 Foreword |
'Truth is a pathless land'. Man cannot come to it through any organisation, through any creed, through any dogma, priest or ritual, not through any philosophical knowledge or psychological technique. He has to find it through the mirror of relationship, through the understanding of the contents of his own mind, through observation and not through intellectual analysis or introspective dissection. Man has built in himself images as a fence of security - religious, political, personal. These manifest as symbols, ideas, beliefs. The burden of these images dominates man's thinking, his relationships and his daily life. These images are the causes of our problems for they divide man from man. His perception of life is shaped by the concepts already established in his mind. The content of his consciousness is his entire existence. This content is common to all humanity. The individuality is the name, the form and superficial culture he acquires from tradition and environment. The uniqueness of man does not lie in the superficial but in complete freedom from the content of his consciousness, which is common to all mankind. So he is not an individual.
Freedom is not a reaction; freedom is not a choice. It is man's pretense that because he has choice he is free. Freedom is pure observation without direction, without fear of punishment and reward. Freedom is without motive; freedom is not at the end of the evolution of man but lies in the first step of his existence. In observation one begins to discover the lack of freedom. Freedom is found in the choiceless awareness of our daily existence.
Thought is time. Thought is born of experience, of knowledge, which are inseparable from time. Time is the psychological enemy of man. Our action is based on knowledge and therefore time, so man is always a slave to the past.
When man becomes aware of the movement of his own consciousness he will see the division between the thinker and the thought, the observer and the observed, the experiencer and the experience. He will discover that this division is an illusion. Then only is there pure observation which is insight without any shadow of the past. This timeless insight brings about a deep radical mutation in the mind.
Total negation is the essence of the positive. When there is negation of all those things which are not love - desire, pleasure - then love is, with its compassion and intelligence.
- J. Krishnamurti
People commonly call their experience from day to day "reality": whether it is the physical reality of bodies and activities, the emotional reality of feelings and relationships, or the mental reality of thoughts and knowledge. It is presumed that what is "real" is what is perceived and experienced from the "point of view" of the "camera-self". People do not generally feel they have a great deal of control over the fact that they experience things from this "separate-self" perspective.
This reality -- of limited conventional experience -- is what is called "conditional reality", with a lowercase "r". This is because it is conditioned by experience and dependent on the condition of a separate "point of view". None of the elements of this so-called "reality" are native to REALITY Itself -- conditional "reality" is only an overlay, or an illusory presumption.
In fact, in reaction to the perception of being associated with a separate "self-position", everyone literally creates this entire so-called "reality", moment by moment, through a comprehensive and chronic contraction of attention and life-force at every level of existence (physical, emotional, mental, and even the root-level of presuming to be a "self").
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