parents and Teachers
59) 1: A man talks about his son and daughter being "in revolt;" they are against war but yet strangely violent, against conformity but yet conforming in their own way with their friends with "slackness and promiscuity" and "caught up in this maelstrom of chaos." Others join in, how their children see the hypocrisy of the parents' generation, how they despise the leaders that we vote for, "...they don't want to be like us at all. My son called me a hypocrite to my face and as he was telling a fact, I couldn't do anything about it."
60) "Their argument is very simple: 'you knew what you wanted to do--get more money and a better position and look where you have brought the world. We certainly don't want that.'"
61) "What have you to offer to the young? What have you to give them--your worries, your problems, your absurd achievements?"
62) "The young start out by revolting against conformity and end up conforming in a most absurd way just as thoroughly."
63) [Interesting metaphor here on horizontal movement, moving from thing to thing, from possession to possession, or pleasure to pleasure, kind of a shallow, petty level of living without depth.] "To a mind that is really enquiring, not merely verbally examining or intellectually putting together hypotheses, to the enquiring mind the horizontal movement has very little significance. The only revolution is within oneself. It is not horizontal but vertical--down and up. The inward movement in oneself is never horizontal and because it is inward it has immeasurable depth... Your gods, your preachers, your leaders are concerned with the superficial, with better arrangements, better systems and organizations which are necessary for efficiency; but that is not the total answer."
64) "Sorrow cannot be solved, cannot be understood when you are running with tremendous energy along the superficial. Unless you solve this through self-knowing you will have revolt after revolt, reforms which need further reformation, and the endless antagonism of man against man will go on. Self-knowing is the beginning of wisdom and it does not lie in books, in churches or in the piling up of words."
65) 2: Discussion here of India: all of the contrasts, all of the poverty and filth, as well as the extraordinary beauty. "It is an incredible land with its incredible sorrow." This section develops into quite a mournful essay about modernity; Krishnamurti talks about a conversation he had with a man with several children, worrying about how to educate them when he knows that institutionalized schooling will cripple the minds of children and take away their youthful vigor, replacing it with a hardness; a system that produces people who can be easily fooled, or worse, chewed up, by the world. "When I see this in my children I am so depressed I often want to commit suicide. Can I do anything at all? They don't want my love. They want a circus, as I did when I was a boy, and the same pattern is repeated."
66) 3: Another essay about discussing education with parents, in this case with a group of "respectable" middle class Hindus. "Their bellies were full: they were Hindus to the core, steeped in their Petty traditions and superficially worried about their children." [This is also quite an interesting essay: these "respectable" Hindus are actually quite passive, they live in a specialized world and want to pass much of their own responsibility off to "experts" to take care of things for them. Again, this is a great metaphor for modernity.]
67) Interesting comment here on respect and respectability: "Respect was ingrained in them, not only for their superiors in their professions, but also for religious people. That is part of this hideous respectability. Respect invariably shows disrespect, utter disregard for those who are below them."
68) [Again, provocative passage here: parents want something "safe" and "respectable" for their children, it's a type of agency problem]: "You have very carefully conditioned your children, though perhaps not deeply understanding the issue. Not only you but the society, the environment, the culture in which they have been brought up, both economic and social, have nurtured them, shaped them to a particular pattern. They are going to go through the mill of so-called education. If they are lucky they will get a job through your manipulations and settle down in their little homes with wives and husbands equally conditioned, to lead a monotonous, dull life. But after all that is what you want--a safe position, marriage so that they will not be promiscuous, with religion as an ornament. Most parents want this, don't they?--a safe place in society, a society they know in their hearts is corrupt. This is what you want and you have created schools and universities to bring this about... You are concerned with one fragment and you will not consider the many fragments of human existence. You don't really want to be concerned do you?"
69) Their response to Krishnamurti's questions here is quite telling. "We haven't the time, the inclination or the interest. We can't join you in this. I might like to but I just haven't the time."
70) 4: On competitiveness and comparison among students. "Why do you compare? What is the need of measurement? Is it an escape from yourself, from your own shallowness, emptiness and insufficiency? This attachment to measurement of what you have been and what you will be divides life and thereby all conflict begins."
71) 5: On meditation, how it can be a trap or even be self-hypnotic.
72) "Any sense of importance of any action of the self must lead inevitably to confusion and sorrow."
73) A discussion here with some rebel-type young people who want to burn down the system, or drop out of the system; they are trying to find something "real" but they're full of slogans like "God is a bourgeois concept." Also a comment from a young man who openly uses drugs, and Krishnamurti tells him "If you really see the danger of it, not verbally or romantically, the very seeing is the action that will put an end to it. But you must see it, not theorize about seeing." [This is one of Krishnamurti's central messages here in this work: you have to get humble, really see your situation, de-identify your ego from it, and if you can do all these things usually the answer is right there for you.]
