The only freedom is the freedom from the known.
Interpretation
True freedom comes from letting go of preconceived notions and familiar beliefs.
Jiddu Krishnamurti's quote suggests that genuine freedom is not merely about external liberties but rather about the liberation of the mind from established beliefs and past experiences. It encourages individuals to question their assumptions and discover new perspectives, thus experiencing life more fully and authentically.
In practice
During a talk about overcoming personal barriers, this quote can illustrate the need to challenge one's understanding.
The following of authority is the denial of intelligence. [It] may help us temporarily to cover up our difficulties and problems; but to avoid a problem is only to intensify it, and in the process, self-knowledge and freedom are abandoned.
In seeking comfort, we generally find a quiet corner in life where there is a minimum of conflict, and then we are afraid to step out of that seclusion.
If you listen through the screen of your desires, then you obviously listen to your own voice; you are listening to your own desires.
If you have this extraordinary thing going in your life, then it is everything; then you become the teacher, the disciple, the neighbour, the beauty of the cloud - you are all that, and that is love.
Meditation is one of the greatest arts in life - perhaps the greatest, and one cannot possibly learn it from anybody, that is the beauty of it.
All of us have been trained by education and environment to seek personal gain and security and to fight for ourselves. Though we cover it over with pleasant phrases, we have been educated for various professions within a system which is based on exploitation and acquisitive fear.
It is dangerous when you start calling people from one part of the world terrorists or fanatic, and you reduce them to some abstract notion. If evil has a geographical place, and if the evil has a name, that is the beginning of fascism. Real life is not this way. You have fanatics and narrow-minded people everywhere.
I was forced to stretch my thinking, to realize that sincere and honest people could believe in very divergent religious doctrines.
Some of my ancestors fought in the American Revolution. A few more wore red coats, a few wore blue coats, and the rest wore no coats at all. We never did figure out who won that war.
It is quite possible--overwhelmingly probable, one might guess--that we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology
Form follows profit is the aesthetic principle of our times.
Whatever the misery, he could not regain contentment with a world which, once doubted, became absurd.
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