The Understanding of Space & the

Nature of Silence
“There are two things which are absolutely necessary to find
out about: the understanding of space, and the nature of
silence. It is a most interesting thing to find out what space
means. We are not talking of the distance between the earth
and the moon, but psychological space, the space within. A
mind that has no space is a shoddy, little mind, a petty mind;
it is caught in a trap and the movement in the trap it calls
living.5

You can observe how little space you have inwardly; we are
overcrowded with noise, chattering, endless memories,
images, symbols, opinions, knowledge, crammed full of
secondhand things. There is no space there at all; therefore
there is no freedom. And without this space, in which there
is no boundary, the mind is incapable of finding out, of
coming upon that immeasurable reality.

Then also one must understand what silence is. You know,

we are never silent; either we are having a dialogue with
ourselves, or with somebody else. The machinery of thought
is incessantly active, projecting itself, what it should do, it
must not do, how it has been – endlessly chattering; or
conforming, accepting, comparing judging, condemning,
imitating, obeying. Knowing this, there are various forms of
meditation which tell you how to control thought. But
controlling thought is not meditation at all; anybody can
concentrate, from the schoolboy to the higher general
preparing for war. And it is only a silent mind that can
perceive, that can actually see; not a chattering mind, not a
controlled mind, not a mind that is tortured, suppressed –
nor yielding, indulging. It is only a very silent mind that can
actually see.

Meditation is one of the greatest arts of life – perhaps the

greatest art. Because in the understanding of meditation
there is love, and love is not the product of systems, of
habits, of following a method. Love cannot be cultivated by
thought. Love can perhaps come into being when there is
complete silence. And the mind can only be silent when it
understands the nature of its own movement, as thought
and feeling.

So meditation can take place when you are sitting in a bus,

or walking in the woods full of light and shadows, or
listening to the singing birds, or looking at the face of your
wife or husband. Meditation is not something apart; it is the
understanding of the totality of life in which every form of
fragmentation of life has ceased.

When one has totally denied the psychological world which

man has created for himself, and has denied the
psychological structure of society of which we are: the greed,
the envy, the brutality, the violence, the jealousies, the
hatred; then when you totally deny, you have space and
silence. And it is only such a mind that is the religious mind,
not belonging to any organized, propagandist religion – it is
only such a mind that can see what is the
immeasurable. And such a mind is a light to itself.”

The right kind of education is concerned with individual freedom, which alone can bring
true cooperation with the whole, with the many; but this freedom is not achieved through
the pursuit of one’s own aggrandizement and success. Freedom comes with self-
knowledge, when the mind goes above and beyond the hindrances it has created for itself
through craving its own security.

It is the function of education to help each individual to discover all these psychological
hindrances, and not merely impose upon him new patterns of conduct, new modes of
thought. Such impositions will never awaken intelligence, creative understanding, but will
only further condition the individual. Surely, this is what is happening throughout the
world, and that is why our problems continue and multiply.
It is only when we begin to understand the deep significance of human life that there can
be true education; but to understand, the mind must intelligently free itself from the desire
for reward which breeds fear and conformity. If we regard our children as personal
property, if to us they are the continuance of our petty selves and the fulfilment of our
ambitions, then we shall build an environment, a social structure in which there is no love,
but only the pursuit of self-centred advantages.

You may ask, ‘If I find such a love, what happens to my wife, my children, my family? They
must have security.’ When you put such a question you have never been outside the field
of thought, the field of consciousness. When once you have been outside that field you will
never ask such a question because then you will know what love is in which there is no
thought and therefore no time. You may read this mesmerized and enchanted, but actually
to go beyond thought and time—which means going beyond sorrow—is to be aware that
there is a different dimension called love.

But you don’t know how to come to this extraordinary fount—so what do you do? If you
don’t know what to do, you do nothing, don’t you? Absolutely nothing. Then inwardly you
are completely silent. Do you understand what that means? It means that you are not
seeking, not wanting, not pursuing; there is no centre at all. Then there is love.

