Commentaries On Living : J Krishnamurthy

Jiddu Krishnamurthy, the sage who would'nt be guru, had declined to accept the throne of the world master in 1930. The order of the star of the east was offered to krisnamurthy by Annie Besant the then chief of Theosophical Society. He was brought up by Annie Beasnt & Leadbeater in order to become the world master that they were awaiting. The twist in the tale came with the awakening of Krishnamurthy & he announced that truth can never be organised or cannot be sought with the help of any guru.

He died in 1986 in Ojai USA.

Although he refused any kind of guruhood but he went on to become a world reknowned teacher & preacher of his own experiences in the form of his discourses & writings. A small group also flourished around him by the name of Krishnamurthy Foundation.

Commenataries On Living is one of the many writings by Krishnamurhty. In this book he talks in details about every aspects of human life.

some excerpts from the book:-

The mind moves from the known to the known, and it cannot reach out into the unknown. You cannot think of something you do not know; it is impossible. What you think about comes out of the known, the past, whether that past be remote, or the second that has just gone by. This past is thought, shaped and conditioned by many influences, modifying itself according to circumstances and pressures, but ever remaining a process of time. Thought can only deny or assert, it cannot discover the new.

Disciplines, renunciations, detachments, rituals, the practice of virtue—all these, however noble, are the process of thought; and thought can only work towards an end, towards an achievement, which is ever the known. Achievement is security, the self-protective certainty of the known. To seek security in that which is nameless is to deny it. The security that may be found is only in the projection of the past, of the known.

For this reason the mind must be entirely and deeply silent; but this silence cannot be purchased through sacrifice, sublimation or suppression. This silence comes when the mind is no longer seeking, no longer caught in the process of becoming. This silence may not be built up through practice. This silence must be as unknown to the mind as the timeless; for if the mind experiences the silence, then there is the experiencer who is cognizant of a past silence; and what is experienced by the experiencer is merely a self-projected repetition. The mind can never experience the new, and so the mind must be utterly still. The mind can be still only when it is not experiencing, that is, when it is not terming or naming, recording or storing up in memory.

This book, I love a lot.