The Book of Life: Daily Meditations with Krishnamurti

You will find that the more you listen to everything, the greater is the silence, and that silence is then not broken by noise. It is only when you are resisting something, when you are putting up a barrier between yourself and that to which you do not want to listen—it is only then that there is a struggle.

the difficulty for most of us is that the mind has become so important, so predominantly significant, that it interferes constantly with anything that may be new, with anything that may exist simultaneously with the known.

Be simple … and don’t try to become something or to capture some experience.

Great seers have always told us to acquire experience. They have said that experience gives us understanding. But it is only the innocent mind, the mind unclouded by experience, totally free from the past—it is only such a mind that can perceive what is reality.

Truth or understanding comes in a flash, and that flash has no continuity; it is not within the field of time. Do see this for yourself. Understanding is fresh, instantaneous; it is not the continuity of something that has been.

To listen there must be an inward quietness, a freedom from the strain of acquiring, a relaxed attention.

We only know two times, physical and psychological, and we are caught in time. Physical time plays an important part in the psyche, and the psyche has an important influence on the physical.

We are always in conflict between what is and “what should be.” The “what I should be” is an idea, and the idea is fictitious, it is not “what I am,” which is the fact; and the “what I am” can be changed only when I understand the disorder that time creates.

Listening has importance only when one is not projecting one’s own desires through which one listens. Can one put aside all these screens through which we listen, and really listen?