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Biography of JK

J. KRISHNAMURTI - A Biography
by Pupul Jayakar

We are like the man who tries to fill water into a pail that has holes. The more water he pours in, the more it pours out, and the pail remains empty. (p.3)

Krishnaji refused to move from “what is”, the actual. He refused to discuss abstracts like God or eternity while the mind was a whirlpool of lust, hatred, and jealousy.

If you have been experimenting with self-knowing, you will notice that your thinking process has slowed down, that your mind is not restlessly wandering. Try working out each thought to its completion, carry it right through to the end. You will find that this is very difficult, for no sooner does one thought come into being than it is pursued by another thought. The mind refuses to complete a thought. It escapes from thought to thought.

Thought can only come to an end when the thinker understands himself, when he sees that the thinker and the thought are not two separate processes. That the thinker is the thought, and the thinker separates himself from thought for his self-protection and continuance. So the thinker is continually producing thought which is transforming and changing. (p.7)

Is the thinker separate from his thoughts ? Remove thought, where is the thinker ? You will find the thinker is not. So when you complete every thought to its end, good or bad - which is extremely arduous - the mind slows down. To understand the self, the self in operation has to be watched. This can only be when the mind slows down - and you can only do this by pursuing every thought to its end as it arises. You will then see that your condemnations, your desires, your jealousies will come out before a consciousness that is empty and completely silent. (p.7-8)

If you follow each thought to its completion, you will see that at the end of it there is silence. From that there is renewal. Thought that arises from this silence no longer has desire as its motive force, it emerges from a state that is not clogged with memory.

But if again the thought that so arises is not completed, it leaves a residue. Then there is no renewal and the mind is caught again in a consciousness which is memory, bound by the past, by yesterday. Each thought, then to the next, is the yesterday - that which has no reality.

The new approach is to bring time to an end. (p.8)

Take a thought, stay with it, hold it in consciousness, you will see how arduous it is to hold one thought as it is to end thought. (p.9)

For the mind to be creative, there must be stillness. A deep stillness that can only come into being when you have faced your loneliness. (P.10)

You do not condemn a man who has a disease. This is your disease. Look at it calmly and simply, with compassion. It would be stupid to condemn or justify. To condemn is another movement of the past to strengthen itself. Look at what takes place in your conscious mind. (p.10-11)

As you look at the conscious mind, slowly the unconscious will throw up its intimations - in dreams, even in the waking state of thought.

The seed has been planted, allow it to germinate - let it lie fallow for a while.

To be free from aggression is not to become weak or humble. (p.11)

“If religion perish here, it will perish everywhere and in India’s hand is laid the sacred charge of keeping alight the torch of spirit amid the fogs and storms of increasing materialism. If that torch drops from her hands, its flame will be trampled out by the feet of hurrying multitudes, eager for worldly goods; and India, bereft of spirituality, will have no future, but will pass on into the darkness, as Greece and Rome have passed.” (Annie Besant) (P.23)

I maintain that Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. That is my point of view, and I adhere to that absolutely and unconditionally. Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized.

Truth cannot be brought down, rather the individual must make the effort to ascend to it. (p.78)

I am concerning myself with only one essential thing: to set man free. I desire to free him from all cages, from all fears, and not to found religions, new sects, nor to establish new theories and new philosophies.

As I have said, I have only one purpose: to make man free, to urge him towards freedom; to help him to break away from all limitations, for that alone will give him eternal happiness, will give him the unconditioned realization of the self.

Because I am free, unconditioned, whole - not the part, not the relative, but the whole Truth that is Eternal - I desire those, who seek to understand me, to be free, not to follow me, not to make out of me a cage which will become a religion, a sect. Rather should they be free from all fears - from the fear of religion, from the fear of salvation, from the fear of spirituality, from the fear of love, from the fear of death, from the fear of life itself. As an artist paints a picture because he takes delight in that painting, because it is his self-expression, his glory, his well-being, so I do this and not because I want anything from anyone. (P.79)

You are all depending for your spirituality on someone else, for your happiness on someone else, for your enlightenment on someone else.

My purpose is to make men unconditionally free, for I maintain that the only spirituality is the incorruptibility of the self which is Eternal, is the harmony between reason and love. This is the absolute, unconditioned Truth which is Life itself. I want therefore to set man free, rejoicing as the bird in the clear sky, unburdened, independent, ecstatic in that freedom. (p.80)

Truth is in everyone; it is not far, it is not near; it is eternally there.

You have the idea that only certain people hold the key to the Kingdom of Happiness. No one holds it. No one has the authority to hold that key. That key is your own self, and in the development and the purification and in the incorruptibility of that self alone is the Kingdom of Eternity.

But those who really desire to understand, who are looking to find that which is Eternal, without beginning and without an end, will walk together with a greater intensity, will be a danger to everything that is unessential, to unrealities, to shadows. And they will concentrate, they will become the flame, because they understand. Such a body we must create, and that is my purpose. (p-81)

My teaching is neither occult nor mystic for I hold both as limitations placed on man in his search for Truth. (p.83)

There will be always death as long as our understanding is limited by personal, egotistical outlook. (p.85)

Two flowers or things can be similar, but not the same. (p.104)

The Real is near, you do not have to seek. Truth is in ‘what is’, and that is the beauty of it. (p.110)

You cannot mix god and mammon. Reality is not for the man who has his hand in his neighbor’s pocket - who exploits and fills his heart with the riches of the earth. (p.112)

To perceive the truth, there must be a focusing of attention. (p.113)

Right action is only possible when the mind is silent and there is a seeing of ‘what is’. Action that arises from this seeing is free of motive, of the past, free of thought and cause. (p.128)

Where there is love there is protection. Hatred permits evil to enter.

