Summary of J. Krishnamurti's The Book of Life

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 If you can listen in this way, listen with ease and without strain, you will find a profound change taking place within you. This change comes without your volition or your asking.
#2 To listen is to hear what is being said and not to project your own desires and fears through which you hear only what you want to hear. To listen is to hear everything, including the noise in the streets, the chatter of birds, and the noise of the tramcar.
#3 Listening is an art that is not easily acquired, but in it there is great beauty and understanding. We listen with the various depths of our being, but our listening is always with a preconception or from a particular point of view.
#4 To listen to someone, you must be quiet. You cannot listen if you are thinking about something else. When you look at a flower, you do not name it, classify it, or say that it belongs to a certain species. When you listen without the idea of what you are going to say, you will be able to understand whether what they are saying is true or false.

Sujets

• Meditations

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 27 avril 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781669393863
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on J. Krishnamurti's The Book of Life
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3 Insights from Chapter 4 Insights from Chapter 5 Insights from Chapter 6 Insights from Chapter 7 Insights from Chapter 8 Insights from Chapter 9 Insights from Chapter 10 Insights from Chapter 11 Insights from Chapter 12 Insights from Chapter 13
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

If you can listen in this way, listen with ease and without strain, you will find a profound change taking place within you. This change comes without your volition or your asking.

#2

To listen is to hear what is being said and not to project your own desires and fears through which you hear only what you want to hear. To listen is to hear everything, including the noise in the streets, the chatter of birds, and the noise of the tramcar.

#3

Listening is an art that is not easily acquired, but in it there is great beauty and understanding. We listen with the various depths of our being, but our listening is always with a preconception or from a particular point of view.

#4

To listen to someone, you must be quiet. You cannot listen if you are thinking about something else. When you look at a flower, you do not name it, classify it, or say that it belongs to a certain species. When you listen without the idea of what you are going to say, you will be able to understand whether what they are saying is true or false.

#5

When you make an effort to listen, are you listening. Is not that very effort a distraction that prevents listening. Do you make an effort when you listen to something that gives you delight. If you would listen in the sense of being aware of your conflicts and contradictions without forcing them into any particular pattern of thought, they might altogether cease.

#6

You should listen to everything, not only to what I am saying, but also to what other people are saying, the birds, the whistle of a locomotive, and the noise of the bus going by. The more you listen, the more silence there will be, and silence is not broken by noise.

#7

When you listen to someone, you are not applying what they are saying. If you are listening to the speaker, they become your leader, your way to understanding. But if you are listening to yourself, you can understand and see your own reality.

#8

Learning is difficult, and listening is also difficult. You never listen to anything because your mind is not free; your ears are stuffed with those things that you already know, so listening becomes extremely difficult.

#9

To discover anything new, you must start on your own. You must start on a journey completely devoid of knowledge, since it is very easy through knowledge and belief to have experiences, but those experiences are merely the products of self-projection and therefore utterly unreal.

#10

There are two types of learning: psychological and physiological. The mind never learns psychologically. It has learned, and with what it has learned, it meets the challenge of life. It is always translating life or the new challenge according to what it has learned.

#11

The function of the mind is to inquire and learn. By learning, I do not mean the mere cultivation of memory or the accumulation of knowledge, but the capacity to think clearly and sanely without illusion.

#12

Learning is a continuous process, not a process of addition. It is never accumulative, and you cannot store up learning and then act from that storehouse. Learning occurs as you are going along.

#13

Wisdom is something that must be discovered by each individual, and it is not the result of knowledge. Knowledge and wisdom do not go together. Wisdom comes when there is the maturity of self-knowing. Without knowing yourself, order is not possible, and therefore no virtue can be found.

#14

There are two ways of learning: through study, through experience, or through being instructed. We generally learn through one of these four methods. But to learn in a different way, you must be free of authority. Otherwise, you will merely be instructed and repeat what you have heard.

#15

To be free, you must examine authority, the whole skeleton of authority, and tear it to pieces. This requires energy, actual physical energy, and psychological energy. But the energy is wasted when you are in conflict.

