Reflections on Freedom, Love, and Truth: Insights from Jiddu Krishnamurti
"Reflections on Freedom, Love, and Truth: Insights from Jiddu Krishnamurti"
"Chasing after gurus and their systems around the world, reading the latest books about this and that seems utterly pointless to me—you may travel around the Earth, but you will still have to come back to yourself."
– Jiddu Krishnamurti, The First and Last Freedom
"Have you noticed that love is silence? It happens when you hold the hand of a loved one, when you look at a child with love, when you absorb the beauty of the evening. Love has no past or future, just as the extraordinary state of silence is beyond time."
– Jiddu Krishnamurti, Bombay Talks
"Unfortunately, most parents believe they are responsible for their children, and this sense of responsibility makes them tell their children what they should and shouldn't do, who they should and shouldn't be. Parents want their children to have a stable position in society. What they call responsibility is part of the respectability they worship. But to me, where there is respectability, there is no order."
– Jiddu Krishnamurti, Freedom from the Known
"When you seek truth, it is merely a reaction, an escape from fact. Truth is what is, not a reaction to what is."
– Jiddu Krishnamurti, Bombay Talks
"The environment around us, our current way of life, dulls and wears us down. How can you become sensitive when you read about the murder of thousands, see it in photographs—and this mass killing is presented as some sort of successful game? When you read about this for the first time, your heart probably aches, but constant repetition of this horrifying cruelty dulls the mind-heart, creating immunity to the unrestrained barbarism of modern society. Radio, magazines, cinema constantly drain the flexibility of feelings; they coerce, intimidate, and box you into a system. How can you remain sensitive amidst this noise, rush, and false ideals to cultivate right thinking?"
– Jiddu Krishnamurti, The Observer is the Observed
"You may find satisfaction, but certainly—you cannot find happiness."
– Jiddu Krishnamurti, The First and Last Freedom
"The present and the future are divided by a vast chasm. By sacrificing the present for the future, we choose unworthy means to achieve what may be a noble goal. But the means determine the goal. Moreover, who are we to decide what a person should be? Who gave us the right to box them into the framework of our own ideals, born from our ambitions, hopes, and fears?"
– Jiddu Krishnamurti, Education and the Meaning of Life
"The rich are surrounded by their own peculiar atmosphere. No matter how educated, polite, noble, or refined they may be, there is an impenetrable and haughty detachment about them, that unshakable confidence and firmness that is hard to break. They are not the owners of their wealth—on the contrary, wealth owns them, which is worse than death. Charity is their vanity. They consider themselves trustees of their own wealth, they organize charitable funds, donations, they are creators, builders, givers. They build churches, temples, but their god is the god of gold."
– Jiddu Krishnamurti, Commentaries on Living
"Self-expression without self-awareness leads to aggressive and ambitious self-assertion."
– Jiddu Krishnamurti, Education and the Meaning of Life
"There is no freedom if you are seeking a result, for you are bound to that goal. You may be free from the past, but the future holds you—it is not freedom. Only in freedom can you discover something: a new idea, a new feeling, a new perception. Any form of discipline, whether political or religious, based on coercion, denies this freedom; and as long as discipline—that is, submission to action with a predetermined goal—blinds you, the mind can never be free."
– Jiddu Krishnamurti, The First and Last Freedom
Venkataramanan Ramasethu
