THE NATURE OF THE MIND 4
Krishnamurti Sonoma Center | One-day program
Saturday, Aug. 2, 2025
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https://krishnamurticenter.org/nature-of-the-mind-4-2025/
I have a question: What is the mind? How do you respond, and what is responding? How do you observe anything? How do you observe a tree? Do you glance at the surface of it; or do you observe the trunk, the branches, the leaves, the flowers, the fruit – the whole of the tree? How do you observe a thing, totally? I hope I am not making it too abstract, but I think one has to go into all this. When we ask the question: what is the mind?, how do you respond to that challenge? From what centre, from what background do you observe? And to observe something entirely, newly, totally, what do you do?
The mind is the capacity to recognize, to hoard knowledge as memory; it is the result of centuries of human endeavour, experience and conflict, and of the present individual experiences in relation to the past and the future; it is the capacity to design, to communicate, to feel, to think rationally or irrationally. There is the mind that feels gentle, quiet, serene, and also brutal, ruthless, superior, arrogant, vain; that is in a state of self-contradiction, pulled in different directions. It is the mind that says, `I am English’, or `American’, or `Indian’. There is the unconscious mind, the deep down collective, the inherited; and there is the superficial mind that has been educated according to a certain technique, a code of behaviour, action and knowledge. It is the mind that is seeking, searching, wanting permanency, security; the mind that lives on hope, but knows only frustration, failure and despair; the mind that can remember, recollect; the mind that is very sharp, precise; the mind that knows what it is to love, and to want to be loved.
Surely, all that is the totality, is it not? That is the mind which you and I have. And then there is the mind which says it must go beyond all this, must reach out somewhere, must experience a totality, a timeless, immeasurable thing.
So, all that is the mind. We know of it in segments, when we are jealous, angry, hateful; or we are aware of it in self-contradiction; or there are dreams, hints, intimations from the past. It is the mind that is caught within the limits of time, because all that is of time.
Now realizing all this, then how do you proceed?
You see, sirs, there must be a change; and a calculated change is no change at all. The change to achieve a certain result, through practice, discipline, control, ruthless domination – all that is merely the continuity of the same thing in a different guise. And the progressive, evolutionary change – that has gone too, we have finished with it. The only change is the radical, immediate change. How is the mind to come to that change, so that it has wiped away its conditioning, its brutalities, its stupidities, its fears, its guilt, its anxieties, and is new? I say it is possible, not through the analytical process, not through investigation, examination and all that. I say it is possible to wipe the slate clean at one stroke, in the instant. That is why I said at the beginning that we need very clear, precise thinking, a ruthless enquiry.
-Krishnamurti, Public Talk 1 London, England – 02 May 1961
Join us for a day of exploration into the Nature of the Mind informed by the teachings of Krishnamurti.
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https://krishnamurticenter.org/nature-of-the-mind-4-2025/
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