I have asked myself what happens when there is no movement of the brain. It ceases completely. Only when it has to manifest it comes. It ceases to exist when it is not there. Has air any place, has light any place ? Air is enclosed and so it is there. Break the enclosure, it is everywhere.

To love is to be chaste, pure, incorruptible. (p.142)

See yourself in the pit and you will be out of it. Next time you will be watchful and see that you do not fall back into the pit. (p.142)

We feel that the ‘I’ is permanent, because all other thoughts come and go. If the thinker is permanent, then thought can be changed, controlled, transformed by the thinker. But is not the ‘I’ the result of thought ? Your mind separates the ‘I’ from thought because it cannot bear impermanency. Thought cannot move from the known to the unknown. To free the mind from the known is all the mind can do. To find out what lies beyond words, words must cease. I can only use words to get to the door. (p.146-147)

Begin where you are. Read every word, every phrase, every paragraph of the mind, as it operates through thought.

The desire to avoid pain and seek happiness (is the common factor amongst all people).

Freedom from fear can only arise when man perceives the movement of fear within himself. The seeing of it is the quenching of it. (p.147)

A reformer is concerned with effects and their rearrangements. Only a revolutionary goes to the root, to the cause in which the end is contained. (p.148)

Politics ages the mind, it is destructive to the flowering of the mind.

Anandamai Ma, the most famous of the then-living deified “Mothers”, with a very large following in North India, came to meet Krishnaji. They met in the garden, as the Mother never entered the home of a householder. She did not speak English, and spoke through a translator. She had a radiant, smiling presence. She said that she had seen a photograph of Krishnaji many years before and knew that he was very great. She asked him, “Why do you deny gurus ? You who are the Guru of Gurus”.

He (Krishnaji) replied, “People use the guru as a crutch”.

“People come to listen to you in thousands,” she said. “That means you are a guru.” He held her hand gently and did not answer. (p.149)

Man is, because he is related; without relationship, man is not. To understand life you have to understand yourself in action, in relationship to people, property and ideas.

Most of us are not aware of our relationship to nature. When we see a tree we see it with a utilitarian view - how to get to its shade, how to use its wood. Similarly, we treat the earth and its products. There is no love of the earth, only a usage of earth. If we loved the earth there would be frugality of the things of the earth. We have lost a sense of tenderness, of sensitivity. Only in the renewal of that can we understand what is relationship. That sensitivity does not come by hanging a few pictures or by putting flowers in your hair. It only comes when the utilitarian attitude is put aside. (p.154)

Stand alone. If you have acted out of the depths of self-knowing because you feel in yourself that what you have done is right, then throw yourself on life. Its water will hold you, carry you, and sustain you. But if you have been influenced, then God help you. The guru has disappeared. (p.159)

The mind is cause and effect, it is caught in time, it has a beginning and an end. Mind can never experience that which is without cause, the timeless, that which has no beginning and no end.

In silence what is there to experience ? Silence can only experience silence. (p.164)

Consciousness is the thought of the moment before, or the moment after. Thought is always of the moment or many moments before. Thought is the result of a stimulus.

We live in cause and effect, constantly rearranging them. We reject our background, our past of yesterday and of thousands of years, without being even aware that the past we reject is an aspect that lies deep within. And so the background remains undiscovered and always in conflict, in contradiction.

Do we see that consciousness is never in ‘the now’, that it is always a projection, a backward or forward movement ? That it is never in the present.

Understanding of the ‘now’ can never be through thought, through consciousness.

The mind cannot understand the ‘now’ which is the new. It is a fact, like the wall is a fact.

I see you. I hear your voice. Mind as thought is not there and yet sensory perception continues, is present. Only identification has ceased. (p.165)

First comes the layer of everyday activity - eating, going to the office, drinking, meeting people, the conditioned habits that operate automatically. It is obviously a static state that conforms to a pattern.

When one’s routine is disturbed, this surface layer ceases for an instant and what is below reveals itself. For convenience we will call this the second layer (of course, since consciousness is non-spatial, it cannot be accurate to use terms indicating layer or level). The thinking that emerges from this layer is still conditioned memory, but it is not as automatic as the surface layer. It is more active, more elastic; it is more nuances. Here thought need not conform so completely to pattern, it has more vitality. The next layer is conditioned by like, dislike, choosing, judging, identifying. Here there is the sense of the ego established and in focus.

Next come the unconscious memories of the individual and the collective, the tendencies, the forces, the urges, the racial instincts; this is the whole network of desire, the matrix of desire. There is an extraordinary movement here. The ego is still functioning - ego as desire moving in its patterns of cause and effect. The ego as desire that continues. The ego with its unconscious tendencies that reincarnate.

Seeing the fact of consciousness - not the word, not the theory, but the fact of it - is ending not possible ? Again, whatever I do to move toward the other is of effort and so destroys it. I can do nothing except be indifferent to it. And concern myself with the ego, with what I am, and my problems. (p.165-167)

The fools enter the kingdom, not the cautious. (p.170)

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