Krishnamurti & the Art of Awakening

«« previous quote

next quote »

Krishnamurti Quote of the Day

Bombay, India | 4th March 1953

The past can never be put aside. There is a watching of the past as it goes by, but not occupation with the past. So the mind is free to observe and not to choose. Where there is choice in this movement of the river of memory, there is occupation, and the moment the mind is occupied. it is caught in the past: and when the mind is occupied with the past, it is incapable of seeing something real, true, new, original, uncontaminated.

A mind that is occupied with the past - the past is the whole consciousness that says, `this is good; `that is right; `this is bad; `this is mine; `this is not mine' - can never know the Real. But the mind unoccupied can receive that which is not known, which is the unknown. This is not an extraordinary state of some yogi, some saint. Just observe your own mind; how direct and simple it is. See how your mind is occupied. And the answer, with what the mind is occupied, will give you the understanding of the past, and therefore the freedom from the past.

You cannot brush the past aside. It is there.

Tags: memory, time, will

Related Quotes
There is no such thing as pure thought, or ''free'' thought
if there is constant perception of beauty without the accumulation of memories, then there is the possibility of joy everlasting.
Your experiences, your inclinations and motives, all that is the movement of the past, which is knowledge.
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?
The more you are interested in something, the more your intention to understand, the more simple, clear, free the mind is.
Our love is based on your image of me and my image of you.
Is there any thought which is not conditioned?
To look, your mind must be silent, and the very urgency of looking makes the mind silent
Experiencing without memory is one state, and experiencing with memory is another.
As long as the mind is a slave to time, there must be the fear of death, the fear and the hope of a future life, and a constant inquiry into that question.
Thought is the outcome of incomplete experience.
Action according to memory, is total inaction, and therefore there is no revolution at all.
For love to be, memory, with all its complex processes, has to come to an end.
Consistency is the sign of memory, memory that results from lack of true comprehension of experience.
Your mind has learned to be careful, to be cunning, to act as a signal, to give a warning; therefore, you cannot meet any incident fully.
How is one to live completely in the present, so that the mind is not perverted with past memories and future longing - which are also memory?
An experience really understood frees the mind from all search for experience.
The moment there is hope, longing, fear, prejudice, temperament, it conditions the mind, and that conditioning creates memory, which obscures the clarity of mind which is intelligence.
What is living fully in the present?
What is it that creates the changing of values?
Memory, is caught up in the struggle of changing values, and this battle is called progress, the evolutionary path of choice leading to truth.
As long as the mind, clouded by memory, imparts values, action must create further walls of prison;
You cannot lose memory, but by living completely in the present, in the fullness of the moment, you become conscious of all the subconscious entanglements of memory, the dormant hopes and longings which surge forward and prevent you from functioning intelligently in the present.
Let us consider what this "I", this actor, this observer, this centre of conflict is.
The beginning and the end, the "you" and the goal, are the results of this self-protective mind.
Anything that we perceive directly, understand completely, leaves no scar on the mind.
Question: You say that memory is a barrier. Why?
If your mind is aware of its own creations, then you will discern how you have established for yourself guides, values, which are but memories, as a protection against the incessant movement of life.
Memory acts as a resistance against the movement of life.
The mind has become merely a record of the various lessons of experience.
Where there is want, there must also be accumulative memories, self-protective calculations, which give to consciousness, continuity and identification.
Memory is ever conditioning the mind and creating for it an environment of values in which it becomes a prisoner.
I have tried to explain that conduct born of compulsion, whether it be the compulsion of reward or of punishment, of fear or of love, is not right conduct.
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.
What is the good of your listening to me if the obvious thing is escaping your consideration?
All habit must prevent clarity of perception and must conceal one's own integrity.
Actually we have no love; we have sentiment; we have emotionality, sensuality, sexuality
The moment you divide up life and think of its goal as something to be attained eventually in some distant future, the sweet purpose of this realisation is lost -
If you and the speaker are the result of forty thousand years or more, and we have come to this peculiar state that we are in, will we, give me another forty thousand years, change?
Breaking through is not a matter of time.
Except for the human beings, it was a new day; nothing was like yesterday.
A mind that is capable of measuring is capable also of illusion
It would be foolish - would it not? - to deny evolution.
Why have we created psychological time?
Personally, to the speaker, there is no psychological evolution;
What is the relationship of attention to inattention, and to awareness?
Meditation is seeing the constant touching the ever-changing movement of life.
Self-knowledge is only from moment to moment, and therefore there is a creative happiness from moment to moment.
Can thought be aware of its own movement? Can thought see itself, see what it is doing, both in the outer and the inner?
Will you please explain what you mean by awareness?
The religious mind does not depend on time for its development.
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.
Conflict at any level, at any depth, indicates immaturity.
There is no essential difference between the old and the young, for both are slaves to their own desires and gratifications.
Any change within the field of time is the same movement modified and continued.
It is we human beings who are always concerned about death - because we are not living.
