On Freedom by Jiddu Krishnamurti

Author:Jiddu Krishnamurti [Krishnamurti, Jiddu]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

20. Saanen, 14 July 1964

The other day 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 para-psychological. 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 centre. 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 that 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.

Any problem at any level, conscious or unconscious, is a factor that destroys freedom. A problem is something that we don’t understand completely. One’s problem may be pain, physical discomfort, the death of someone, or the lack of money; it may be the incapacity to discover for oneself whether god is a reality, or merely a word without substance. And there are the problems of relationship, both private and public, individual as well as collective. Not to understand the whole of human relationship does

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