concentration. When you concentrate, or attempt to concentrate, in that
concentration there is the observer and the observed. There is the one who says,
“I must concentrate; I must force myself to concentrate,” so concentration
becomes conflict. When you do learn to concentrate, like a schoolboy, then that
concentration becomes a process of exclusion, building a wall against thought,
which is another movement of thought. Concentration is not meditation.
Meditation is not an escape from the understanding of what yourself actually is.
So there must be complete self-knowledge—not of a higher-self or the Atman
and all that rubbish, which are all inventions. What is fact is real, inventions are
not.
So, a mind that has understood through negation that there is no system, no
method, no concentration becomes very quiet naturally. In that, there is no
observer who has achieved some kind of silence. In that silence there is the
emptying of the mind of all the past. Unless you do this in your daily life, you
won’t understand the marvel, the subtlety, the beauty, the extraordinariness of it.
Don’t merely repeat what the speaker says. If you repeat, it becomes propaganda,
which is a lie.
So when the mind has complete order, mathematical order, and that order has
conie into being naturally through the understanding of the disorder of our daily
life, then the mind becomes extraordinarily quiet. This quiet has vast space. It is
not the quiet of a little room. It is not the silence of the ending of noise. It is of a
mind that has understood the whole problem of existence, love and death and
living, the beauty of the skies, the trees, the people. All your religious gurus have
denied beauty, and that’s why you destroy your trees, nature. When you have
understood all this, then you will know what happens in that silence. Nobody can
describe it. Anybody who describes it doesn’t know what it is. It is for you to
find out.
You must ask questions, not only of the speaker but of yourself, which is far
more important. Ask yourself why you believe, why you follow, why you accept
authority, why you are corrupt, angry, jealous, brutal, violent. Question that and
find out the answer; and you cannot find out the answer by asking another. You
see, you have to stand alone, completely alone, which doesn’t mean you become
isolated. Because you are alone then you will know what it means to live purely.
Therefore you must endlessly ask questions. And the more you ask of yourself,
do not try to find an answer but ask and look. Ask and look and when you ask
there must be care, there must be affection, there must be love in your asking of
yourself, not beating yourself with questions.
QUESTIONER: When you say the one who says he knows doesn’t know, what
do you mean? Must you not know yourself to say that?
KRISHNAMURTI: Let’s proceed. We have said that he who says he knows does
not know. You hear that and you say, “What are you talking about? What do you
mean by that?” So you have to find out what the word know means. What is
involved in the word know? When you say you know your wife or your husband,
what do you mean? Do you know her or him? Or do you know the image that