Freedom from the Known

Here are my notes from Freedom from the Known by Jiddu Krishnamurti.

Chapter 1

We are secondhand people. … There is nothing new in us, nothing that we have discovered for ourselves; nothing original, pristine, clear.

That is the first thing to learn—not to seek. When you seek you are really only window-shopping.

To understand yourself is the beginning of wisdom.

Truth has no path, and that is the beauty of truth, it is living.

Nobody need tell you how to look. You just look.

In trying to conform to the ideology, you suppress yourself—whereas what is actually true is not the ideology but what you are.

The moment you really see that the question, ‘How can I change?’ sets up a new authority, you have finished with authority for ever.

We need a tremendous amount of energy and we dissipate it through fear… When there is freedom, there is energy.

When we look at ourselves with the dead authority of yesterday we will fail to understand the living movement and the beauty and quality of that movement.

To be free of all authority, of your own and that of another, is to die to everything of yesterday, so that your mind is always fresh, always young, innocent, full of vigour and passion. It is only in that state that one learns and observes.

Forget all you know about yourself; forget all you have ever thought about yourself; we are going to start as if we knew nothing.

Chapter 2

I can observe myself only in relationship because all life is relationship.

I have to study myself in actuality—as I am, not as I wish to be.

Understanding is not an intellectual process.

To understand a fact we must look at it, not run away from it.

Most of us are afraid of living as well as of dying.

You can face a fact only in the present and if you never allow it to be present because you are always escaping from it, you can never face it, and because we have cultivated a whole network of escapes we are caught in the habit of escape.

In seeing a danger as a mere idea there is conflict between the idea and action and that conflict takes away your energy. .. Seeing is acting.

The moment you give your total attention to your conditioning you will see that you are free from the past completely, that it falls away from you naturally.

Chapter 3

When you become aware of your conditioning you will understand the whole of your consciousness. Consciousness is the total field in which thought functions and relationships exist. … when you are being totally aware of the whole field of consciousness there is no friction. It is only when you divide consciousness, which is all thought, feeling and action, into different levels that there is friction.

The only way to look at yourself is totally, immediately, without time; and you can see the totality of yourself only when the mind is not fragmented. What you see in totality is the truth.

Concentration is exclusion; attention, which is total awareness, excludes nothing.

You can give your whole attention only when you care.

Such awareness is like living with a snake in the room; you watch its every movement, you are very, very sensitive to the slightest sound it makes. Such a state of attention is total energy; in such awareness the totality of yourself is revealed in an instant. … And out of this choiceless awareness perhaps the door will open and you will know what that dimension is in which there is no conflict and no time.

Chapter 4

Thought creates and sustains pleasure through desire, and gives it continuity, and therefore the natural reaction of desire to any beautiful thing is perverted by thought. Thought turns it into a memory and memory is then nourished by thinking about it over and over again.

A mind which is not crippled by memory has real freedom.

Have you ever noticed that when you respond to something totally, with all your heart, there is very little memory?

Anything that is the result of memory is old and therefore never free.

Thought is never new, for thought is the response of memory, experience, knowledge.

Living in the present is the instant perception of beauty and the great delight in it without seeking pleasure from it.

Chapter 5

This craving for position, for prestige, for power, to be recognized by society as being outstanding in some way, is a wish to dominate others, and this wish to dominate is a form of aggression. … And what is the cause of this aggressiveness? It is fear, isn’t it? … A mind that is caught in fear lives in confusion, in conflict, and therefore must be violent, distorted and aggressive. It dare not move away from its own patterns of thinking, and this breeds hypocrisy.

Thought, which is always old, because thought is the response of memory and memories are always old—thought creates, in time, the feeling that you are afraid which is not an actual fact. The actual fact is that you are well.

Thought is the response to memory, memory which has been accumulated through experience, knowledge, tradition, time. And from this background of memory we react and this reaction is thinking. So thought is essential at certain levels but when thought projects itself psychologically as the future and the past, creating fear as well as pleasure, the mind is made dull and therefore inaction is inevitable.

