Krishnamurti & the Art of Awakening

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Krishnamurti Quote of the Day

Ojai, California | 6th Public Talk 1945

We translate all experience in terms of our own conditioning, the deeper it is the more alertly aware must we be not to misread it. Deep and spiritual experiences are rare and if we have such experiences we reduce them to the petty level of our own mind and heart. If you are a Christian or a Hindu or a non-believer you accordingly translate such experiences, reducing them to the level of your own conditioning. If your mind-heart is given over to nationalism and greed, to passion and ill will, then such experiences will be used to further the slaughter of your neighbour; then you seek guidance to bomb your brother; then to worship is to destroy or torture those who are not of your country, of your faith.

Tags: conditioning, illusion

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Breaking through is not a matter of time.
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Your mind is conditioned right through; there is no part of you which is unconditioned.
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Can one see that the whole movement of this illusory memory, which appears so real, can end?
Will you please explain what you mean by awareness?
You cannot perceive if you do not ask the right question - and a right question has no answer, because it needs no answer.
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Right education is surely finding a different way of life, setting the mind free from its own conditioning.
Any movement on my part, any movement, conscious or unconscious is the movement of conditioning
Whatever movement a conditioned mind makes, whatever movement a conditioned mind follows, it is still conditioned; therefore, one asks, can it remain completely with the fact alone and nothing else?
You will say that I have given you no constructive or positive instruction.
The past is the background of conditioned thought-action which is dominating and controlling the present and thereby creating a predetermined future.
Ignorance is the unawareness of the process of conditioning, which consists of the many wants, fears, acquisitive memories, and so on.
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.
Please do not [at the beginning of these talks] expect an immediate solution for your various problems.
Desire can only recondition itself, reshape itself to a new pattern, but it will still be desire, giving birth to fear.
Memory, tradition, value imposed by society, religion, and personal experience, influence our discernment.
It is possible to be a true individual in the highest sense, only if one is not identified with any special conditioning.
When one has liberated oneself from society, group, race, family, and from all separative conditioning, and has become an undivided, integral being the problems which now torment the citizens of various particularized states will have utterly lost their significance.
Surely there is a difference between right thinking and right or conditioned thought.
You think that you are thinking.
[Experience] is always broken down to constitute a particular condition and therefore, there is never a complete action.
You then realise that you are alone and you have to be alone if you seek Truth.
With regard to every subject, you are misinformed, you are badly educated and badly conditioned; and you try to interpret life through this misinformation.
When your neighbour and yourself are each behind his own wall, how can you understand each other?
The problem at the present moment is: Can I, who am conditioned - whether by the left or by the right is irrelevant -, can I step out of that conditioning?
What is it that conditions you? What is it that limits thought? What is it that creates the pattern in which you are caught?
My thought, which is the outcome of yesterday, can respond only in terms of yesterday; and when it asks, 'how can I go beyond?', it is asking a wrong question.
Can one realize truth immediately, without preparation? I say yes - not out of some fancy of mine, not out of some illusion;
We have to find out what is the accurate, correct, right action, or right livelihood in the world of reality, and reality includes illusion
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The craving for experience is the beginning of illusion.
Freedom is to stand alone, unattached and unafraid, free in the understanding of desire which breeds illusion.
Meditation is seeing the constant touching the ever-changing movement of life.
A satisfactory explanation, or a comforting belief, can put you soothingly to sleep; but is that what you want?
For me, revolution is synonymous with religion. I do not mean by the word 'revolution' immediate economic or social change; I mean a revolution in consciousness itself.
One takes comfort, security, in any form of illusion. And man apparently needs many illusions.
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The religious mind does not depend on time for its development.
Instead of discerning the cause, you think that you can comprehend yourself through another. This looking to the example of another only leads to illusion and suffering.
Most of us do not want to die to anything, particularly to that which gives us pleasure, to the memory of things that we have known and cherished.
The power to create illusion is vastly more significant to understand than to understand reality.
That which is real will be known when the various forms of illusions have ceased.
Most minds have identified themselves with a belief, and therefore their thought is always circumscribed, limited by that belief or ideal;
What happens to a house whose walls you are merely decorating though its foundations are rotten?
If you don't understand something and merely try to modify it, your action must increase the barriers, must build up new sets of barriers;
Not having that creative intelligence which is the comprehension of environment, man begins to play within the walls of his prison, he begins to embellish and decorate the prison and he makes himself comfortable within its walls;
Intelligence is the only solution that will bring about harmony in this world of conflict, harmony between mind and heart in action.
There is no security, no comfort, but only clarity of thought which brings about the understanding of the fundamental cause of suffering, which alone will liberate man.
Our present search for reality is nothing but the search for a greater and more magnificent illusion.
The very search for reality is an illusion, because it is but an escape.
When there is true discernment there is the ecstasy of the immeasurable, which cannot be imagined or preconceived, but only experienced.
Illusion divides itself infinitely.
The continual process of awakening the mind from its own limitations is true experience.
We have many stupidities and limitations which are slowly destroying intelligence, such as ideals, beliefs, dogmas, nationalism and the possessive idea of family;
A man who would understand truth must be free from the desire for security and comfort.
In pursuit of an illusion, one often feels an exhilaration, an emotionalism; but when one examines this emotional structure, it is nothing but a limitation, the building up of walls of refuge.
Until the mind-heart is deeply, profoundly conscious of its own process, its own power to create illusions, there cannot be discernment.
To inquire into the unconditioned state when one's mind is limited is so utterly futile.
It is one of the illusions of the mind that creates the hope of something beyond its own darkness.
The conflict between the actual and the illusory must continue till either the unreal overcomes the actual or the actual breaks through all safeguards, all escapes, and begins to reveal its deep significance.
As the mind is capable of creating illusion this power must be understood before it can be wholly free from its own self-created distractions.
In opposition there is no understanding.
Just as the sensate man creates havoc in the world, the man of ideation with a framework of references also creates mischief; in fact, the latter does more harm.
Since it is extremely difficult and arduous to be aware, you spin out theories, you escape through property, through name and family, and all the rest of the absurdities which bring about destruction.
It is such a phoney superficial world, so ugly if you look behind the curtain; and we are decorating the curtain and hoping that everything will be right behind it.