Insights of Jiddu Krishnamurti

Consciousness

What is consciousness? Is it in how you think, believe, act, react?

Does that make up your consciousness totally?

Your brain is the result of evolution. Not merely your brain alone but the brains of all people.

You go through many of the same things as everyone else. You experience fear of physical pain, fear of death, fear of what’s beyond death, anxiety in existence, psychological pain and rejection, shame about who you are. You have experienced all the psychological turmoil that goes with being human. All of this content makes up your consciousness, which is always divisive, always fragmented. But there is another way. Is it possible for the content of your consciousness to be dissolved?

Breaking the Pattern

People try to break the pattern of their thinking through different forms of drugs or sex or discipline. They may cling to an ideology, teacher, philosophy, religion, and so on. People have tried countless methods to escape from the content of their consciousness.

Is it possible for you to break through your conditioned mind?

Time will not solve this problem. There is no psychological tomorrow. There is only now.

When you begin to no longer see time as a factor, the pattern begins to crack. There is not any future notion of being awakened, no procrastination anymore. While time may be a factor of growth in the biological-technological-scientific sense, the nature of psychological time is different.

Awakening lies in perception. In perception, there already is action.

There is no need for any future time. There is no gradual progress.

Psychologically, one is already there.

Limits of Your Brain

Your brain is limited. Limited from knowledge, from specialization, from the pursuit of a discipline, from belonging to a group. Self-interest — desiring to be happy, to be successful, to gain a title, to be favored, to make a lot of money — limits the brain to that interest. Under the camouflage of peace, love, justice and so on, espoused from the knowledgeable professor or religious guru, there is self-interest. It may exist subtly, but it is there. The immense capacity of the brain is reduced through self-interest, often hidden behind an egoic illusion. Look at these illusions in their many forms: in your neurotic thoughts and rationalizations, in your allegiances to political parties and religions, in the awards and titles that you chase after.

You should investigate the depths of what you truly desire. Are you hiding behind anything?

What do you really want?

Identify with Humanity

You share the same consciousness with everyone. From all parts of the world, no matter who you are, you will experience fear, anxiety, disappointment, pleasure, pain… It doesn’t matter what nationality, religion, race, or political party that you identify with. It doesn’t matter how much you are trained by society. You are like the rest of humanity. When you separate and ignore your relationship with the world, you will create conflict. When you take responsibility for being connected to all of humanity, there will be no limits to your love.

Make No Comparisons

You are told to compare yourself to others. In your family, you fight with your siblings for the affection of your parents. In school, you try to get better marks than the other students. You are always being compared to others and then you learn to compare in turn.

When you constantly compare yourself to find out who is brighter, who is stronger, who is more athletic, and so on, you bring yourself down. You feel inferior. When you think you’re better than someone else, you feel temporarily superior.

In school, your teachers grade you to measure your progress. They give you information so that you can pass examinations. What would happen if you didn’t take those examinations, if you stopped being measured and judged? What would happen if you stopped comparing yourself to others? Have you learned anything then?

In your comparisons, you create conflict. You create a sense of “otherness” in your competition. You’ve been conditioned to seek the pleasure of superiority, to avoid the pain of inferiority, trying to cling onto what is impermanent. It is all an illusion. You are not looking at what is. Your struggle in measuring, in analyzing yourself constantly, leads to misery. When you are no longer clinging, another dimension opens up. One of joy.

Fear

You may be afraid of the uncertainty of the future. You may be insecure about what you don’t know. You may secretly believe that life is meaningless and there is no purpose. You may resist thinking too much about death.

There are many forms of fear — some rational or neurotic — but many people are still terrified of the past and the future. They’re trapped in memories of the past, not wanting to repeat what once happened to them again. Or they dread the idea of growing old, slumped over in wrinkles, becoming senile, and then eventually dying.

You have a fear of time. You think not only about the past and future, but of being someone in it. You desire to be important, to be successful, to leave your mark upon the world before you succumb to the inevitability of your demise. You may be aware of some of these fears, but there are other fears that are unexplored, hidden deep inside.

These fears cannot be resolved by sheer will.

You dwell on what has happened before and don’t want it to happen tomorrow. You project the pain that you felt from the past to the future, while not being present. Your fear breeds more fear. Through the avoidance of pain, you ignore pleasure. Through clinging to pleasure, you ignore pain.

Both are interrelated.

Thinking about how to gain one while ridding yourself of the other, constantly, engenders more fear. To analyze your pain to bring about pleasure still brings on fear, even though pleasure may be temporarily felt.

Thought makes a center of “you, you, you,” of the ego, where you create your fixed sense of “Self” through your opinions. Your ego is strengthened through your thought. You cultivate ideas about everything and how they relate to pleasure and pain. Your life, your country, your furniture, your religion, your friends, your favorite music, you, you, you.

You create a division between what is good and bad, what is pleasurable and painful. These divisions only become more subtle overtime. Separations arise within everything, causing resistance within the people who separate. With separation, there is conflict and fear. To watch these conflicting feelings in the moment and not to name them, to have the discipline to look into yourself without comparing that moment to the past and future, is to free yourself of fear. You must clearly see with your full existence. There can be no running from what is happening, only the courage to witness without any judgement.