THOUGHT IS movement between “what is” and “what should be.
There is a transcendent spontaneity of life, a ‘creative Reality’, as Krishnamurti calls it, which reveals itself as immanent only when the perceiver’s mind is in a state of ‘alert passivity’, of ‘choiceless awareness’. Judgement and comparison commit us irrevocably to duality. Only choice-less awareness can lead to non-duality, to the reconciliation of opposites in a total understanding and a total love. Ama et fac quod vis. If you love, you may do what you will.
Life is really very beautiful, it is not this ugly thing that we have made of it; and you can appreciate its richness, its depth, its extraordinary loveliness only when you revolt against everything – against organized religion, against tradition, against the present rotten society – so that you as a human being find out for yourself what is true.
So, the questioner wants to know why it is that he cannot go beyond all these superficial wrangles of the mind. For the simple reason that, consciously or unconsciously, the mind is always seeking something, and that very search brings violence, competition, the sense of utter dissatisfaction. It is only when the mind is completely still that there is a possibility of touching the deep waters.
Ideas always breed enmity, confusion, conflict.
A fact can never be denied. Opinion about fact can be denied.
By learning I do not mean the mere cultivation of memory or the accumulation of knowledge, but the capacity to think clearly and sanely without illusion, to start from facts and not from beliefs and ideals. There is no learning if thought originates from conclusions.
That is the difficulty, because most of us are incapable of being passively aware, letting the problem tell the story without our interpreting it. We do not know how to look at a problem dispassionately. We are not capable of it, unfortunately, because we want a result from the problem, we want an answer, we are looking to an end; or we try to translate the problem according to our pleasure or pain; or we have an answer already on how to deal with the problem.
If, with all its power and superiority, one cannot think for oneself, there can be no peace in the world.
You may build with great care a marvellous society, using the infinite knowledge science has given us. But so long as the psychological strife and struggle and battle are not understood and the psychologica, overtones and currents are not overcome, the structure of society, however marvellously built, is bound to crash, as has happened over and over again.
It begins at school and you go through life repeating what others have said. You are therefore secondhand human beings. How can such a secondhand human being find out something that is original, that is true? It is very important to understand what conditioning is and to go into this very deeply; as you look at it you have the energy to break down all those conditionings that hold the mind.
The now has greater significance than the tomorrow. In the now is all time, and to understand the now is to be free of time.
Freedom from the desire for an answer is essential to the under standing of a problem. This freedom gives the ease of full attention; the mind is not distracted by any secondary issues.
Now, what makes the mind petty? Surely, the mind is narrow, limited, shallow, petty, as long as it is acquisitive. It may give up worldly things and become acquisitive in the pursuit of knowledge, wisdom, but it is still petty because in acquiring, it develops the will to achieve, to gain, and this very will to achieve constitutes pettiness.
To go beyond, there must be the cessation of this process. But if you say, “How am I to go beyond?” then the “how” becomes the method, the practice, which is still progress, therefore there is no going beyond but only the refinement of consciousness in sorrow. I hope you are getting this.
In attention there is no focusing, no choice; there is complete awareness without any interpretation. And if we can listen so attentively, completely, to what is being said, then that very attention brings about the miracle of change within the mind itself.
Thought in human relationships is always demanding pleasure which it covers by different words like loyalty, helping, giving, sustaining, serving.
Ideas are not truth; and truth is something that must be experienced directly, from moment to moment.
I think we do not sufficiently realize the seriousness of this. Anything really true must be totally individual – not in the sense of self-centeredness, which is very limiting and which in itself is evil, but individual in the sense that each one of us must experience for himself, uninfluenced, something which is not the outcome of any self-centered interest or drive.
How to be simple, then, is the problem; because that simplicity makes one more and more sensitive. A sensitive mind, a sensitive heart, is essential, for then it is capable of quick perception, quick reception.