Jiddu Krishnamurti Quotes & Sayings on Truth, Jiddu Krishnamurti on Truth

Jiddu Krishnamurti

Jiddu Krishnamurti Quotes on Truth

First of all, to understand truth you must stand alone, entirely and wholly alone. No Master, no teacher, no guru, no system, no self-discipline will ever lift for you the veil which conceals wisdom. Wisdom is the understanding of enduring values and the living of those values. No one can lead you to wisdom.
Belief is a denial of truth, belief hinders truth; to believe in God is not to find God. Neither the believer nor the non-believer will find God; because reality is the unknown, and your belief or non-belief in the unknown is merely a self-projection and therefore not real.
You cannot find truth through anybody else. How can you? Truth is not something static; it has no fixed abode; it is not an end, a goal. On the contrary, it is living, dynamic, alert, alive.
For the discovery of truth there is no path. You must enter the uncharted sea.
Truth can only come to the mind that is empty of the known. It comes in a state in which the known is absent, not functioning. The mind is the warehouse of the known, the residue of the known; for the mind to be in that state in which the unknown comes into being, it must be aware of itself, of its previous experiences, the conscious as well as the unconscious, of its responses, reactions, and structure.
It is only the perception of truth that liberates; and to see, to receive truth, there must be the focusing of attention, which means that you must give your heart and mind to see and to understand.
When the mind seeks truth, the truth it has read about in books, that 'truth' is self-projected; for then the mind is merely in pursuit of the known, a more satisfactory known than the previous one. When the mind seeks truth, it is seeking its own self-projection, not truth.
A man who is protecting himself constantly through knowledge is obviously not a truth- seeker.
God or truth or what you will is a thing that comes into being from moment to moment, and it happens only in a state of freedom and spontaneity, not when the mind is disciplined according to a pattern. God is not a thing of the mind, it does not come through self-projection, it comes only when there is virtue, which is freedom. Virtue is facing the fact of what is and the facing of the fact is a state of bliss. Only when the mind is blissful, quiet, without any movement of its own, without the projection of thought, conscious or unconscious - only then does the eternal come into being.
To find out what is truth there must be great love and a deep awareness of man's relationship to all things- which means that one is not concerned with one's own progress and achievements. The search for truth is true religion, and the man who is seeking truth is the only religious man.
Truth has no tradition, it cannot be handed down.
The man who is seeking comfort does not want truth; he only wants security, safety, a refuge in which he will not be disturbed. But a man who is seeking truth must invite disturbances, tribulations because it is only in moments of crisis that there is alertness, watchfulness, action. Then only that which is is discovered and understood.
There is no path to truth. There is not your path or my path. There is no Christian way to it, or Hindu way to it. A 'way' implies a static process to something which is also static. There is a way from here to that next village, the village is firmly there, rooted in the buildings, and there is a road to it. But truth is not like that, it is a living thing, a moving thing and therefore there can be no path to it, neither yours nor mine nor theirs.
To discover truth in some abstract realm is mere ideation, and most of us seek truth this way as a means of escape from life. Life is too much for us, too taxing, too painful, so we want truth away from life. Therefore we seek a guru who will help us to escape, and the more he helps us to escape, the more we are attached to that guru.
To understand what is, there must be no condemning, no justifying, no blaming; and since our whole structure of being is built upon denial and acceptance, one must become aware of the whole background. Just be aware as I am speaking, for choiceless awareness reveals the truth, and it is the truth that liberates, not your gurus or your systems, not all the pujas and rituals and practices. Through time, through discipline, through denial and acceptance you cannot find truth.
Truth comes into being when the mind is utterly and completely still, and that stillness is not made up, put together; that stillness arises only when there is understanding; and this understanding is not difficult, only it demands your whole attention. Attention is denied when you are merely living in the brain, and not with your whole being.
To receive truth, to know its beauty, to know its joy, there must be instant receptivity, unclouded by theories, fears and answers.
There will be division as long as there is the image which engenders the whole structure of conflict. So one must learn the art of looking, not only at the clouds and the flowers, at the movement of a tree in the wind, but actually looking at ourselves as we are, not saying, 'It is ugly', 'It is beautiful, or 'Is that all?' - all the verbal assertions that one has with regard to oneself. When we can look at ourselves clearly, without the image, then perhaps we shall be able to discover what is true for ourselves. And that truth is not in the realm of thought but of direct perception, in which there is no separation between the observer and the observed.
If I want to know the truth, I begin to inquire, and before I can know the truth of anything, I must have confidence. To have confidence, I must inquire into myself and remove those causes that prevent each experience from giving its full significance.
Simplicity is action, without idea. But that is a very rare thing; that means creativeness. So long as there is not creation, we are centres of mischief, misery and destruction. Simplicity is not a thing which you can pursue and experience. Simplicity comes, as a flower opens at the right moment, when each one understands the whole process of existence and relationship. Because we have never thought about it, observed it, we are not aware of it; we value all the outer forms of few possessions but those are not simplicity. Simplicity is not to be found; it does not lie as a choice between the essential and the non-essential. It comes into being only when the self is not; when the mind is not caught in speculations, conclusions, beliefs, ideations. Such a free mind only can find truth. Such a mind alone can receive that which is immeasurable, which is unnameable; and that is simplicity.
Seeing the false as the false and the true as the true is transformation, because when you see something very clearly as the truth, that truth liberates. When you see that something is false, that false thing drops away. When you see that ceremonies are mere vain repetitions, when you see the truth of it and do not justify it, there is transformation, is there not?, because another bondage is gone. When you see that class distinction is false, that it creates conflict, creates misery, division between people - when you see the truth of it, that very truth liberates. The very perception of that truth is transformation, is it not? As we are surrounded by so much that is false, perceiving the falseness from moment to moment is transformation. Truth is not cumulative. It is from moment to moment. That which is cumulative, accumulated, is memory, and through memory you can never find truth, for memory is of time - time being the past, the present and the future. Time, which is continuity, can never find that which is eternal; eternity is not continuity. That which endures is not eternal. Eternity is in the moment. Eternity is in the now. The now is not the reflection of the past nor the continuance of the past through the present to the future.