Freedom from the Known by J Krishnamurti

Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895-1986) was a leading spiritual and philosophical thinker whose ideas continue to influence us today.

Freedom from the Known is one of Krishnamurti’s most accessible works.

In this book Krishnamurti reveals how we can free ourselves radically and immediately from the tyranny of the expected. By changing ourselves, we can alter the structure of society and our relationships. The vital need for change and the recognition of its very possibility form an essential part of this important book’s message.

Freedom from the Known Book Summary

Note: This summary is made up of my notes, thoughts and highlights of important passages while reading the book. I keep updating the summary when I revisit it, and occasionally may edit it to reduce summary length. Don’t be surprised if it has changed between visits. The author’s words are in normal font, while my interpretations are in italics.

We are second-hand people

For centuries we have been spoon-fed by our teachers, by our authorities, by our books, our saints.

We say, ‘Tell me all about it – what lies beyond the hills and the mountains and the earth?’ and we are satisfied with their descriptions, which means that we live on words and our life is shallow and empty.
We are second-hand people.

There is nothing new in us, nothing that we have discovered for ourselves; nothing original, pristine, clear.

The primary cause of disorder in ourselves is the seeking of reality promised by another.

Most of us are opposed to political tyranny and dictatorship, we inwardly accept the authority, the tyranny, of another to twist our minds and our way of life.

That is the first thing to learn – not to seek.
When you seek you are really only window-shopping.

The question of whether or not there is a God or truth or reality, or whatever you like to call it, can never be answered by books, by priests, philosophers or saviours. Nobody and nothing can answer the question but you yourself and that is why you must know yourself.

Immaturity lies only in total ignorance of self. To understand yourself is the beginning of wisdom.

Truth has no path, and that is the beauty of truth, it is living.

You cannot depend upon anybody. There is no guide, no teacher, no authority. There is only you – your relationship with others and with the world – there is nothing else.

What is important is not a philosophy of life but to observe what is actually taking place in our daily life, inwardly and outwardly.

Order imposed from without must always breed disorder.

There is no such thing as doing right or wrong when there is freedom. You are free and from that centre you act. And hence there is no fear, and a mind that has no fear is capable of great love.

You had an experience yesterday which taught you something and what it taught you becomes a new authority – and that authority of yesterday is as destructive as the authority of a thousand years.

To be free of all authority, of your own and that of another, is to die to everything of yesterday, so that your mind is always fresh, always young, innocent, full of vigour and passion.
It is only in that state that one learns and observes.
And for this a great deal of awareness is required, actual awareness of what is going on inside yourself, without correcting it or telling it what it should or should not be, because the moment you correct it you have established another authority, a censor.

Learning about Ourselves and Conditioning

All authority of any kind, especially in the field of thought and understanding, is the most destructive, evil thing.

Leaders destroy the followers and followers destroy the leaders. You have to be your own teacher and your own disciple.

If you do not follow somebody you feel very lonely. Be lonely then.

Why are you frightened of being alone? Because you are faced with yourself as you are and you find that you are empty, dull, stupid, ugly, guilty and anxious – a petty, shoddy, secondhand entity. Face the fact; look at it, do not run away from it. The moment you run away fear begins.

There is no difference between the individual and the collective. That is an actual fact. I have created the world as I am.

I can observe myself only in relationship because all life is relationship.
I cannot exist by myself. I exist only in relationship to people, things and ideas, and in studying my relationship to outward things and people, as well as to inward things, I begin to understand myself.
I cannot study myself in abstraction; I am not an abstract entity; therefore I have to study myself in actuality – as I am, not as I wish to be.

Acquiring knowledge about yourself and learning about yourself are two different things, for the knowledge you accumulate about yourself is always of the past.

Understanding is not an intellectual process.

A mind that is burdened with the past is a sorrowful mind.

