As One Is: To Free the Mind from All Conditioning by J. Krishnamurti

When we seek, we are seeking something which we want, so our search is already established, predetermined, and therefore it is no longer a search.

When the mind seeks a particular state, a solution to a problem, when it seeks God, truth, or desires a certain experience, whether mystical or any other kind, it has already conceived what it wants; and because it has already conceived, formulated, what it is seeking, its search is infinitely futile.

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As long as one’s instrument of thinking is not clear, is perverted, conditioned, whatever one thinks is bound to be limited, narrow.

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Without self-knowledge, without knowing oneself as one is—not as one would like to be, which is merely an illusion, an idealistic escape—without knowing the ways of one’s thinking, all one’s motives, one’s thoughts, one’s innumerable responses, it is not possible to understand and go beyond this whole process of thinking.

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I think it is important to understand the difference between attention and concentration. Concentration implies choice, does it not? You are trying to concentrate on what I am saying, so your mind is focused, made narrow, and other thoughts intervene; so there is not an actual listening but a battle going on in the mind, a conflict between what you are hearing and your desire to translate it, to apply what I am talking about, and so on. Whereas, attention is something entirely different. In attention there is no focusing, no choice; there is complete awareness without any interpretation. And if we can listen so attentively, completely, to what is being said, then that very attention brings about the miracle of change within the mind itself.

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The scientist is occupied with his technical problems, with his mechanics, with his mathematics, as the housewife is occupied in the kitchen or with the baby. We are all so frightened of not being occupied, frightened of the social implications. If one were not occupied, one might discover oneself as one is, so occupation becomes an escape from what one is.

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The questioner asks how he is to earn his livelihood if he is not occupied with his work. Do you occupy yourself with your work? Please listen to this. If you are occupied with your work, then you do not love your work. Do you understand the difference? If I love what I am doing, I am not occupied with it, my work is not apart from me. But we are trained in this country, and unfortunately it is becoming the habit throughout the world to acquire skill in work which we don’t love. There may be a few scientists, a few technical experts, a few engineers who really love what they do in the total sense of the word, which I am going to explain presently. But most of us do not love what we are doing and that is why we are occupied with our livelihood. I think there is a difference between the two if you really go into it. How can I love what I am doing if I am all the time driven by ambition, trying through my work to achieve an aim, to become somebody, to have a success? An artist who is concerned with his name, with his greatness, with comparison, with fulfilling his ambition, has ceased to be an artist; he is merely a technician like everybody else. Which means, really, that to love something there must be a total cessation of all ambition, of all desire for the recognition of society, which is rotten anyhow. [Laughter] Sirs, please don’t. And we are not trained for that, we are not educated for that; we have to fit into some groove which society or the family has given us. Because my forefathers have been doctors, lawyers, or engineers, I must be a doctor, a lawyer, or an engineer. And now there must be more and more engineers because that is what society demands. So we have lost this love of the thing itself, if we ever had it, which I doubt. And when you love a thing, there is no occupation with it. The mind isn’t conniving to achieve something, trying to be better than somebody else; all comparison, competition, all desire for success, for fulfillment, totally ceases. It is only the ambitious mind that is occupied.

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Anything I fight, I am giving life to. If I fight an idea, I am giving life to that idea; if I fight you, I am giving you life to fight me. I must see that very clearly, and I can see it very clearly only if I am looking at the whole problem of habit, not just at one specific habit. Then my approach to habit is at a different level altogether.

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What is a problem? A problem comes into being only when the mind is occupied with something, does it not? If I have a problem, what does it mean? Let’s say that my mind is occupied from morning till night with envy, with jealousy, with sex, or what you will. It is the occupation of the mind with an object that creates the problem. The envy may be a fact, but it is the occupation of the mind with the  fact that creates the problem, the conflict.

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When the mind is free from occupation with the problem, free to observe, to be aware of the whole issue, then the problem itself can be solved comparatively easily.

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So the issue is not how to resolve desire but to understand it, and one can understand it only when there is no condemnation of it.

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What is confusion? Confusion exists only when there is the fact plus what I think about the fact: my opinion about the fact, my disregard of the fact, my evasion of the fact, my evaluation of the fact, and so on. If I can look at the fact without the additive quality, then there is no confusion.

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