One of the functions of thought is to be occupied all the time with something. Most of us want to have our minds continually occupied so that we are prevented from seeing ourselves as we actually are. We are afraid to be empty. We are afraid to look at our fears.

There is only one desire; there is only desire. You desire. The objects of desire change, but desire is always the same. So perhaps in the same way there is only fear. You are afraid of all sorts of things but there is only one fear.

Can the mind perceive fear and not the different forms of fear—perceive total fear, not what you are afraid of?

To live with a living thing such as fear requires a mind and heart that are extraordinarily subtle, that have no conclusion and can therefore follow every movement of fear.

The observer is fear and when that is realized there is no longer any dissipation of energy in the effort to get rid of fear, and the time-space interval between the observer and the observed disappears. When you see that you are a part of fear, not separate from it—that you are fear—then you cannot do anything about it; then fear comes totally to an end.

Chapter 6

You say, ‘I will think about it; I will consider whether it is possible to be free from violence or not. I will try to be free.’ That is one of the most dreadful statements you can make, ‘I will try’. There is no trying, no doing your best. Either you do it or you don’t do it. You are admitting time while the house is burning.

Chapter 7

By taking some form of drug we may find enough energy temporarily to see things very clearly but we revert to our former state and therefore become dependent on that drug more and more. So all stimulation, whether of the church or of alcohol or of drugs or of the written or spoken word, will inevitably bring about dependence, and that dependence prevents us from seeing clearly for ourselves and therefore from having vital energy.

What frees the mind from dependence is seeing the whole structure and nature of stimulation and dependence and how that dependence makes the mind stupid, dull and inactive. Seeing the totality of it alone frees the mind.

Conflict will inevitably arise so long as there is a division between ‘what should be’ and ‘what is’, and any conflict is a dissipation of energy. If you put the question to yourself, ‘How am I to be free from conflict?’, you are creating another problem and hence you are increasing conflict, whereas if you just see it as a fact—see it as you would see some concrete object—clearly, directly—then you will understand essentially the truth of a life in which there is no conflict at all.

When you no longer struggle to be different from what you are—what has happened to your mind? Your mind has ceased to create the opposite and has become highly intelligent, highly sensitive, capable of immense passion, because effort is a dissipation of passion—passion which is vital energy—and you cannot do anything without passion.

Through comparison you hope to evolve, to grow, to become more intelligent, more beautiful. But will you? The fact is what you are, and by comparing you are fragmenting the fact which is a waste of energy. To see what you actually are without any comparison gives you tremendous energy to look.

I don’t want to know the peripheral conflicts of my being. What I want to know is why conflict should exist at all. … Trying to become like somebody else, or like your ideal, is one of the main causes of contradiction, confusion and conflict.

It is the ideal that creates the opposite to what is, so if you know how to be with ‘what is’, then the opposite is not necessary.

Chapter 8

Freedom comes only when you see and act, never through revolt. The seeing is the acting and such action is as instantaneous as when you see danger. Then there is no cerebration, no discussion or hesitation; the danger itself compels the act, and therefore to see is to act and to be free.

Is freedom to be achieved through a gradual process? Obviously not, because as soon as you introduce time you are enslaving yourself more and more. You cannot become free gradually. It is not a matter of time. … Freedom can only come about naturally, not through wishing, wanting, longing. Nor will you find it by creating an image of what you think it is. To come upon it the mind has to learn to look at life, which is a vast movement, without the bondage of time, for freedom lies beyond the field of consciousness.

Chapter 9

Man lives by time. Inventing the future has been his favourite game of escape.

Time is a deceiver as it doesn’t do a thing to help us bring about a change in ourselves. Time is a movement which man has divided into past, present and future, and as long as he divides it he will always be in conflict.

Problems exist only in time, that is when we meet an issue incompletely. This incomplete coming together with the issue creates the problem.