Learning about yourself is always in the present and knowledge is always in the past, and as most of us live in the past and are satisfied with the past, knowledge becomes extraordinarily important to us. That is why we worship the erudite, the clever, the cunning.
Learning is a constant movement without the past.
Learning implies a great sensitivity. There is no sensitivity if there is an idea, which is of the past, dominating the present.
To be completely sensitive to all the implications of life demands that there be no separation between the organism and the psyche.

To understand anything you must live with it, you must observe it, you must know all its content, its nature, its structure, its movement. Have you ever tried living with yourself?

To live with a living thing your mind must also be alive.
And it cannot be alive if it is caught in opinions, judgements and values.
When we condemn or justify we cannot see clearly, nor can we when our minds are endlessly chattering; then we do not observe what is; we look only at the projections we have made of ourselves.

Each of us has an image of what we think we are or what we should be, and that image, that picture, entirely prevents us from seeing ourselves as we actually are.

It is one of the most difficult things in the world to look at anything simply.

The moment you have achieved anything you cease to have that quality of innocence and humility.

The moment you have a conclusion or start examining from knowledge, you are finished, for then you are translating every living thing in terms of the old.

If there is no certainty, no achievement, there is freedom to look, to achieve. And when you look with freedom it is always new.

A confident man is a dead human being.

When you look at a tree and say, ‘That is an oak tree’, or ‘that is a banyan tree’, the naming of the tree, which is botanical knowledge, has so conditioned your mind that the word comes between you and actually seeing the tree?

When you struggle against any kind of disturbance or defend yourself against any outer or inner threat, then you know you are conditioned.
If one gets used to disturbance it means that one’s mind has become dull.

You can face a fact only in the present and if you never allow it to be present because you are always escaping from it, you can never face it.

Only when there is an emotional content do you become vital.

If you see the danger of your conditioning merely as an intellectual concept, you will never do anything about it.

In seeing a danger as a mere idea there is conflict between the idea and action and that conflict takes away your energy.
When you see the conditioning and the danger of it immediately, and as you would see a precipice, that you act. So seeing is acting.

Consciousness — The Totality of Life — Awareness

Consciousness is the total field in which thought functions and relationships exist.

The only way to look at yourself is totally, immediately, without time; and you can see the totality of yourself only when the mind is not fragmented. What you see in totality is the truth.

Attention is not the same thing as concentration. Concentration is exclusion; attention, which is total awareness, excludes nothing.

You can give your whole attention only when you care, which means that you really love to understand – then you give your whole heart and mind to find out.

If I am all the time measuring myself against you, struggling to be like you, then I am denying what I am myself. Therefore I am creating an illusion.

Comparison in any form leads only to greater illusion and greater misery, just as when I analyse myself, add to my knowledge of myself bit by bit, or identify myself with something outside myself, whether it be the State, a saviour or an ideology – when I understand that all such processes lead only to greater conformity and therefore greater conflict.

Verbally we can go only so far: what lies beyond cannot be put into words because the word is not the thing.

No words or explanations can open the door. What will open the door is daily awareness and attention – awareness of how we speak, what we say, how we walk, what we think.

Pleasure – Desire – Thought – Memory – Joy

Pleasure is the structure of society.

A mind that is all the time seeking pleasure must inevitably find its shadow, pain. They cannot be separated.
Pleasure comes into being through four stages – perception, sensation, contact and desire.

There is nothing wrong with desire. To react is perfectly normal. But then thought steps in and chews over the delight and turns it into pleasure.

Thought creates and sustains pleasure through desire, and gives it continuity, and therefore the natural reaction of desire to any beautiful thing is perverted by thought. Thought turns it into a memory and memory is then nourished by thinking about it over and over again.

A mind which is not crippled by memory has real freedom.

Anything that is the result of memory is old and therefore never free.
There is no such thing as freedom of thought. It is sheer nonsense.
Thought is never new, for thought is the response of memory, experience, knowledge.
From the old you derive pleasure, never from the new.
There is no time in the new.

