Krishnamurti & the Art of Awakening

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Krishnamurti Quote of the Day

Santiago, Chile | 3rd Public Talk 8th September, 1935

Question: Have you attained to what you are in this life, through a series of past lives?

Krishnamurti: You are asking me if one can understand truth, life or God through accumulation of experience.

Experience has merely taught us to be cunningly self-protective, to create defences against the movement of life. In this enclosure the mind takes shelter, guarding itself more and more against the continual becoming of life, These defensive barriers divide the movement of life into the past, the present and the future. It is this division that destroys the continuity of life as a whole. From this there arises fear, which is covered over by illusions, hopes. So long as the mind-heart is caught up in this division there cannot be the understanding of truth; for then experience merely becomes a source of conflict and sorrow, whereas it should wear down these self-protective barriers and so liberate the mind and heart to the movement of life.

Tags: experience

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We must find out - if it is possible or not - whether there is a different dimension, a different approach, to life altogether.
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All one's education, all one's past experience and knowledge is a movement in becoming, both inwardly, psychologically as well as outwardly.
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The more you are interested in something, the more your intention to understand, the more simple, clear, free the mind is.
If I listen to what you are saying - which may perhaps be new, different - with a mind already entrenched in a particular ideology, in a particular experience, in a specific knowledge, can such a mind listen?
It is only the frustrated, narrow, shallow mind, the conditioned mind, that is always seeking the more.
To examine, explore, anything, there must be the quality of freedom from all your prejudices, conditioning and so on, even from your own experience;
Any experience in the present - experience being the reaction of personal desire, which is craving - will yield to you its full significance, if you are watchful, alert.
There can be no intelligence which is the discernment of right value, as long as there is imitation and conformity, as long as there is the search for power and the pursuit of gain.
An experience really understood frees the mind from all search for experience.
Self-discipline implies a mind that is tethered to a particular thought or belief or ideal, a mind that is held by a condition;
When there is complete nakedness, utter hopelessness, then in that moment of vital insecurity there is born the flame of supreme intelligence, the bliss of truth.
Experience becomes valueless to a man who merely uses it as a means of further self-defence against life.
The mechanistic view of life deprives man of the true experience of reality.
The mind has become merely a record of the various lessons of experience.
The accumulation of self-protective memories is the process of experience, and relationship is the contact between two individualized and self-protective memories, whose morality is the agreement to guard what they possess.
Experience may further condition thought or it may release it from limitations.
Experience based on any belief is limiting, however wide and large it may be.
Mere experience cannot dissolve ignorance; it can only reform it.
As long as we do not understand the motive power of [this] mechanism that creates escape, merely to consider the escapes is of little value.
Unless you understand why you depend upon sensation, upon this constant search for excitement, which becomes vulgar and degrading, you will ever find new forms of excitement, satisfaction.
These talks will be utterly useless if you do not experience as you are listening.
Will your hunger be satisfied through watching another eat?
Only experience keeps the mind-heart pliable and alert but experience is beyond and above intellectual and emotional gratification and stimulation.
The dead past darkens the ever living present.
If we would understand a problem we must set aside our desires, our accumulated experiences, our patterns of thought.
We shall know, as experience, the new form of intelligence only when the self-protective and self-expansive intelligence ceases.
Memory is the residue left in the mind of insufficient experience;
We experience through the screen of the past and therefore there is no experience at all but only a modification of experience.
[Experience] is always broken down to constitute a particular condition and therefore, there is never a complete action.
In seeing the false as false, truth is perceived.
If you experience something directly, it would be experience not based on belief;
Experience is only to the man who is asleep because he is awakened by that experience and he then says that he has had experience.
To understand a challenge, which is always new, I must also meet it anew, there must be no residue of yesterday; so, I must say adieu to yesterday.
I must give continuity to an experience, otherwise consciousness ceases.
If you have a very strong feeling of nationalism, what happens? You give it a name, the thought arises of idealism, love, 'my country; that is, you term it and thereby give it a continuity.
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Consciousness is action; and without challenge, response, without experiencing, naming or terming, and recording, which is memory, there is no action