Creative emptiness is not possible so long as there is the thinker who is waiting, watching, observing in order to gather experience, in order to strengthen himself.
The thinker is a fictitious entity, an unreal state. There is only thought; and the bundle of thoughts creates the 'I', the thinker.
To control thought-feeling for a greater reward, for a greater result, is to make it petty, ignorant and sorrowful.
Patience is not time. Impatience is time. Patience has no time.
I feel that a radical change can come only when there is no effort, when the mind is not trying to become something, not trying to be virtuous - which does not mean that the mind must be nonvirtuous.
Space and time are real for the man who is yet imperfect and space is divided for him into dimensions, time into past, present and future.
You see, death is destruction, it is final; you can't argue with it, you can't say, 'Nay, wait a few days more.'
If action is conditioned by an idea, by a formula, by a concept, action then is not important, but the idea is important, and therefore, there is a conflict between action and idea.
Time is merely the outcome of our not meeting the fact without knowledge.
As long as the mind is a slave to time, there must be the fear of death, the fear and the hope of a future life, and a constant inquiry into that question.
A fundamental question cannot be answered by somebody else.
A constant battle is going on within us, wearing us out in the process.
Is there time to overcome death; or is death always in harmony with life, with love, with pain; or is death something to be put far away, one day we have to face it but not now?
Time is a movement invented by thought.
Life is not what we would like it to be; life is not permanent at all.
What I have to say concerns the hindrances which prevent in you the instantaneous recognition of truth.
Consider the working of your own mind and heart and you will see that in the pursuit of achievement and progress you are living in the past and in the future and never fully in the present.
You must realize with your heart as well as with your mind that the cause of emptiness is craving.
Man in general sees life only through the tradition of time which he bears in his mind and his heart; whereas to me life is fresh, renewing, moving, never static.
If you perceive and live completely in the very thing that you are experiencing, then this idea of change from the unessential to the essential disappears
I say that time does not bring you understanding; when you look to time as a gradual process of unfoldment you are creating a hindrance.
The very inquiry into the future shows that you are already dying.
What is living fully in the present?
The future is nothing but an escape from actuality, through an ideal to which we try to adjust the present, the immediate action.
The "I" process that seeks to perpetuate itself is nothing but accumulated craving.
The past is the background of conditioned thought-action which is dominating and controlling the present and thereby creating a predetermined future.
Where there is intense interest there is full awareness.
In your eagerness you want immediate results, you are concerned with results and not with the ways and means; thus in your haste you become a plaything of empty promises.
Sincerity can never be simple; sincerity is the breeding ground of the will, and will cannot uncover the ways of the self.
It is only the righteous man that develops his will as a means of resistance, and a man of will can never find truth, because he is never free.
Freedom cannot be given; freedom is something that comes into being when you do not seek it;
Is silence to be cultivated, carefully nurtured and strengthened? And who is the cultivator? Is he different from the totality of your being?
We are saying: Be dead to love; it doesn't matter. Live entirely in your intellect and in your verbal manipulations, your cunning arguments.
An ambitious man, whether he be a merchant, a politician, or a so-called saint is essentially a self-contradictory human being.
Have the teachings attributed to the great teachers - Christ, Buddha, Hermes and others - any value for the attainment of the direct path to truth?
The energy which seeks truth creates its own discipline without any form of imposition; and as the river finds the sea, so that energy finds its own freedom.
You can't empty the mind, do what you will you can't empty it, because the desire to empty it is part of the activity of the self.
Is there an action which is not the result of effort, which is not the action of will?
Will is the outcome of the conflict of choice, but discernment is choiceless.
There are two kinds of will - the will that is born out of desire, want, craving, and the will that is of discernment, comprehension.
The change in will is submission to the authority of ideal and conduct. The change of will is discernment, intelligence, in which there is not the conflict of antitheses.
The will to exist, the will to become perfect, the will to succeed, the will to acquire, the will to find God, is the urge of egotism.
Will living according to a pattern, an ideal, following it ruthlessly, meditating upon it, bring you to the discovery of yourself?
Is each one aware of the mechanical process of the intellect, of the will, which destroys the spontaneous, the real?
Creative emptiness is not to be run after or sought by devious ways. It must happen. Truth is.
The desire to be satisfied creates will, which maintains itself by its own continual effort.
Being poor inwardly, psychologically, spiritually, one thinks of enriching oneself through possessions, with ever increasing complex demands and problems.
You may be able to overcome greed through the mere exertion of the will of denial, but that does not lead to understanding, to love, for such a will is the product of conflict and therefore cannot free itself from greed.
Understanding is not brought about through the mere exertion of a one-sided will but through that experimental approach which has that peculiar quality of wholeness.
All overcoming is a form of ignorance and violence; only understanding can free thought from bondage.
It is only when we are really inwardly free from greed, not merely in our outward relationship and action, that there can be peace and disinterested action.
To understand the complex causes of conflict and the desire to be free from it, requires not the mere will to be free, but constant awareness in our daily life.
The motive for cultivating the opposite matters greatly; if it is a desire to escape from the struggle and pain of envy, then its opposite becomes identical with itself and so there is no freedom from envy.