It is the struggle to repeat and perpetuate pleasure which turns it into pain.

The very demand for the repetition of pleasure brings about pain, because it is not the same as it was yesterday. You struggle to achieve the same delight, not only to your aesthetic sense but the same inward quality of the mind, and you are hurt and disappointed because it is denied to you.
When you don’t get what you want you become anxious, envious, hateful.

Living in the present is the instant perception of beauty and the great delight in it without seeking pleasure from it.

Self-concern – Position – Fear – Fragmentation of Thought

Most of us crave the satisfaction of having a position in society because we are afraid of being nobody.

Position must be recognised by others, otherwise it is no position at all. We must always sit on the platform.
This craving for position, for prestige, for power, to be recognised by society as being outstanding in some way, is a wish to dominate others, and this wish to dominate is a form of aggression.

A mind that is caught in fear lives in confusion, in conflict, and therefore must be violent, distorted and aggressive.

We are all afraid about something; there is no fear in abstraction, it is always in relation to something.
One of the major causes of fear is that we do not want to face ourselves as we are.
The movement from certainty to uncertainty is what I call fear.

At the actual moment as I am sitting here I am not afraid; I am not afraid in the present, nothing is happening to me, nobody is threatening me or taking anything away from me.

But beyond the actual moment there is a deeper layer in the mind which is consciously or unconsciously thinking of what might happen in the future or worrying that something from the past may overtake me.
Thought, which is always old, because thought is the response of memory and memories are always old – thought creates, in time, the feeling that you are afraid which is not an actual fact. The actual fact is that you are well.

There is no new thought. If we recognise it, it is already old.

What we are afraid of is the repetition of the old – the thought of what has been projecting into the future. Therefore thought is responsible for fear.
When you are confronted with something immediately there is no fear. It is only when thought comes in that there is fear.
Thought is essential at certain levels but when thought projects itself psychologically as the future and the past, creating fear as well as pleasure, the mind is made dull and therefore inaction is inevitable.

Most of us want to have our minds continually occupied so that we are prevented from seeing ourselves as we actually are.

We are afraid to be empty. We are afraid to look at our fears.
One of the functions of thought is to be occupied all the time with something.
You can watch only when the mind is very quiet, just as you can listen to what someone is saying only when your mind is not chattering with itself.

Is the observer who says, ‘I am afraid’, any different from the thing observed which is fear?

The observer is fear and when that is realised there is no longer any dissipation of energy in the effort to get rid of fear, and the time-space interval between the observer and the observed disappears.
When you see that you are a part of fear, not separate from it – that you are fear – then you cannot do anything about it; then fear comes totally to an end.

Violence – Ideal and Actual

Violence is not merely killing another. It is violence when we use a sharp word, when we make a gesture to brush away a person, when we obey because there is fear.

When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence.

To live completely, fully, in the moment is to live with what is, the actual, without any sense of condemnation or justification – then you understand it so totally that you are finished with it. When you see clearly the problem is solved.

Relationship – Poverty – Dependence

Relationship between human beings is based on the image-forming, defensive mechanism.

In all our relationships each one of us builds an image about the other and these two images have relationship, not the human beings themselves.
The actual relationship between two human beings or between many human beings completely ends when there is the formation of images.
All our relationships, whether they be with property, ideas or people, are based essentially on this image-forming, and hence there is always conflict.
In all our relationships, whether with the most intimate person or with a neighbour or with society, this conflict exists – conflict being contradiction, a state of division, separation, a duality.
Man has accepted conflict as an innate part of daily existence because he has accepted competition, jealousy, greed, acquisitiveness and aggression as a natural way of life.

Poverty is to be completely free of society.

Poverty becomes a marvellously beautiful thing when the mind is free of society.
One must become poor inwardly for then there is no seeking, no asking, no desire, no – nothing! It is only this inward poverty that can see the truth of a life in which there is no conflict at all.