The content of my consciousness is my unhappiness, my misery, my struggle, my sorrow,

the images which I have collected through life, the frustrations, the pleasures, the fears, the
agony, the hatred – that is my consciousness. Can all that be completely emptied? Not only
at the superficial level but right through? – the so-called unconscious. If it is not possible,
then I must live a life of misery, I must live in endless, unending sorrow. There is neither
hope, nor despair, I am in prison. So the mind must find out how to empty itself of all the
content of itself, and yet live in this world, not become a moron, but have a brain that
functions efficiently. Now how is this to be done? Can it ever be done? Or is there no
escape for man?
You can see all this happening inside yourself if you watch it. You can see it fully,
completely, in one glance, not take analytical time over it. You can see in a moment the
whole structure and nature of this shoddy little thing called ‘me’, my tears, my family, my
nation, my belief, my religion—all that ugliness, it is all inside you. When you see it with
your heart, not with your mind, when you see it from the very bottom of your heart, then
you have the key that will end sorrow.

How can I be free? These questions can become a catch-22 because, in order to find out
what freedom is and whether we are free or not, our mind has to be already free to
investigate, free to look. Are we stuck in a mental groove, a bias, or a belief? Some people’s
answer to the question of freedom has been to pursue “spiritual awakening”, in ways that
made sense to them. What if the only revolution, the only awakening, starts when we
abandon all beliefs and ideologies?

As you grow, you’ll begin to see how various influences are beginning to mold you.
Ultimately, if you don’t revolt against this process, you become like an automatic machine,
functioning without creativity, without much original thought.

You listen to all this and what’s going to happen? You know very well what’s going to
happen—unless you are in revolt, you’ll just be like the rest of the world because you dare
not be otherwise. You will be so conditioned, so molded, that you will be afraid to strike out
on your own. Your husband will control you, or your wife will control you, and society will
tell you what you must do. So generation after generation, imitation goes on. There is no
real initiative, there is no freedom, there is no happiness.

The world doesn’t want you to think, it doesn’t want you to be free to find out, because
then you would be a dangerous citizen, you would not fit into the established pattern. A
free human being can never feel that they belong to any particular country, class, or type of
thinking. Freedom means freedom at every level, right through.
So while you are young, it is very important to be free, not only at the conscious level, but
also deep inside. You must be watchful of yourself, more and more aware of the influences
which seek to control or dominate you. Always question, investigate and be in revolt.

Freedom is not to be acquired. You cannot go out and buy freedom in the market. You
cannot get it by reading a book. Freedom comes with intelligence.

But what is intelligence? Can there be intelligence when there is fear, or when the mind is
conditioned? When your mind is prejudiced, or when you are very ambitious and want to
climb the ladder of success… when you are concerned about yourself, when you follow or
worship somebody, can there be intelligence? Surely intelligence comes when you
understand and break away from all this stupidity.

So you have to set about it; and the first thing is to be aware that your mind is not free. You
have to observe how your mind is bound by all these things, and then there is the
beginning of intelligence, which brings freedom

You have to find the answer.

The Core of the Teachings

The core of Krishnamurti’s teaching is contained in the statement he made in 1929 when
he said, “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, through observation and not
through intellectual analysis or introspective dissection.

Man has built in himself images as a fence of security—religious, political, personal. These
manifest as symbols, ideas, beliefs. The burden of these images dominates man’s thinking,
his relationships, and his daily life. These images are the causes of our problems for they
divide man from man. His perception of life is shaped by the concepts already established
in his mind. The content of his consciousness is his entire existence. The individuality is the
name, the form and superficial culture he acquires from tradition and environment. The
uniqueness of man does not lie in the superficial but in complete freedom from the
content of his consciousness, which is common to all humanity. So he is not an individual.

Freedom is not a reaction; freedom is not choice. It is man’s pretence that because he has
choice he is free.

Freedom is pure observation without direction, without fear of punishment and reward.
Freedom is without motive; freedom is not at the end of the evolution of man but lies in the first
step of his existence.

In observation one begins to discover the lack of freedom. Freedom is found in the
choiceless awareness of our daily existence and activity.

Thought is time. Thought is born of experience and knowledge, which are inseparable from
time and the past. Time is the psychological enemy of man. Our action is based on
knowledge and therefore time, so man is always a slave to the past. Thought is ever limited
and so we live in constant conflict and struggle. There is no psychological evolution. When
man becomes aware of the movement of his own thoughts, he will see the division
between the thinker and thought, the observer and the observed, the experiencer and the
experience. He will discover that this division is an illusion. Then only is there pure
observation which is insight without any shadow of the past or of time. This timeless
insight brings about a deep, radical mutation in the mind.

Total negation is the essence of the positive. When there is negation of all those things that
thought has brought about psychologically, only then is there love, which is compassion
and intelligence.

