From ‘Think on These Things’ by J. Krishnamurti

And should not education help you to find out what you really love to do, so that from the beginning to the end of your life you are working at something which you feel is worthwhile and which for you has deep significance? Otherwise, for the rest of your days, you will be miserable. Not knowing what you really want to do, your mind falls into a routine in which there is only boredom, decay and death. That is why it is very important to find out while you are young what it is you really love to do, and this is the only way to create a new society


Do you know what it means to be considerate? When you see a sharp stone on a path trodden by many bare feet, you remove it, not because you have been asked, but because you feel for another – it does not matter who he is, and you may never meet him. To plant a tree and cherish it, to look at the river and enjoy the fullness of the earth, to observe a bird on the wing and see the beauty of it's flight, to have sensitivity and be open to this extraordinary movement called life ………….



But when the mind is no longer comparing, judging, evaluating, and is therefore capable of seeing what is from moment to moment without wanting to change it – in that very perception is the eternal



……. And this is an essential part of education: to learn to stand alone so that you are not caught either in the will of the many or in the will of one, and are therefore capable of discovering for yourself what is true.
Don’t depend on anybody ………



If you don’t begin to understand life while you are young, you will grow up inwardly hideous; you will be dull, empty inside, though outwardly you may have money, ride in expensive cars, put on airs.



Wherever one goes in the world, it does not matter where, one finds that society is in a perpetual state of conflict. There are always the powerful, the rich, the well-to-do on the one hand, and the labourers on the other; and each one is enviously competing, each one wants a higher position, a bigger salary, more power, more prestige. That is the state of the world, and so there is always war going on both within and without.

Now, if you and I want to bring about a complete revolution in the social order, the first thing we have to understand is this instinct for the acquisition of power.


Society is the relationship between you and me, and if our relationship is based on ambition, each one of us wanting to be more powerful than the other, then obviously we shall always be in conflict………


Have you noticed how few of us have deep feeling about anything? Do you ever rebel against your teachers….. parents…… because you have a deep, ardent feeling that you don’t want to do certain things? If you feel deeply and ardently about something, you will find that this very feeling in a curious way brings a new order into your life.………

That is why you should have strong feelings – feelings of passion, anger – and watch them, play with them, find out the truth of them. For if you merely suppress them ……. you will find that your mind is gradually being encased in an idea and thereby becomes very shallow.


You cannot learn to love, but what you can do is to observe hate and put it gently aside.



If you have no prejudice, no bias, if you are open, then everything around you becomes extraordinarily interesting, tremendously alive.
That is why it is very important, while you are young, to notice all these things. Be aware of the boat on the river, watch the train go by, see the peasant carrying a heavy burden, observe the insolence of the rich, the pride of the ministers, of the big people, of those who think they know a lot – just watch them, don’t criticize.



…. to have this inward beauty, there must be complete abandonment, the sense of not being held, of no restraint, no defence, no resistance, but abandonment becomes chaotic if there is no austerity with it …… what it means to be austere, to be satisfied with little and not to think in terms of ‘the more’?
……….. There is austerity when the mind is capable of infinite experience – when it has experience and yet remains very simple



……… whereas if you observe your mind very quietly without giving explanations, if you just let the mind be aware of it's own struggle, you will soon find that there comes a state in which there is no struggle at all, but an astonishing watchfulness. In that state of watchfulness there is no sense of the superior and the inferior, there is no big man or little man, there is no guru. All those absurdities are gone because the mind is fully awake, and the mind that is fully awake is joyous.



Why is there this everlasting craving to be loved? Listen carefully. You want to be loved because you do not love, but the moment you love, it is finished, you are no longer inquiring whether or not somebody loves you.


One of our main difficulties is that modern education all over the world is chiefly concerned with making us mere technicians ………. Our lives are very empty now, are they not? You may have a college degree, you may get married and be well off, you may be clever, have a great deal of information ……… But as long as you fill your heart with the things of the mind, your life is bound to be empty, ugly, and it will have very little meaning. There is beauty and meaning in life only when the heart is cleansed of the things of the mind.


You will never find God at sixty, for at that age most people are worn out, finished. You must begin when you are very young ……..


To break out of the prison of belief requires a mature mind, a thoughtful mind, a mind that perceives the nature of the prison itself and does not compare one prison with another. …….. If you examine the nature of organized religion, you will see that all religions are essentially alike, whether Hinduism, Buddhism, Mohammedanism, Christianity – or communism, which is another form of religion, the very latest ……… only the man who is free of belief can discover that which lies beyond all belief, that which is immeasurable.



The mind can discover only when it is young, fresh, innocent, but innocence is not a matter of age …….. the mind that is capable of experiencing without accumulating the residue of experience. The mind ….. must respond to everything – to the river, to the diseased animal, to the dead body being carried away to be burnt, to the poor villagers carrying their burdens along the road, to the tortures and miseries of life – otherwise it is already dead, but it must be capable of responding without being held by the experience. It is tradition, the accumulation of experience, the ashes of memory, that make the mind old. The mind that dies every day to the memories of yesterday, to all the joys and sorrows of the past – such a mind is fresh, innocent, it has no age; and without that innocence, whether you are ten or sixty, you will not find God.