All stimulation, whether of the church or of alcohol or of drugs or of the written or spoken word, will inevitably bring about dependence, and that dependence prevents us from seeing clearly for ourselves and therefore from having vital energy.

The mere intellectual acceptance of an idea, or the emotional acquiescence in an ideology, cannot free the mind from being dependent on something..

Contradiction exists when there is comparison.

There is what is only when there is no comparison at all, and to live with what is, is to be peaceful.
When you do not compare at all, when there is no ideal, no opposite, no factor of duality, when you no longer struggle to be different from what you are – what has happened to your mind? Your mind has ceased to create the opposite and has become highly intelligent, highly sensitive, capable of immense passion.

Effort is a dissipation of passion.

Passion is vital energy – and you cannot do anything without passion

Any conflict is a dissipation of energy.

The fact is what you are, and by comparing you are fragmenting the fact which is a waste of energy.

It is not the objects of desire but the very nature of desire which is contradictory.

State of contradiction is brought about by desire – desire being the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain.

You have a concept of what you should be and how you should act, and all the time you are in fact acting quite differently; so you see that principles, beliefs and ideals must inevitably lead to hypocrisy and a dishonest life.

Trying to become like somebody else, or like your ideal, is one of the main causes of contradiction, confusion and conflict.

Inaction is complete action.

Freedom – Solitude

When we talk of freedom are we talking of complete freedom or of freedom from some inconvenient or unpleasant or undesirable thing?

To see is to act and to be free

Freedom comes only when you see and act, never through revolt.
The seeing is the acting and such action is as instantaneous as when you see danger.
Freedom is a state of mind – not freedom from something but a sense of freedom, a freedom to doubt and question everything.

To be alone you must die to the past.

You are never alone because you are full of all the memories, all the conditioning, all the mutterings of yesterday; your mind is never clear.

You cannot become free gradually. It is not a matter of time.

If you say, ‘I am free’, then you are not free.

Freedom can only come about naturally, not through wishing, wanting, longing.

To come upon it the mind has to learn to look at life, which is a vast movement, without the bondage of time, for freedom lies beyond the field of consciousness.

Time – Sorrow – Death

Man lives by time.

Inventing the future has been his favourite game of escape.
Time is a movement which man has divided into past, present and future, and as long as he divides it he will always be in conflict.
Problems exist only in time, that is when we meet an issue incompletely. This incomplete coming together with the issue creates the problem.
The problem continues so long as we continue to give it incomplete attention, so long as we hope to solve it one of these days.

Time is the interval between idea and action.

Do you know what time is? Not by the watch, not chronological time, but psychological time? It is the interval between idea and action.

Action is always immediate; it is not of the past or of the future; to act must always be in the present, but action is so dangerous, so uncertain, that we conform to an idea which we hope will give us a certain safety.

There is the idea, the interval and action. And in that interval is the whole field of time. That interval is essentially thought.

If thought can think about it, it is within the field of thought and therefore it cannot be permanent because there is nothing permanent within the field of thought.

You cannot be frightened of the unknown because you do not know what the unknown is and so there is nothing to be frightened of.

The interval between the living and the dying is fear.

We have separated living from dying.
Death is extraordinarily like life when we know how to live.
You cannot live without dying.
You cannot live if you do not die psychologically every minute.
To die is to have a mind that is completely empty of itself, empty of its daily longings, pleasures and agonies.

Freedom from the known is death, and then you are living.

Love

When you feel separate from another there is no love.

What sex gives you momentarily is the total abandonment of yourself, then you are back again with your turmoil, so you want a repetition over and over again of that state in which there is no worry, no problem, no self.
When one loves there must be freedom, not only from the other person but from oneself.

Love is not the product of thought which is the past.

Love is always active present. It is not ‘I will love’ or ‘I have loved’.
There is beauty only when your heart and mind know what love is.
It is only the innocent mind which knows what love is, and the innocent mind can live in the world which is not innocent.