But in his view history shows there has been a repeated failure of education, science,
politics and organized religion to end them. What is needed in our time therefore is to own
up to that failure, to make a clean sweep of all these past, defective endeavors, and to
adopt an entirely new approach. It is quite hard to imagine taking a more radical position
than this. Put aside everything you have ever learned from others, ever read, and start your
own inquiry into what life is about, what really matters. Stand on your own feet. Stop being
a second-hand human being.

He proposes that this means looking at what is actually happening in life and in our
consciousness—‘what is, not what should be’—without condemning or justifying, without
resisting or wanting to change it, holding it instead ‘like a precious jewel.’ In so doing, he
says, we are looking at human consciousness not just our own.

This non-judgmental watching, free from all past-based thought and projection, is for him ‘pure
observation’. If accompanied by a passion to find out, there will then be fresh understanding, he
says, a ‘going beyond’ one’s previous state of consciousness.
A constant source of human confusion in Krishnamurti’s view is our rooted tendency to
make images of ourselves, others, and of life and death that are put together by thought
based on memory, on past experience or hearsay. Instead of looking afresh at what is new
in the now, being open to the unknown and unpredictable, we ‘translate the present into
the past.’ He sees such images are inevitably conflictual because they are time-bound and
therefore partial and inadequate. Yet we frequently act as though we are programmed by
them.

So to go into the question of what love is we must first free it from the encrustation of
centuries, put away all ideals and ideologies of what it should or should not be. To divide
anything into what should be and what is, is the most deceptive way of dealing with life.

Now how am I going to find out what this flame is which we call love—not how to express it
to another but what it means in itself? I will first reject what the church, what society, what
my parents and friends, what every person and every book has said about it because I
want to find out for myself what it is. Here is an enormous problem that involves the whole
of mankind, there have been a thousand ways of defining it and I myself am caught in
some pattern or other according to what I like or enjoy at the moment—so shouldn’t I, in
order to understand it, first free myself from my own inclinations and prejudices? I am
confused, torn by my own desires, so I say to myself, ‘First clear up your own confusion.
perhaps you may be able to discover what love is through what it is not.’
 But if you can live with your wife without thought creating all these contradictory states,
these endless quarrels in yourself, then perhaps—perhaps—you will know what love is.
Then you are completely free and so is she, whereas if you depend on her for all your
pleasure you are a slave to her. So when one loves there must be freedom, not only from
the other person but from oneself.

This belonging to another, being psychologically nourished by another, depending on

another—in all this there must always be anxiety, fear, jealousy, guilt, and so long as there
is fear there is no love; a mind ridden with sorrow will never know what love is;
sentimentality and emotionalism have nothing whatsoever to do with love. And so love is
not to do with pleasure and desire.

Most parents unfortunately think they are responsible for their children and their sense of
responsibility takes the form of telling them what they should do and what they should not
do, what they should become and what they should not become. The parents want their
children to have a secure position in society. What they call responsibility is part of that
respectability they worship; and it seems to me that where there is respectability there is
no order; they are concerned only with becoming a perfect bourgeois. When they prepare
their children to fit into society they are perpetuating war, conflict and brutality. Do you call
that care and love?

Really to care is to care as you would for a tree or a plant, watering it, studying its needs,
the best soil for it, looking after it with gentleness and tenderness—but when you prepare
your children to fit into society you are preparing them to be killed. If you loved your
children you would have no war.

So the problem is our consciousness. Our consciousness, which means the way you think,
the way you live, the way you believe, the way you react, your behavior, all that is your
consciousness, which is your life. That consciousness is you. The content of that
consciousness makes consciousness…

This content has been put together through time; it isn’t one day’s acquirement. Our brain
is the result of time, evolution. Our brain is not your brain and my brain, but the brain of
mankind. This is difficult for you to see, and even recognize, because we have been so
conditioned that it is my brain. And it is your brain. But if you observe, human beings right
throughout the world go through enormous turmoil, poverty, anxiety, insecurity, confusion,
psychologically wounded, fear, fear of being hurt, physically, fear of psychological hurts,
fear of death, and the enquiry, what is there beyond…

That is the content of our consciousness. And as long as there’s that content, which is
always divisive, which is always fragmented, our action must be fragmented. Right?

So the problem then is: is it possible for the content of that consciousness to be dissolved?

