27. The Beauty of Life

In September 1973, Mary Lutyens suggested that Krishnamurti start keeping a journal. He bought a notebook and began writing the following morning, mostly about his memories. He continued doing so for six weeks. Krishnamurti's Journal was published in 1982.

With the book already in print, K continued to write, and these additional writings were later released in Krishnamurti Foundation Bulletins and as a book in 2023 titled The Beauty of Life.

The first entry is dated 14 September 1973 and the final entry in the original edition is dated 24 April 1975. Some entries were written in August 1981, more than six years later. The full-text edition includes these additional entries.

The Journal differs considerably from that of the Notebook, in which K described his inner states of consciousness. Here, the descriptions blend real events, recollections of the past, and philosophical content. The language is beautiful, and the descriptions in many episodes are astonishingly detailed and vivid.

When the Self Is Speechless

The book begins in the Grove at Brockwood Park, where K feels like an intruder when he enters a small forest with redwoods.

"The heart was beating less fast, speechless with the wonder of an unexpected benediction."

The next day, K seems to be in Switzerland. He writes that not a single thought crossed his mind during his long walks along solitary mountain paths or in the crowded streets. He had always been like this, but had only recently realised how extraordinary it was.

On the third day, K drives a Mercedes along mountain roads and enjoys himself. He had always liked machines, and meditation came naturally when driving the car. There was no meditator, no words, no time.

Then we are in India, where K describes the different types of forest. He also reminds us to take care of our brains. They are a marvellous

creation, unmatched even by the best computer. However, thinking has also caused incredible mischief, confusion, sorrow and misery.

Nothing will change as long as the'me' and the 'you'remain. The 'me' never realises that it is the 'you', that the observer is the observed.

His brain was active when he was talking and writing; but otherwise, it was completely quiet, and just observing. K says he often wakes up at night during meditation.

The other night, he was aware of a ball of fire entering the very centre of his head. He watched this happening as though it were happening to someone else.

Who Is Healthy?

We then move to the setting of the Ojai Valley in California. In the mountains, K encounters a bobcat and follows it for about a mile.

K wonders why humans go wrong and become corrupt, indecent. It's easy to blame others; explanations and causes are an easy way out.

Some of us are born generous, kind, and responsible. They are not changed by the environment or any pressure. Why not?

"Any explanation is of little significance. All explanations are escapes, avoiding the reality of what is. This is the only thing that matters. The what is can be totally transformed with the energy that is wasted in explanations and in searching out the causes."

On 20 September, K wonders about the nature of sanity and insanity. Are the politicians or the priests sane? What about those who are committed to ideologies? Are the artists or intellectuals sane?

Fragmented, broken-up action is not sanity. A healthy mind means living without conflict. Do we have one?

"To breed antagonism and division, which is the trade of the politicians who represent you, is to cultivate and sustain insanity, whether they are dictators or those in who use their power in the name of peace or some form of ideology."

The mind and brain only function efficiently when they are in order. Conflict is disorder.

The mind processes all sorts of things during the day and tries to restore order at night. When the observer is the observed there is complete order.

The Truth Is Not in the Temple

The building used to be a temple, but it has fallen into ruins and become a sanctuary for birds and monkeys, parrots and doves. Long ago, it was a flourishing place, filled with thousands of worshippers offering garlands, incense, and prayers. Even though the holy sanctuary had disappeared long ago, the atmosphere of that time remained still there.

"Religion has become superstition and image-worship, belief and ritual. It has lost the beauty of truth; incense has taken the place of reality. Instead of direct observation there is in its place the image carved by the hand or the mind."

According to K, the only concern of religion is the total transformation of man. All the circus around it is nonsense.

"Truth is not to be found in any temple, church or mosque, however beautiful they are. Beauty of truth and the beauty of stone are two different things. One opens the door to the immeasurable, the other
to the imprisonment of man; one to freedom and the other to the bondage of thought. Romanticism and sentimentality deny the very nature of religion, nor is it a plaything of the intellect."

Beauty and truth are never where man can find them, for there is no path to its beauty.

"Truth is not a fixed point, a haven of shelter. It has its own tenderness whose love is not to be measured nor can you hold it, experience it. It has no market value to be used and put aside. It is there when the mind and heart are empty of the things of thought."

The Word Is Not the Thing

K once picked up a sea-washed piece of wood from the beach, shaped like a human head and put it on the mantelpiece. One day, he placed some flowers around it and continued doing so every day. Soon, that object became very important in his life. It had become holy, sacred.