Do you know what time is? Not by the watch, not chronological time, but psychological time? It is the interval between idea and action. An idea is for self-protection obviously; it is the idea of being secure. Action is always immediate; it is not of the past or of the future; to act must always be in the present, but action is so dangerous, so uncertain, that we conform to an idea which we hope will give us a certain safety. .. There is the idea, the interval and action. And in that interval is the whole field of time. That interval is essentially thought. … Can we live so completely that there is no tomorrow for thought to think about? Because time is sorrow. … So long as there is this interval of time which has been bred by thought, there must be sorrow, there must be continuity of fear.

Time is the interval between the observer and the observed.

You cannot be frightened of the unknown because you do not know what the unknown is and so there is nothing to be frightened of. Death is a word, and it is the word, the image, that creates fear. … Hence there is a gap between you and the thing of which you are afraid. In this time-space interval there must be conflict which is fear, anxiety and self-pity.

To live completely, wholly, every day as if it were a new loveliness, there must be dying to everything of yesterday, otherwise you live mechanically, and a mechanical mind can never know what love is or what freedom is.

The man who is not frightened of life is not frightened of being completely insecure for he understands that inwardly, psychologically, there is no security. When there is no security there is an endless movement and then life and death are the same.

To die is to have a mind that is completely empty of itself, empty of its daily longings, pleasures and agonies. Death is a renewal, a mutation, in which thought does not function at all because thought is old. When there is death there is something totally new. Freedom from the known is death, and then you are living.

Chapter 10

The demand to be safe in relationship inevitably breeds sorrow and fear. This seeking for security is inviting insecurity.

When you say you love God what does it mean? It means that you love a projection of your own imagination, a projection of yourself clothed in certain forms of respectability according to what you think is noble and holy; so to say, ‘I love God’, is absolute nonsense. When you worship God you are worshipping yourself—and that is not love.

To divide anything into what should be and what is, is the most deceptive way of dealing with life.

What sex gives you momentarily is the total abandonment of yourself, then you are back again with your turmoil, so you want a repetition over and over again of that state in which there is no worry, no problem, no self.

Love is not the product of thought which is the past. Thought cannot possibly cultivate love. Love is not hedged about and caught in jealousy, for jealousy is of the past. Love is always active present.

You can see all this happening inside yourself if you watch it. You can see it fully, completely, in one glance, not take analytical time over it. You can see in a moment the whole structure and nature of this shoddy little thing called ‘me’, my tears, my family, my nation, my belief, my religion—all that ugliness, it is all inside you. When you see it with your heart, not with your mind, when you see it from the very bottom of your heart, then you have the key that will end sorrow.

Love is something that is new, fresh, alive. .. Like a flower that has perfume you can smell it or pass it by. That flower is for everybody and for the one who takes trouble to breathe it deeply and look at it with delight. Whether one is very near in the garden, or very far away, it is the same to the flower because it is full of that perfume and therefore it is sharing with everybody. … But you don’t know how to come to this extraordinary fount—so what do you do? If you don’t know what to do, you do nothing, don’t you? Absolutely nothing. Then inwardly you are completely silent. Do you understand what that means? It means that you are not seeking, not wanting, not pursuing; there is no centre at all. Then there is love.

Chapter 11

For most people love means comfort, security, a guarantee for the rest of their lives of continuous emotional satisfaction. … when you are driven into a corner to look, you realize that what you have always thought of as love is not love at all; it is a mutual gratification, a mutual exploitation.

Try it and see what actually takes place when you observe the tree with all your being, with the totality of your energy. In that intensity you will find that there is no observer at all; there is only attention. It is when there is inattention that there is the observer and the observed. When you are looking at something with complete attention there is no space for a conception, a formula or a memory.

When there is an observer who is the censor, the experiencer, the thinker, there is no beauty because beauty is something external, something the observer looks at and judges, but when there is no observer—and this demands a great deal of meditation, of enquiry—then there is beauty without the object.