In duty there is no love.

So long as you are compelled to do something because it is your duty you don’t love what you are doing.

You are not seeking, not wanting, not pursuing; there is no centre at all.
Then there is love.

To Look and to Listen

If your eyes are blinded with your worries, you cannot see the beauty of the sunset.

Having lost touch with nature we naturally tend to develop intellectual capacities.

If you are directly in contact with nature; if you watch the movement of a bird on the wing, see the beauty of every movement of the sky, watch the shadows on the hills or the beauty on the face of another, do you think you will want to go to any museum to look at any picture?

It is only a mind that looks at a tree or the stars or the sparkling waters of a river with complete self-abandonment that knows what beauty is, and when we are actually seeing we are in a state of love.

When you look at a face opposite, you are looking from a centre and the centre creates the space between person and person, and that is why our lives are so empty and callous. You cannot cultivate love or beauty, nor can you invent truth, but if you are all the time aware of what you are doing, you can cultivate awareness and out of that awareness you will begin to see the nature of pleasure, desire and sorrow and the utter loneliness and boredom of man, and then you will begin to come upon that thing called ‘the space’.

What is Thinking?

Ideas have become far more important to us than action.

The more cunning, the more subtle, those ideas are the more we worship them and the books that contain them.
Ideas are always of the past and action is always the present – that is, living is always the present.
We are afraid of living and therefore the past, as ideas, has become so important to us.

Thought is the breeder of duality in all our relationships.

Thought in its demand for pleasure brings its own bondage.
As every challenge is met in terms of the past – a challenge being always new – our meeting of the challenge will always be totally inadequate, hence contradiction, conflict and all the misery and sorrow we are heir to.

Those who think a great deal are very materialistic because thought is matter.

Energy functioning in a pattern becomes matter.
Thought is matter as an ideology. Where there is energy it becomes matter.

A new fact cannot be seen by thought.

Thought can never solve any psychological problem.
Thought is crooked because it can invent anything and see things that are not there. It can perform the most extraordinary tricks, and therefore it cannot be depended upon.

If one wants to see a thing very clearly, one’s mind must be very quiet, without all the prejudices, the chattering, the dialogue, the images, the pictures.

It is only in silence that you can observe the beginning of thought – not when you are searching, asking questions, waiting for a reply.

If there is an awareness of how thought begins then there is no need to control thought.

As long as there is no thought derived from memory, experience or knowledge, which are all of the past, there is no thinker at all.

The Burdens of Past

In the life we generally lead there is very little solitude.

Are we ever alone? Or are we carrying with us all the burdens of yesterday?
We carry our burdens all the time; we never die to them, we never leave them behind.
It is only when we give complete attention to a problem and solve it immediately – never carrying it over to the next day, the next minute – that there is solitude.

Solitude indicates a fresh mind, an innocent mind.

To have inward solitude and space is very important because it implies freedom to be, to go, to function, to fly.

It is only when the mind is silent that there is a possibility of clarity.

Space and silence are necessary because it is only when the mind is alone, uninfluenced, untrained, not held by infinite varieties of experience, that it can come upon something totally new.
The whole purpose of meditation in the East is to bring about such a state of mind – that is, to control thought, which is the same as constantly repeating a prayer to quieten the mind and in that state hoping to understand one’s problems.

One of the greatest stumbling blocks in life is this constant struggle to reach, to achieve, to acquire.

Psychological security is not within the field of achievement.

The mere pursuit of the ideal of having a quiet mind is valueless because the more you force it the more narrow and stagnant it becomes.

Control in any form, like suppression, produces only conflict.

Discipline must be without control, without suppression, without any form of fear.
To understand this freedom, which is the freedom from the conformity of discipline, is discipline itself.
You don’t have to impose discipline in order to study it, but the very act of studying brings about its own discipline in which there is no suppression.