74) "May we all come back another day, Sir?" The rebellious kids tone it down and want to keep learning.
75) 6: This is a discussion with a utopianist who, by his own words, is violent by nature, who wants to burn down the system and let something new grow in its place. Krishnamurti responds that he will bring about a dictatorship in place of what he hopes to be his utopia, it will end up in a tyrannical bureaucracy. "Surely this is not what you want."
76) And then a discussion of meditation: it is not an escape from what is, it is the understanding of it and going beyond it.
77) [More of Krishnamurti's central message here]: "You don't have to become an activist, which again is a fragmentation of life. If we are really concerned with total action, not a fragmentary one, then total action comes with total attention, which is to see actually 'what is' both inwardly and outwardly. And that very seeing is the doing."
78) "But doesn't meditation bring about extraordinary experiences?"
"Extraordinary experiences are totally irrelevant and dangerous. The mind being surfeited with experience wants wider, greater, more transcendent experience. The more is the enemy of the good. The good flowers only in the understanding of 'what is', not in wanting more or greater experiences. In meditation there are certain things that do happen, for which there are no words; and if you talk about them, then they are not the real."
79) 7: "The search for truth is such a false affair, as though by searching for it, asking others the way to it, reading about it in books, trying this or that system, you will be able to find it. To find it as if it were something there, fixed, motionless, and all you need to do is recognize it, grasp it, and say you have found it."
80) A discussion here about becoming emotionally hurt: "Why do we get hurt? Is it because we are sensitive, or is it because we have an image of ourselves which must be protected, which we feel is important for a very existence, an image without which we feel lost, confused? There are these two things: the image and sensitivity."
81) On the memory of the hurt and the prevention of future hurts. On building walls, stronger and higher walls to protect yourself, but this also cuts you off from others, a paradox. On using attentiveness to prevent hurt.
82) 8: [This mini-chapter begins with a very beautiful, very direct explanation of meditation, thought, and the self]: "Meditation is never the control of the body. There is no actual division between the organism and the mind. The brain, the nervous system and the thing we call the mind are all one, indivisible. It is the natural act of meditation that brings about the harmonious movement of the whole. To divide the body from the mind and to control the body with intellectual decisions is to bring about contradiction, from which arise various forms of struggle, conflict and resistance.
"Every decision to control only breeds resistance, even the determination to be aware. Meditation is the understanding of the division brought about by decision. Freedom is not the act of decision but the act of perception. The seeing is the doing. It is not a determination to see and then to act. After all, will is desire with all its contradictions. When one desire assumes authority over another, that desire becomes will. In this there is inevitable division. And meditation is the understanding of desire, not the overcoming of one desire by another. Desire is the movement of sensation, which becomes pleasure and fear. This is sustained by the constant dwelling of thought upon one or the other. Meditation really is a complete emptying of the mind. Then there is only the functioning of the body; there is only the activity of the organism and nothing else; then thought functions without identification as the me and the not-me. Thought is mechanical, as is the organism. What creates conflict is thought identifying itself with one of its parts which becomes the me, the self and the various divisions in that self. There is no need for the self at any time. There is nothing but the body and freedom of the mind can happen only when thought is not breeding the me. There is no self to understand but only the thought that creates the self. When there is only the organism without the self, perception, both visual and non-visual, can never be distorted. There is only seeing 'what is' and that very perception goes beyond what is. The emptying of the mind is not an activity of thought or an intellectual process. The continuous seeing of what is without any kind of distortion naturally empties the mind of all thought and yet that very mind can use thought when it is necessary. Thought is mechanical and meditation is not."
83) On the nature of obedience: on obeying one's parents, or obeying society, or obeying your own urges: "In obedience there was always fear, and fear darkens the mind. So instead of asking that question, find out if you can talk to your parents rationally and also find out what it means to hear. Can you hear without any fear what they say? And can you also listen to your own urges and desires without fear of going wrong? If you can listen quietly without fear you will find out for yourself whether you should obey, not only your parents, but every form of authority." On obedience as like a tiny corner of a huge field, whereas learning and intelligence are the whole vast field: but your teachers and your parents tend to be concerned with the corner of the field dedicated to obedience, and while you may revolt against obedience to these things, this revolt still is "concerned only with their piece of the corner."
To Read:
Krishnamurti: The Urgency of Change
Krishnamurti: The Only Revolution
Krishnamurti: The First and Last Freedom