"What is sacred?", K then asks. "Not the things made by the mind, the hand or the sea. The symbol is never the real; the word grass is not the grass of the field, and the word God is not God. The word never contains the whole, however cunning the description. The word sacred has no meaning by itself, it becomes sacred only in its relation to something, illusory or real. What is real is not in the words of the mind."

Non-Verbal Consultation

In October, K recalls his childhood. He used to sit under a large tree near a pond and watch the animals: snakes, chameleons, and frogs.

It is easy to feel that we are merely observing an external object. Without noticing, we develop a sense of the observer under the tree, and the word becomes more important than the object it describes.

"There are no ends to words, but communication is verbal and non-verbal. The hearing of the word is one thing and the hearing of no word is another; the one is irrelevant, superficial, leading to inaction; the other is non-fragmentary action, the flowering of goodness. Words have given beautiful walls but no space."

If you experience reality or truth, you must realise that it is only a projection of your own mind. There is no path to truth, historically
or religiously. It is not to be experienced or found through dialectics; it is not to be seen in shifting opinions and beliefs. You will come upon it when the mind is free of all the things it has put together.

The Role of Culture Is to Change Man

In October, K flew to Rome. The summer had been particularly hot and dry. It had been dreadful in the cities, but it was very beautiful out in the countryside.

On the television screen, the preacher said that he knew his saviour, the only Saviour, was alive, and that gave hope for the world. The aggressive thrust of his arm drove away any doubt or inquiry. His audience listened, spellbound and with open mouths. A war had just begun, but neither the preacher nor his large audience cared, for wars must go on and besides, war was part of their culture.

A little later, scientists' work was shown on the screen what the scientists: their marvellous inventions and new, complex machines,
as well as their experiments on animals. There were also images shown of weeping women and wounded children in war, as well as priests intoning blessings.

"The tears of mankind have not washed away the desire to kill. No religion has stopped war; on the contrary, they have all encouraged it and blessed the weapons of war; dividing the people. Governments are isolated and cherish their insularity.

Scientists are supported by governments. The preacher is lost in his words and images."

K sums up: "The function of culture is to transform man totally."

Where Is Peace Built?

In Sanskrit, there is a long prayer to peace. Written many centuries ago, it predates "the creeping poison of nationalism, the immorality of the power of money and the insistence on worldliness that is brought about by industrialisation".

The prayer is for enduring peace:

"May there be peace among the gods, in heaven and among the stars. May there be peace on earth, among men and four-footed animals. May we not hurt each other. May we be generous to each other. May we have that intelligence which will guide our life and action. May there be peace in our prayer, on our lips and in our hearts."

There is no mention of individuality in this peace. That concept came much later.

On 18 October, K wrote: "Peace is not an interval between the ending and beginning of conflict, of pain and of sorrow. No government can bring peace; its peace is of corruption and decay. The orderly rule of a people breeds degeneration for it is not concerned with all the people of the earth. Tyrannies can never hold peace for they destroy freedom. To kill another for peace is the idiocy of ideologies. No one can lead you to peace, no guru, no priest, no symbol. In meditation it is."

A few days later, he described the redwood tree, one of the oldest living things on the planet. It had withstood storms, fires, wars and lightning. K had visited that tree several times.

"Because it was not a man-made shrine, there was unfathomable sacredness which would never again leave you, for it was not yours."

Rats Destroy Each Other

One day, a mother came to ask K about love.

"In the denial of what love is not, love is. Don't be afraid of the word negation. Negate all that is not love, then what is is compassion."

There must be space for beauty and compassion.

"Everything must have space, the living and the dead, the rock on a hill and the bird on the wing. When there is no space, there is death. If rats are enclosed in a restricted space, they destroy each other.
The small birds sitting on a telegraph wire of an evening, have the needed space between each other. Human beings living in crowded cities are becoming violent. Where there is no space, outwardly and inwardly, every form of mischief and degeneration is inevitable."

A Light for All

K often used the phrase, "Be a light to yourself". Then you are a light to all others. To be a light to oneself denies all experience. Experiences come from the known, for these, recognition is essential.

"The conviction of experience is the negation of inquiry. Intelligence is the freedom to enquire, to investigate the me and the not me, the outer and the inner. Belief, ideologies and authority prevent insight which comes only with freedom. Thought may put together the inner, but it is still the outer. Freedom lies beyond thought. All the activity of thought is not love."