There can be self-abandonment only when there is total austerity—not the austerity of the priest with its harshness, its sanctions, rules and obedience—not austerity in clothes, ideas, food and behaviour—but the austerity of being totally simple which is complete humility. Then there is no achieving, no ladder to climb; there is only the first step and the first step is the everlasting step.

When the observer is not translating what he observes into thought—in that silence there is a different quality of beauty. There is neither nature nor the observer. There is a state of mind wholly, completely, alone; it is alone—not in isolation—alone in stillness and that stillness is beauty. When you love, is there an observer? There is an observer only when love is desire and pleasure. When desire and pleasure are not associated with love, then love is intense. It is, like beauty, something totally new every day.

When I say I know you, I mean I knew you yesterday. I do not know you actually now. All I know is my image of you.

Two people who have lived together for a long time have an image of each other which prevents them from really being in relationship. .. These images create the space between you and what you observe and in that space there is conflict.

The very attention you give to a problem is the energy that solves that problem.

Every problem is related to every other problem so that if you can solve one problem completely—it does not matter what it is—you will see that you are able to meet all other problems easily and resolve them. We are talking, of course, of psychological problems.

These memories are the images we carry about with us and it is these images which meet this extraordinary thing called life and therefore there is a contradiction and hence conflict. Life is very real—life is not an abstraction—and when you meet it with images there are problems.

Is it possible to meet every issue without this space-time interval, without the gap between oneself and the thing of which one is afraid? It is possible only when the observer has no continuity, the observer who is the builder of the image, the observer who is a collection of memories and ideas, who is a bundle of abstractions.

So long as there is a centre creating space around itself there is neither love nor beauty. When there is no centre and no circumference then there is love. And when you love you are beauty.

There is no leader, there is no teacher, there is nobody to tell you what to do. You are alone in this mad brutal world.

Chapter 12

You are always translating the new in terms of the old and therefore you are everlastingly in conflict.

There is a central image put together by all the other images, and this central image, the observer, is the censor, the experiencer, the evaluator, the judge who wants to conquer or subjugate the other images or destroy them altogether. The other images are the result of judgements, opinions and conclusions by the observer, and the observer is the result of all the other images—therefore the observer is the observed. .. It is not a superior entity who becomes aware of this, it is not a higher self (the superior entity, the higher self, are merely inventions, further images); it is the awareness itself which has revealed that the observer is the observed.

Chapter 13

If thought doesn’t give continuity to feeling, feeling dies very quickly.

Ideas are always of the past and action is always the present—that is, living is always the present. We are afraid of living and therefore the past, as ideas, has become so important to us.

The thinker separates pleasure from pain. He doesn’t see that in the very demand for pleasure he is inviting pain and fear. Thought in human relationships is always demanding pleasure which it covers by different words like loyalty, helping, giving, sustaining, serving. I wonder why we want to serve? The petrol station offers good service. What do those words mean, to help, to give, to serve? What is it all about? Does a flower full of beauty, light and loveliness say, ‘I am giving, helping, serving’? It is! And because it is not trying to do anything it covers the earth.

Thought in its demand for pleasure brings its own bondage. Thought is the breeder of duality in all our relationships. .. Thought not only breeds this duality in us, this contradiction, but it also accumulates the innumerable memories we have had of pleasure and pain, and from these memories it is reborn. So thought is the past, thought is always old. .. As every challenge is met in terms of the past—a challenge being always new—our meeting of the challenge will always be totally inadequate, hence contradiction, conflict and all the misery and sorrow we are heir to. Our little brain is in conflict whatever it does.

Those who think a great deal are very materialistic because thought is matter. Thought is matter as much as the floor, the wall, the telephone, are matter. Energy functioning in a pattern becomes matter. There is energy and there is matter. That is all life is. We may think thought is not matter but it is. Thought is matter as an ideology. Where there is energy it becomes matter.

Thought is never new and therefore it can never answer any tremendous question. The old brain cannot solve the enormous problem of living.

