You know, it is good to hide your brilliance under a bushel, to be anonymous, to love what you are doing and not to show off. It is good to be kind without a name. That does not make you famous, it does not cause your photograph to appear in the newspapers. Politicians do not come to your door. You are just a creative human being living anonymously, and in that there is richness and great beauty.
J. Krishnamurti, by way of whiskey river & sharanam. I love this. Thank you both and K. as well.

(via sharanam)

When you say, “I am hurt,” what is this “I” that is hurt? You say, “You have hurt me” - by your word, by a gesture, by discourtesy, and so on and so on - what is hurt? Is it not the image that you have built about yourself? Please, do look at it. That image is one of the factors that society, education, and environment have built in you. “You” are that picture, that image, the name, the form, the characteristics, the idiosyncrasies, and so on. All that is you, the picture, the image which you are. And that image has been hurt. You have a conclusion about yourself, that you are this or that, and when that conclusion is disturbed you are hurt. So can you live without a conclusion, without a picture, without an image about yourself? As long as you have an image about yourself, you are everlastingly hurt. You may resist it, you may build a wall around yourself, but when there is a wall around yourself, when you withdraw, there is a division, and where there is a division there must be conflict - as with the Arab and the Jew, the Hindu and the Muslim, the communist and the noncommunist. Where there is a division, it is the law that there must be conflict.
J. Krishnamurti (Ojai, California - April 3, 1976). Another gem from predatorywaspobserver.
The man goes to the office where he is brutal and ambitious, greedy; then he comes home and he says, “Darling, how lovely you are.” So there is a contradiction in our life and, therefore, our life is a constant battle and, therefore, there is no relationship. To have real human relationship is to have no image whatsoever, no picture, no conclusion. And it is quite complex, because you have memories. Can you be free of memories of yesterday’s incidents? All that is implied. Then what is the relationship between two human beings who have no images? You will find out if you have no image. That may be love.
J. Krishnamurti (Ojai, California - April 3, 1976). Great! Thank you, predatorywaspobserver.
We are the world. The world is you and me, the world is not separate from you and me. We have created this world - the world of violence, the world of wars, the world of religious divisions, sex, anxieties, the utter lack of communication with each other, with no sense of compassion, consideration for another. Wherever one goes in any country throughout the world, human beings, that is, you and another, suffer; we are anxious, we are uncertain, we don’t know what is going to happen. Everything has become uncertain. Right through the world as human beings we are in sorrow, fear, anxiety, violence, uncertain of everything, insecure. There is a common relationship between us all. We are the world essentially, basically, fundamentally. The world is you, and you are the world. Realizing that fundamentally, deeply, not romantically, not intellectually but actually, then we see that our problem is a global problem. It is not my problem or your particular problem, it is a human problem.
J. Krishnamurti (Ojai, California - April 3, 1976) Than you, predatorywaspobserver.
Self-knowledge is not the product of will; self-knowledge comes into being through awareness of the moment by moment responses to the movement of life.
J. Krishnamurti (Thank you, sharanam & Science & Nonduality)
Death is extraordinarily like life when we know how to live. You cannot live without dying. You cannot live if you do not die psychologically every minute. This is not an intellectual paradox. To live completely, wholly, everyday as if it were a new loveliness, there must be a dying to everything of yesterday, otherwise you live mechanically, and a mechanical mind can never know what love is or what freedom is.
J. Krishnamurti, Freedom from the Known. Thank you, commondense,  universoul & sharanam)

(via sharanam)

Thought has created this sense of loneliness, this emptiness, because it is limited, fragmentary, divided and when it realizes this, loneliness is not, therefore there is freedom from attachment. I have done nothing; I have watched the attachment, what is implied in it, greed, fear, loneliness, all that and by tracing it, observing it, not analyzing it, but just looking, looking and looking, there is the discovery that thought has done all this. Thought, because it is fragmentary, has created this attachment. When it realizes this, attachment ceases. There is no effort made at all. For, the moment there is effort conflict is back again.
J. Krishnamurti, A dialogue with oneself: On Love & Attachment (via sharanam)

(via sharanam)

A true and simple life

Simple life does not consist in the mere possession of a few things but in the freedom from possession and non-possession, in the indifference to things that comes with deep understanding. Merely to renounce things in order to reach greater happiness, greater joy that is promised, is to seek reward which limits thought and prevents it from flowering and discovering reality.

To control thought-feeling for a greater reward, for a greater result, is to make it petty, ignorant and sorrowful. Simplicity of life comes with inner richness, with inward freedom from craving, with freedom from acquisitiveness, from addiction, from distraction. From this simple life there comes that necessary one-pointedness which is not the outcome of self-enclosing concentration but of extensional awareness and meditative understanding.

Simple life is not the result of outward circumstances; contentment with little comes with the riches of inward understanding. If you depend on circumstances to make you satisfied with life then you will create misery and chaos, for then you are a plaything of environment, and it is only when circumstances are transcended through understanding that there is order and clarity. To be constantly aware of the process of acquisitiveness, of addiction, of distraction, brings freedom from them and so there is a true and simple life.

~ J. Krishnamurti from The Collected Works Volume III Ojai 8th Public Talk 2nd July, 1944. Courtesy of The Beauty We Love

A Constant Renewal

“Now if you see how it is still the action of thought and is therefore based on fear, on imagination, on the past, that is the field of the known.  That is, I am attached to the field of the known, with all its varieties, changes, its activities, and what I demand is comfort.  Because I have found comfort in the past,  I have lived within the field of the known; that is my territory , I know its borders, the frontiers. 

So I ask myself: my life has been the past; I live in the past; I act in the past; that is my life.  Listen to this!  My life, living in the past is a dead life.  You understand?  My mind, which lives in the past , is a dead mind. 

I see this as something enormously real.  Therefore the mind, realizing that, actually dies to the past; it will use the past, but it has lost its grip;  the past has lost its values, grip, its, vitality.  So the mind has its own energy, which is not derived from the past.  Therefore living is dying - you understand?

Therefore living is love, which is dying.  Because if there is no attachment, then there is love.  If there is no attachment to the past - the past has its value, which can be used, which must be used as knowledge - then my living is a constant renewal, is a constant movement in the field of the unknown in which there is learning, moving.”

J. Krishnamurti from a talk in Saanen, July 27th, 1972. Courtesy of The Beauty We Love.

I have suddenly become conscious of the fact that I have an image of myself - an image which has been built up through my vanity, through my pleasure, pain, conclusions. It is an image put together by thought, by experience, by life, by my relationships, by my activities, sorrow, disgrace - everything has put together in me this image, and I have become aware of it. Then what happens? Am I choicelessly aware of it as a fact - as a fact which I can’t alter? Do you understand what I mean? It is a fact that the sun rises and sets, and I can’t do a thing about it. Similarly, this image is a fact, and I see it as a fact without saying, ‘I want to get rid of it,’ or ‘I want to change it,’ or ‘I must do something about it.’
J. Krishnamurti , Talks in Europe 1965 (Authentic Report) Paris-Saanen (Thank you,  sharanam)

(via sharanam)