#16

The authority of the law, the policeman who keeps order, is not the only authority that the mind can objectify. We also have our own authority as experience and knowledge, which we are trying to follow. But this constant repetition becomes destructive of virtue because virtue is not something that can be cultivated.

#17

The old mind is the mind that has been conditioned by countless sects, religions, and superstitions. It is essentially the mind that is bound by authority. To break away from it, we must destroy the authority of our old minds, which is tradition, knowledge, experience, and the means of finding security and staying in it.

#18

To break free from the authority of others, we must understand the compulsion behind our desire to dominate or be dominated. We crave certainty, success, and knowledge, and this desire for permanence builds up within us the authority of personal experience.

#19

Self-awareness is difficult, and since we prefer an easy, illusionary way of life, we create the authority that gives shape and pattern to our life. This authority may be the collective or the personal.

#20

The deep psychological revolution that we are experiencing is the result of our becoming free of authority. We cannot look to any authority, whether our own creation or imposed upon us by another.

#21

To know yourself is to understand your own problems, and that is difficult. To know yourself does not mean to withdraw from relationship. To know yourself is a process, not an end in itself. You discover yourself in action, not in isolation or withdrawal.

#22

To transform yourself, you must first know yourself. To know yourself, you must not imagine or have any belief in something you are not. If you want to know what you are, you cannot have an ideal of something you are not.

#23

There is no method for self-knowledge. Following a method implies the desire to attain a certain result, and we all want that. We follow authority because we want a result that will be satisfying and secure. But the pursuit of a system inevitably leads to security, certainty, and not self-knowledge.

#24

When we are aware of ourselves, we realize that the whole movement of living is a way of uncovering the self, the ego, the self. The self is a very complex process that can only be uncovered in relationship, in our daily activities, and in the way we talk and judge.

#25

To meditate without first establishing deeply, irrevocably, that virtue which comes about through self-knowing is utterly deceptive and completely useless. You must understand what this self-knowing is, just to be aware of the me which originates in a bundle of memories without any choice.

#26

The answer to the question of emptiness is found by listening to the soil as it receives the seed. You must understand all your own projections and activities from moment to moment in order to see the answer. There is no need to cultivate emptiness; it comes darkly and without invitation.

#27

You and the world are not two separate entities with separate problems. Your problem is the world’s problem, and you can only solve it if you understand yourself. You are one with the world, and without self-knowledge, you cannot understand reality.

#28

Self-knowledge is not a formula. It comes about when we are aware of ourselves in relationship, and we see what we are from moment to moment. We cannot see ourselves as we are in relationship, however, because we immediately begin to condemn or justify what we see.
Insights from Chapter 2

#1

When you are aware of the trick that you have played on yourself, the false as the false is seen. All conflict, all becoming, is disintegration. When there is an awareness of this trick that the mind has played on itself, there is only what is.

#2

If I try to become sensitive, the very effort to become sensitive is crudity. If I recognize that I am crude without trying to change, I can begin to understand what crudeness is. Then, as I observe my crudeness in daily life, it begins to change.

#3

The hierarchical structure of the ego is an excellent opportunity for self-expansion. You may want brotherhood, but how can there be brotherhood if you are pursuing spiritual distinctions. You may smile at worldly titles, but when you admit the Master, the savior, the guru in the realm of the spirit, are you not carrying over the worldly attitude.

#4

To understand the self, we must be very intelligent, constantly on the lookout, and constantly watching to make sure it doesn’t slip away. We must let go of the self, but we must do so in a way that does not strengthen it.

#5

The search for power, position, and authority is the self in all its different forms. But what is important is to understand the self and its tendencies, so that we can act upon it and revolutionize it.

#6

When you truly understand the working of the self, you will know what love is. Love is not the self. When there is love, self is not. When you know love, self is not.

#7

To understand what is true, I must first understand what is false. To understand what is false, I must first see the truth. When the mind sees what is false, that which is true arises and gives me happiness.

#8

We don’t need a belief that there is sunshine, the mountains, or the rivers. We don’t need a belief that life is a terrible misery with its anguish, conflict, and constant ambition. But we demand a belief when we want to escape from a fact into an unreality.

#9

Religion is not