Thought is crooked because it can invent anything and see things that are not there. It can perform the most extraordinary tricks, and therefore it cannot be depended upon.

If one wants to see a thing very clearly, one’s mind must be very quiet, without all the prejudices, the chattering, the dialogue, the images, the pictures—all that must be put aside to look.

As long as there is no thought derived from memory, experience or knowledge, which are all of the past, there is no thinker at all.

Chapter 14

We carry our burdens all the time; we never die to them, we never leave them behind. It is only when we give complete attention to a problem and solve it immediately—never carrying it over to the next day, the next minute—that there is solitude.

To find out for yourself that there is no form of security in any relationship—to realize that psychologically there is nothing permanent—gives a totally different approach to life.

Space and silence are necessary to go beyond the limitations of consciousness.

Control in any form, like suppression, produces only conflict. So control and outward discipline are not the way, nor has an undisciplined life any value.

Discipline must be without control, without suppression, without any form of fear. How is this discipline to come about? It is not discipline first and then freedom; freedom is at the very beginning, not at the end. To understand this freedom, which is the freedom from the conformity of discipline, is discipline itself. .. You don’t have to impose discipline in order to study it, but the very act of studying brings about its own discipline in which there is no suppression.

What can be described is the known, and the freedom from the known can come into being only when there is a dying every day to the known.

A living mind is a still mind, a living mind is a mind that has no centre and therefore no space and time. Such a mind is limitless and that is the only truth, that is the only reality.

Chapter 15

Anything measurable is within the limits of thought and is apt to create illusion. .. So if in seeking something fundamental, such as what is truth, pleasure is the measure, you have already projected what that experience will be and therefore it is no longer valid.

Everything affirmed contains its own opposite, and effort to overcome strengthens that against which it strives. When you demand an experience of truth or reality, that very demand is born out of your discontent with what is, and therefore the demand creates the opposite. And in the opposite there is what has been. So one must be free of this incessant demand, otherwise there will be no end to the corridor of duality. This means knowing yourself so completely that the mind is no longer seeking.

By repetition you can induce the mind to be gentle and soft but it is still a petty, shoddy, little mind.

Meditation is the understanding of the totality of life in which every form of fragmentation has ceased.

Silence put together by thought is stagnation, is dead, but the silence that comes when thought has understood its own beginning, the nature of itself, understood how all thought is never free but always old—this silence is meditation in which the meditator is entirely absent, for the mind has emptied itself of the past.

Chapter 16

I must change first; I must see what is the nature and structure of my relationship with the world—and in the very seeing is the doing.

The religious mind is a state of mind in which there is no fear and therefore no belief whatsoever but only what is—what actually is.

All desire is energy. All feeling is energy. All thought is energy. All living is energy. All life is energy. If that energy is allowed to flow without any contradiction, without any friction, without any conflict, then that energy is boundless, endless. When there is no friction there are no frontiers to energy. It is friction which gives energy limitations.

As long as there is a time interval between the observer and the observed it creates friction and therefore there is a waste of energy. That energy is gathered to its highest point when the observer is the observed, in which there is no time interval at all. Then there will be energy without motive and it will find its own channel of action because then the ‘I’ does not exist.

Gradually to uncondition the mind is not the way. Time is not the way.

Is it possible to break through this heavy conditioning of centuries immediately and not enter into another conditioning—to be free, so that the mind can be altogether new, sensitive, alive, aware, intense, capable? That is our problem. There is no other problem because when the mind is made new it can tackle any problem. That is the only question we have to ask ourselves. But we do not ask. We want to be told.

Can you with one breath, with one look, know yourself very simply as you are?

It is a brutal thing to have ideals. If you have any ideals, beliefs or principles you cannot possibly look at yourself directly.

Passion is a rather frightening thing because if you have passion you don’t know where it will take you. .. So is fear perhaps the reason why you have not got the energy of that passion to find out for yourself why this quality of love is missing in you, why there is not this flame in your heart?