Kinfonet Quote of the Day: Man is almost suffocated in the prison of false values, of which he is unconscious.

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Krishnamurti Quote of the Day

Buenos Aires, Argentina | 1st Public Talk 12th July, 1935

Man is almost suffocated in the prison of false values, of which he is unconscious. Through deep questioning and suffering he becomes aware of that which he has built about himself, and not through mere acceptance of what another says; if he merely accepted, he would fall into another prison, into another cage. If you individually and intelligently inquired into the system to which each one has contributed, then, through the understanding born of suffering, you would know for yourself the true manner of action.

What are these values, seasoned in tradition and illusion, based on? If you discern deeply, you will see that these values and ideals are based on fear, which is the outcome of individual search for security. in search of this security, we have divided life as material and spiritual, economic and religious. Now such an artificial division is entirely false, for life is an integrated whole. We have created this artificial distinction; and in understanding the cause of this separation between the spiritual and material, we shall know the integrated action of life as a whole.

Tags: belief, fear, values

Related Quotes: Religion, surely, is the uncovering of reality. Religion is not belief.; As long as mind is caught up in belief, there is no understanding, there is no freedom.; Truth is truth, one, alone; it has no sides, no paths; all paths do not lead to truth.; Freedom cannot be given; freedom is something that comes into being when you do not seek it;; Every habit, repetition, rituals strengthened by belief and dogma, sensory responses, can be and are refined, but the alert awareness, sensitivity, is quite another matter.; A satisfactory explanation, or a comforting belief, can put you soothingly to sleep; but is that what you want?; That is the nature of belief: taking for granted, accepting something to be true when your own enquiry, your own vitality, energy, has not found out, you believe.; Belief implies accepting as true what we don't know.; Do you agree with the teachings of Buddha?; By studying what we consider important in life, those things which we have accepted - the values, the standards, the beliefs, the innumerable things that we hold - by examining them, perhaps we shall find out the ways of our own thinking and thereby know ourselves.; All men, everywhere in the world have a belief, it does not matter what it is, and that belief guides their mind, whereas life should guide and not belief.; You have to believe in God only when there is no understanding, and you cannot have understanding by searching for it.; Where there is a search for comfort, security, there must be a pattern, a mould, in which we take shelter, and therefore we begin to preconceive what God must be, and what truth must be.; As beliefs separate people, condition people, keep them apart, so possessiveness, expressing itself as class-consciousness and growing into nationality, keeps people apart.; I hold that to have a belief is a limitation.; To really think, the mind must not be tethered to a belief.; To me, truth has no aspects; it is one, and that which is complete, whole, has no aspects.; To be a theist or an atheist, to me, are both absurd.; Belief is merely an escape from the present conflict.; Most minds have identified themselves with a belief, and therefore their thought is always circumscribed, limited by that belief or ideal;; Self-discipline implies a mind that is tethered to a particular thought or belief or ideal, a mind that is held by a condition;; Both the believer and the non-believer in God and immortality are wrong, because the mind cannot comprehend reality until it is completely free of all illusions.; Should not traditions, beliefs, dogmas be questioned?; Your traditions and your beliefs are shelters under which you take cover in time of trouble.; When the mind is stagnant, drugged to sleep by beliefs, crippled by limitations, and is awakened by the movement of life, that awakening we call suffering.; To understand and awaken [this] harmonious intelligence, one must begin, not with assumptions and authoritative assertions, but negatively.; When people say that they believe in reincarnation, in immortality, in God, these are but emotional cravings which to them become objectified concepts and facts.; If you have beliefs, you are translating and moulding your experiences according to them, and so you are continuously forcing and limiting thought-emotion, and these limitations become the "I" process.; There are three conditions of mind: "I know", "I believe", and "I do not know."; We begin to discern what is true only when all want has ceased, for want creates beliefs, ideals, hopes, which are mere escapes.; For a man who is truly uncertain, there is hope;; Fundamentally, vicarious experience cannot have integral value.; To inquire into the unconditioned state when one's mind is limited is so utterly futile.; Surely that is another form of conditioning. How