Life does not belong to the hermit, or to the sannyasi, or to the politician, or even to the saintly politician. Life, is something extraordinarily vast, immense, immeasurable. A petty mind cannot possibly understand it. A petty mind is essentially an ambitious mind, a greedy mind, an acquisitive mind. And the moment you cease to be ambitious in every form - even the ambition to find out God - the moment you have broken off from ambition, your brain becomes astonishingly quiet. The brain then is quiet without any movement of desire, because desire has been understood. When you have understood the imaginary visions, belonging to this and that, when all that has been set aside, forgotten, then you are no longer caught by the known. Most of us move from the known to the known; that is our daily activity. All your life is spent in the office or in some technical work, from the known to the known. Your mind thinks in terms of the known and therefore is never free from the known.
A meditative mind is free from the known - that means free from the word, the symbol, the idea, the belief, the dogma, the projections from the past. When the brain is free from the past, or rather when the brain is quiet, the totality of the whole consciousness becomes completely still - the totality of consciousness, not just one part - because it is completely alone, uninfluenced. It no longer belongs to any society, any group, any caste, any religion, any dogma; it has finished with all these. Therefore there is complete stillness of the mind; and in that stillness there is neither the observer nor the observed - because the observer, as I explained, is the result of the reaction of thought; the observer, the thinker, is the reaction of thought. You can yourself think all this out if you are interested, afterwards.
J. Krishnamurti
Public Talk 6 New Delhi, India - 07 February 1962