To study the whole psychological structure of authority within ourselves there must be freedom.

We cannot accept authority and yet study it – that is impossible.

Negation of everything that has been considered worthwhile, such as outward discipline, leadership, idealism, is to study it; then that very act of studying is not only discipline but the negative of it, and the very denial is a positive act.

What can be described is the known, and the freedom from the known can come into being only when there is a dying every day to the known.

A living mind is a still mind, a living mind is a mind that has no centre and therefore no space and time. Such a mind is limitless and that is the only truth, that is the only reality.

Experience — Satisfaction — Duality — Meditation

This demand for more and more experiences shows the inward poverty of man.

Most of us demand completely satisfying, lasting experiences which cannot be destroyed by thought.
Pleasure dictates the form of experience we demand, and pleasure is the measure by which we measure the experience.

If you don’t recognise an experience it isn’t an experience at all.
We recognise only something we have already known and therefore when we say we have had a new experience it is not new at all.

A mind that is seeking, craving, for wider and deeper experience is a very shallow and dull mind because it lives always with its memories.

Demand is born out of duality: ‘I am unhappy and I must be happy’. In that very demand that I must be happy is unhappiness.

Everything affirmed contains its own opposite, and effort to overcome strengthens that against which it strives.

Meditation is not following any system; it is not constant repetition and imitation.

By repetition you can induce the mind to be gentle and soft but it is still a petty, shoddy, little mind.
Meditation is not concentration.
You should be attentive to every movement of the mind wherever it wanders. When your mind wanders off it means you are interested in something else.
Meditation is the understanding of the totality of life in which every form of fragmentation has ceased.
Meditation is not control of thought, for when thought is controlled it breeds conflict in the mind.
That very understanding of the structure of thinking is its own discipline which is meditation.
Meditation is to be aware of every thought and of every feeling, never to say it is right or wrong but just to watch it and move with it. And out of this awareness comes silence.
Meditation is a state of mind which looks at everything with complete attention, totally, not just parts of it.
Meditation is one of the greatest arts in life – perhaps the greatest, and one cannot possibly learn it from anybody, that is the beauty of it. It has no technique and therefore no authority.
When you learn about yourself, watch yourself, watch the way you walk, how you eat, what you say, the gossip, the hate, the jealousy – if you are aware of all that in yourself, without any choice, that is part of meditation.

Love cannot be cultivated by thought.

In the understanding of meditation there is love, and love is not the product of systems, of habits, of following a method.

Total Revolution — The Religious Mind — Energy — Passion

The religious mind is something entirely different from the mind that believes in religion.

You cannot be religious and yet be a Hindu, a Muslim, a Christian, a Buddhist.
The religious mind is a state of mind in which there is no fear and therefore no belief whatsoever but only what is – what actually is.
It is a brutal thing to have ideals. If you have any ideals, beliefs or principles you cannot possibly look at yourself directly.
That state of mind which is no longer capable of striving is the true religious mind, and in that state of mind you may come upon this thing called truth or reality or bliss or God or beauty or love.

A man who knows what it is to have humility is a vain man.

A man who knows that he is silent, who knows that he loves, does not know what love is or what silence is.
So when you are directly in contact with fear or despair, loneliness or jealousy, or any other ugly state of mind, can you look at it so completely that your mind is quiet enough to see it?
If I am all the time measuring myself against you, struggling to be like you, then I am denying what I am myself.

When you say you dislike or hate someone that is a fact, although it sounds terrible. If you look at it, go into it completely, it ceases, but if you say, ‘I must not hate; I must have love in my heart’, then you are living in a hypocritical world with double standards. To live completely, fully, in the moment is to live with what is, the actual, without any sense of condemnation or justification – then you understand it so totally that you are finished with it. When you see clearly the problem is solved.

When you are confronted with something immediately there is no fear. It is only when thought comes in that there is fear.

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