First of all, I am nobody. That’s all. It is as simple as that. I am nobody. But what is
important is: who you are, what are you? When they ask who you are, in that question is
implied you are somebody very great therefore I am going to imitate you: the way you
walk, the way you talk, the way you brush your teeth, or whatever it is. I am going to imitate
you, which is part of our pattern, you understand? There is the hero, or the man who is
enlightened, or the guru, and you say, ‘I am going to copy everything you do’ – which
becomes so absurdly silly – childish to imitate somebody. And are we not the result of a lot
of imitations? The religions have said – they don’t use the word ‘imitate’ – but give yourself
over, surrender yourself, follow me, I am this, I am that, worship. All this is what you are. In
school you imitate. Acquiring knowledge is a form of imitation and of course there is the
fashion – short dress, long dress, long hair, short hair, beard, no beard – imitate, imitate,
imitate. And also we imitate inwardly, so we all know that.

But to find out who you are, who you are, not who the speaker is, is far more important,
and to find out who you are you have to enquire. You are the story of mankind. If you really
see that it gives you tremendous vitality, energy, beauty, love, because it is no longer a
small entity struggling in the corner of the earth. You are part of this whole humanity. It has
a tremendous responsibility, vitality, beauty, love. But most of us won’t see this, as most of
us are concerned with ourselves, with our particular little problem, particular little sorrow
and so on. And to step out of that narrow circle seems almost impossible because we are
so conditioned, so programmed, like the computers, that we cannot learn something new.

The more resistance there was to this fear, the more intense the fear became. At a certain
point, it could no longer be resisted. There was just the actuality of fear, like a tidal wave
overtaking and flowing through me.

We assume we know ourselves, and therefore we tend to look through these ideas we have
about ourselves, as if we already know. In so doing, we don’t look directly. But to see that
we actually don’t know, we only assume we do, is to see ourselves as we are. What we
thought we knew about ourselves was just an idea.

So what is moving within us right now may not be what we assume it to be, it may actually
be unknown to us. And it may be more alive than anything we could ever conceive of.

In the end, it seems it is up to each of us to find out what is actually true, and to not
depend on our ideas or the words of others. To start afresh, which means to realize that
what we think we know may be what is hindering us.
The illusion of continuity is only created when you look for it, when you ask yourself: can I
remember what I did this morning? or, can I remember when I was a kid? Because this brain can
pull up memories, you make this story of “I have lived this life”, and you call that “me”.

In this torn desert world there is no love because pleasure and desire play the greatest
roles, yet without love your daily life has no meaning. And you cannot have love if there is
no beauty. Beauty is not something you see—not a beautiful tree, a beautiful picture, a
beautiful building or a beautiful woman. There is beauty only when your heart and mind
know what love is. Without love and that sense of beauty there is no virtue, and you know
very well that, do what you will, improve society, feed the poor, you will only be creating
more mischief, for without love there is only ugliness and poverty in your own heart and
mind. But when there is love and beauty, whatever you do is right, whatever you do is in
order. If you know how to love, then you can do what you like because it will solve all other
problems.

So we reach the point: can the mind come upon love without discipline, without thought,
without enforcement, without any book, any teacher or leader—come upon it as one
comes upon a lovely sunset?

It seems to me that one thing is absolutely necessary and that is passion without motive—
passion that is not the result of some commitment or attachment, passion that is not lust.
A man who does not know what passion is will never know love because love can come
into being only when there is total self-abandonment.

A mind that is seeking is not a passionate mind and to come upon love without seeking it is
the only way to find it—to come upon it unknowingly and not as the result of any effort or
experience. Such a love, you will find, is not of time; such a love is both personal and
impersonal, is both the one and the many. Like a flower that has perfume you can smell it
or pass it by. That flower is for everybody and for the one who takes trouble to breathe it
deeply and look at it with delight. Whether one is very near in the garden, or very far away,
it is the same to the flower because it is full of that perfume and therefore it is sharing with
everybody.

Love is something that is new, fresh, alive. It has no yesterday and no tomorrow. It is
beyond the turmoil of thought. It is only the innocent mind which knows what love is, and
the innocent mind can live in the world which is not innocent. To find this extraordinary
thing which man has sought endlessly through sacrifice, through worship, through
relationship, through sex, through every form of pleasure and pain, is only possible when
thought comes to understand itself and comes naturally to an end. Then love has no
opposite, then love has no conflict.