To be a light to oneself means the mind is free from challenge and response. The mind is then totally awake.

"As long as there's a centre, the me, there must be challenge and response, adequate or inadequate, pleasurable or sorrowful. The centre can never be a light to itself; its light is the artificial light of thought and it has many shadows. Compassion is not the shadow of thought but it is light, neither yours nor another's."

Unending Passion Brings Creation

It was a lovely morning, cool and fresh. Soft light covered the land. The beauty of that morning could not be described.

"Without passion there is no creation. Total abandonment brings this unending passion. Abandonment with a motive is one thing; without a purpose, without calculation, it is another."

That which has an end and a direction, is short-lived and becomes mischievous, commercial, and vulgar.

"The other, not driven by any cause, intention or gain, has no who is not guided by any reason, purpose or benefit has no beginning and no end. This abandonment is the emptying of the mind of the me,

the self. The me can lose itself in some activity, a comforting belief or a fanciful dream, but such loss is the continuing of the self in another form, identifying with another ideology and action. The abandonment of the self is not an act of will, for the will is the self. Any movement of the self, horizontally or vertically, in any direction is still within the field of time and sorrow."

Space, Knowledge and Self-awareness

In April 1975, K was in Malibu and recalled a situation in which a hundred Brahmins were chanting. The sound "opened the heart to tears and beauty".

Without space, there is no beauty, no depth, only poverty. Without space, we become violent and ugly.

There is no space in your mind when you think you are the centre of the universe. The space that you occupy is the space that thought has built around you, and that is filled with misery and confusion.

You can have a great deal of knowledge and still be poor in spirit. You can expand your consciousness through a variety of knowledge and remain poor. There is no knowledge of the inner, only the outer can be known.

"Only in relationship can you know yourself, not in abstraction, and certainly not in isolation. Even in a monastery, you are related to the society which has made the monastery as an escape, or closed the doors to freedom. The movement of behaviour is the sure guide to yourself; it is the mirror of your consciousness. This mirror will reveal its contents, the images, the attachments, the fears, the loneliness, the joy and the sorrow. Poverty lies in the running away from this, either in its sublimations or in its identities. Negating without resistance this content of consciousness is the beauty and compassion of intelligence."

The Messed-up Human

"Only man brings disorder to the universe. He is ruthless and extremely violent. Wherever he is he brings misery and confusion in himself and in the world about him. He lays waste and destroys, and he has no compassion. In himself there is no order and so what he touches becomes soiled and chaotic."

Our politics have become a refined gangsterism of power and deceit. Our economy is restricted and so it is not universal. Our society is immoral, whether under freedom or tyranny.

People are not religious, even though they believe, worship and perform endless rituals. Why has humanity become so cruel, irresponsible, and so utterly self-centred?

There are a hundred explanations, and those who offer them, subtly with words born from knowledge of many books, are caught in the web of human sorrow, ambition, pride and agony.

We are looking for outward causes, but there are none. The division between the outer and inner is the beginning of all conflict and misery. It is an invention of thought.

The Mystery of the Silent Night

"In the silence of deep night there is a great mystery. It is there in all living things. If you sit quietly under a tree, you would feel the ancient earth with its incomprehensible mystery. On a still night,
you would be aware of expanding space and the mysterious order of all things, of the immeasurable and of nothing."

There is mystery in ancient temples, but they lose their shadowy mystery, because there is bigotry, dogma and military pomp.

"The myth that is concealed in the deep layers of the mind is not mysterious, it is romantic, traditional and conditioned. In the secret recesses of the mind, truth has been pushed aside by symbols, words and images. In them there is no mystery, they are the churnings of thought."

Knowledge and its action bring wonder, appreciation and delight, but mystery is quite another thing. It is not an experience to be recognised, stored up and remembered.

In order to communicate, we need words, gestures and looks. However, to be in communion with the mysterious, the mind must be at the same level, at the same time, and with the same intensity. With this, the whole mystery of the universe is open.

"There is a space of nothingness whose volume is not bound by time, the measure of thought. This space the mind cannot enter, it can only observe. In this observation there is no experiencer. This observer has no history, no association, no myth, so the observer is that which is."

Thought Is Helpless

Thought tries to resolve the problems it has created, but this only perpetuates them. It is only when thought realises its own psychological incapacity that perception and insight put an end to the problems.