All quotes from Jiddu Krishnamurti’s

The brain is the centre of all the senses; the more the senses are alert and sensitive the sharper the brain is.

Revolution, social, economic, can only change outer states and things, in increasing or narrowing circles, but it will always be within the limited field of thought. For total revolution the brain must forsake all its inward, secret mechanism of authority, envy, fear and so on.

To do something for its own sake seems quite difficult and almost undesirable. Social values are based on doing something for the sake of something else. This makes for barren existence, a life which is never complete, full.

This activity of doing something for the sake of something else is in essence an intricate series of escapes, escapes from oneself, from what is.

Thought is matter and it can be made into anything, ugly—beautiful.

Unrelated to all these twists and turns of self-contaminated consciousness, wholly different is this immense solitude. In it all creation takes place.

It’s as though everything stood still. There’s no movement, no stirring, complete emptiness of all thought, of all seeing. There’s no interpreter to translate, to observe, to censor. An immeasurable vastness that is utterly still and silent. There is no space, nor time to cover that space. The beginning and the ending are here, of all things.

The brain was only an instrument and it’s the mind that is this timeless expanding, exploding intensity of creation.

The brain had lost all its responses; it was only an instrument of observation, it was seeing, not as the brain belonging to a particular person, but as a brain which is not conditioned by time-space, as the essence of all brains.

There’s an inward observation which is not the outward observation turned inward. The brain and the eye which observe only partially do not comprehend the total seeing. They must be alive completely but still; they must cease to choose and judge but be passively aware. Then the inward seeing is without the border of time-space. In this flash a new perception is born.

Why is it that there is deterioration? Inwardly as well as outwardly. Why? Time brings destruction to all mechanical organizations; it wears out by use and disease every form of organism. Why should there be deterioration inwardly, psychologically? Beyond all explanations which a good brain can give why do we choose the worse and not the better, why hate rather than love, why greed and not generosity, why self-centred activity and not open total action? Why be mean when there are soaring mountains and flashing streams? Why jealousy and not love? Why?

All these are merely words and so they can never represent the real; the symbol is never the real and the symbol is without value.

There is the purity of incredible beauty, the beauty not of things, which thought or feeling has put together, or the gift of some craftsman, but as a river that wanders, nourishing and indifferent, polluted and made use of; it’s there, complete and rich in itself. And a strength that has no value in man’s social structure and behaviour.

It was actually taking place, it wasn’t a dream, a vision nor a symbol to be interpreted. It was there taking place, beyond any doubt; it was not a thing of imagination. No thought could possibly invent it; it was too immense and real for thought to formulate it.

Creation is not for the talented, for the gifted; they only know creativeness but never creation. Creation is beyond thought and image, beyond the word and expression. It is not to be communicated for it cannot be formulated, it cannot be wrapped up in words. It can be felt in complete awareness. It cannot be used and put on the market, to be haggled and sold.

The cup is not only the shape, the colour, the design but also that emptiness inside the cup. The cup is the emptiness held within a form; without that emptiness there would be no cup nor form.

Seeing a cloud over a mountain, without thought and its responses, is the miracle of the new; it’s not “beautiful,” it’s explosive in its immensity; it is something that has never been and never will be. To see, to listen, consciousness in its entirety must be still for the destructive creation to be. It is the totality of life and not the fragment of all thought. There is no beauty but only a cloud over the mountain; it is creation.