Quotes from "Total Freedom" by J Krishnamurthi

"Total Freedom" is a thought provoking LONG read. But if you can understand the thought behind it , your thoughts process will be shaken to the core. 

Image Courtesy: AI Generated (Dall-e)

Context provided: A person observing his own brain in microscope.

Few quotes from the book "Total Freedom" - Essentials of J Krishnamurthi.

As we move closer to our time, this problem is inverted. Knowledge overtakes wisdom and culture surrenders to technology.

People do not need guidance, they need awakening.

The speaker is unimportant. The perfect man has no self; the Holy man has no merit; the sage has no fame; All three being same.

No man from outside can make you free.

Individual merely becomes a tool in the hands of the group or of the expert.

The mind wants to escape into an illusion rather than face the suffering which will inevitably arise.

Find out why you are thinking in a certain way and why you are feeling in a certain manner. Don't try to alter it, don't try to analyze your thoughts and your emotions; but become conscious of why you are thinking in a particular groove and from what motive you act.

To think creatively is to bring about harmony between mind, emotion and action.

To acknowledge, to be aware of what one is, is already the beginning of wisdom.

Problems bring us together, but ideas separate us.

If I want to understand you, I must not condemn you.

Reaction only breeds opposition, and reform needs further reform.

Thought, after all, is only a result and not the source.

Comparison prevents learning and breeds fear.

A confident man is dead human being.

So thought creates and sustains pleasure through desire, and gives it continuity.

For centuries upon centuries man has been violent; religions have tried to tame him throughout the world and none of them have succeeded.

Freedom is a state of mind - Not freedom from something but a sense of freedom.

You must express everything you feel and that any form of holding back or restraint is detrimental.

What you are now is what you will be in the coming days. You cant avoid it.

One learns about oneself much more by watching than from books or from some psychologist.

To be whole, non-fragmented in action, in life, in every kind of relationship, that is the very essence of sanity.

After all, war is merely the dramatic outward expression of our inward struggle.

Seriously watch your mind in action all the time.

You can know what you think, but you don't always know why you think it.

Truth is a pathless land. Man cannot come to it through any organization, 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.

Thought is born of experience, of knowledge, which are inseparable from time. Time is the psychological enemy of man.

When man becomes aware of the movement of his own consciousness he will see the division between the thinker and the observed, the experiencer and the experience.

Unless we understand the nature and the structure of this consciousness in which we act, through which all our behavior and all our thinking takes place, it seems to me we shall always be floundering, confused, always living in constant battle within.

Can the mind be free of form, free of the ideal, of form as a cause, so that the mind is capable of going beyond itself.

All our life is based on thinking. All our actions are the result of thought, either from the deep past, or from immediate necessities according to environment.

Then enjoyment is completely for the moment, but when thought takes it over, it becomes pleasure and it becomes mechanistic.

Sensation plus thought is desire.

compassion is the highest form of intelligence.

You cannot hear what somebody else is saying if you are talking to yourself all the time.

So meditation implies a life of great order and, therefore, great virtue, morality. And it implies the understanding and the depth of beauty. And it implies the emptying of that consciousness which is you, with all your attachments, fears, hopes, despairs, the emptying of all that by observing. Then you have energy which alone can discover that which is eternal, which has no beginning and no ending.

Society is NOT created by some extraordinary events but by the extraordinary lives we lead, not only we, but also past generations.

When there is complete attention, there is no confusion. It is only when there is no attention that confusion arises.

Learn not from me! learn from yourself by observing.

To have mind that is completely centered, completely concentrated, so that there is no thought except one thought one picture, one image, one center upon which you are looking. Have a mind that is capable of observation.

Not to record flatter or insult is to have a brain that is free, not burdened by a thousand records of a thousand yesterday's.

If you take a journey into yourself, empty all the content that you have collected and go very, very deeply, then there is that vast space, that so-called emptiness, that is full of energy.

The man who pursues money, success, power , and the man who pursues so-called spirituality are both the same.

The brain now is full of information, cluttered up, there is no space in it, and one must have space. Space means energy. When there is no space, your energy is very limited.