"The other day when we met here, I was talking about the necessity of freedom; and by that word freedom I do not mean a peripheral or fragmentary freedom at certain levels of one's consciousness. I was talking about being totally free - free at the very root of one's mind, in all one's activities, physical, psychological, and parapsychological. Freedom implies a total absence of problems, does it not? Because when the mind is free, it can observe and act with complete clarity; it can be what it is without any sense of contradiction. To me, a life of problems - whether economic or social, private or public - destroys and perverts clarity. And one needs clarity. One needs a mind that sees very clearly every problem as it arises, a mind that can think without confusion, without conditioning, a mind that has a quality of affection, love - which has nothing whatever to do with emotionalism or sentimentality.
To be in this state of freedom - which is extremely difficult to understand, and requires a great deal of probing into - one must have an undisturbed, quiet mind; a mind that is functioning totally, not only at the periphery, but also at the center. This freedom is not an abstraction, it is not an ideal. The movement of the mind in freedom is a reality, and ideals and abstractions have nothing whatsoever to do with it. Such freedom takes place naturally, spontaneously - without any sort of coercion, discipline, control, or persuasion - when we understand the whole process of the arising and the ending of problems. A mind that has a problem, which is really a disturbance, and has escaped from that problem, is still crippled, bound; it is not free. For the mind that does not resolve every problem as it arises, at whatever level - physical, psychological, emotional - there can be no freedom and therefore no clarity of thought, of outlook, of perception.
Most human beings have problems. I mean by a problem the lingering disturbance created by one's inadequate response to a challenge - that is, by the incapacity to meet an issue totally, with one's whole being - or by the indifference which results in the habitual acceptance of problems and just putting up with them. There is a problem when one fails to confront each issue and go to the very end of it, not tomorrow or at some future date, but as it arises, every minute, every hour, every day."
(J. Krishnamurti, Second Talk in Saanen, 1964)Can we have a "taste" of the vastness he is talking about?
(picture titled "dessert storm", courtesy of Gerry Johnson, http://www.