do you know that there is the real?; Are you conscious with your whole being that you are protecting yourself in some form or other through belief, acquisitions, virtue, ambition?; It is one of the illusions of the mind that creates the hope of something beyond its own darkness.; Both the religious and the materialistic mind are conditioned by their own prejudices which prevent the integral comprehension of truth and the communion with it.; Belief and non-belief are definite hindrances to the understanding of reality;; Through attachment the inevitable darkness of fear is waiting; Most of us want to be occupied; otherwise we shall feel lost, otherwise we do not know what to do, we will be lonely, we will be confronted with what we actually are; It is the fear of being nothing that compels us to accumulate;; From my point of view, religions with all their intermediaries, their ceremonies, their priests, destroy creative understanding and pervert judgment.; 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.; Followers are those who want power through knowledge, through enlightenment; The 'me' is created by thought and the 'me' says: "I am independent of thought".; As long as you think time and thought are necessary, in the psychological world, in the world of the self, in the world of psyche, in the world of inside the skin, then you will be perpetually in fear.; The relationship between what one is and what one desires to be causes fear.; Though we have theories, speculations, and there are certain observable facts, death is still the unknown.; If what I say is destructive to any particular organization or society, then either that society is false or what I say is false; and it is for you to consider, to judge and to act without compromise.; There cannot be human, vital relationships, or living joyously in the plenitude of life in the present - which to me is the only eternity - so long as mind and heart are crippled through fear;; The very inquiry into the future shows that you are already dying.; Patriotism is a disease, and when you begin to realize, become aware that it is a disease, then you will see how your mind is reacting to that disease.; Where there is fear there must be discipline, compulsion, influence, domination, the search for power which the mind glorifies as virtue and as divine.; You have created disciplines, codes and authorities, and your life is moulded, controlled and shaped by compulsion of various forms and degrees.; As in a circus the animals are trained to function for the amusement of spectators, so the individual through fear seeks out these spiritual trainers whom he calls priests and swamis, who are the defenders of spurious spirituality and the inanities of religion.; When we say we seek out or cultivate a new value, it is but the overcoming of that in which the mind is already caught up, which is its opposite.; The illusion of economic security is shown throughout the world by these depressions, crises, wars, calamities, and chaos.; Question: I do not care what happens after death, but I am afraid of dying. Must I fight this fear, and how can I overcome it?; Illusion divides itself infinitely.; In order to escape from fear, you create faith.; To discuss and intellectually discover what is intelligence would be, I feel, a waste of time and energy, for that would not lift the burden of ignorance and illusion.; Fear is so subtle. so swift, so cunning, that it hides itself in many places.; What happens when you seek security, certainty?; What really awakens intelligence is action without the fear of not adjusting oneself to a standard or an ideal.; One can wholly eliminate fear, it is not a fundamental part of life.; The will to survive, the will to be satisfied, the will to continue - this is the very root cause of fear.; Please do not [at the beginning of these talks] expect an immediate solution for your various problems.; Intellect merely guides fear, controls it, but can never destroy it, for intellect is the very cause of fear.; When there is discontentment, sorrow, the intellect mechanically comes forward with solutions, explanations, tentative suggestions, which gradually crystallize and become habits of thought.; There is only one fundamental problem, which expresses itself in many different ways.; Desire cannot exist by itself, it must always be in relation to something.; Is not the mind, as we know it, an instrument developed for survival, for satisfaction, for self-protection, for resistance, and therefore the instrument of fear?; Do not think by merely wishing for peace, you will have peace, when in your daily life of relationship you are aggressive, acquisitive, seeking psychological security here or in the hereafter.; Is your realization of truth permanent and present all the time, or are there dark times when you again face the bondage of fear and desire?; All life is action - speaking, walking, thinking, acting from knowledge, responsibility, friendship, the whole of our existence is action, whether that action is directed by a value, or by an experience, or sanctioned by society or culture and religion.; Should not traditions, beliefs, dogmas be questioned?