Daily Quote, Wednesday March 4, 2009

Good morning everyone,

Bright and sunny here in Halifax. Hope it's the same where you are!

Here is today's quote.

I really enjoyed the title today. It's very easy to overlook the fact that it's not the thinker needing to be understood by someone else. For me, today's quote sums up very well Krishnamurti's entire teaching. I particularly appreciated the point that wisdom cannot be bought or learned. In a sense, it can only come through practice, which is self-observation and awareness. All the yoga classes and all the yoga teacher training in the world are useless unless you observe yourself. Is anyone in my yoga classes reading this? (ha, ha!)

Robert

If the thinker is not understood, obviously his thinking is a process of escape.

What is important, surely, is to be aware without choice, because choice brings about conflict. The chooser is in confusion, therefore he chooses; if he is not in confusion, there is no choice. Only the person who is confused chooses what he shall do or shall not do. The man who is clear and simple does not choose: what is is. Action based on an idea is obviously the action of choice, and such action is not liberating; on the contrary, it only creates further resistance, further conflict, according to that conditioned thinking.
So, then, the important thing is to be aware from moment to moment without accumulating the experience which awareness brings; because, the moment you accumulate, you are aware only according to that accumulation, according to that pattern, according to that experience. That is, your awareness is conditioned by your accumulation, and therefore there is no longer observation, but merely translation. Where there is translation, there is choice, and choice creates conflict; and in conflict there can be no understanding.
...
Thought and the thinker are one, but it is thought that creates the thinker, and without thought there is no thinker. So, one has to be aware of the process of conditioning, which is thought; and, when there is awareness of that process without choice, when there is no sense of resistance, when there is neither condemnation nor justification of what is observed, then we see that the mind is the center of conflict. In understanding the mind and the ways of the mind, the conscious as well as the unconscious, through dreams, through every word, through every process of thought and action, the mind becomes extraordinarily quiet; and that tranquillity of the mind is the beginning of wisdom. Wisdom cannot be bought, it cannot be learned; it comes into being only when the mind is quiet, utterly still - not made still by compulsion, coercion, or discipline. Only when the mind is spontaneously silent is it possible to understand that which is beyond time.

Collected Works, Vol. VI - 206