From these prejudices there arises conflict, transient joys and suffering. But we are unconscious of this, unconscious that we are slaves to certain forms of tradition, to social and political environment, to false values.
Interpretation
The quote highlights how ignorance of our ingrained beliefs and societal influences leads to conflict and suffering.
Jiddu Krishnamurti's quote delves into the idea that many of our conflicts arise from unexamined prejudices and traditions that we blindly adhere to. He suggests that we often remain unaware of how these beliefs enslave us, binding our perceptions and behaviors to societal norms and false values, which ultimately results in a cycle of transient joys followed by suffering.
In practice
In a discussion about societal norms, this quote can be used to encourage critical thinking about inherited beliefs.
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.
Oh, what a catastrophe for man when he cut himself off from the rhythm of the year, from his unison with the sun and the earth. Oh, what a catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was a personal, merely personal feeling, taken away from the rising and the setting of the sun, and cut off from the magic connection of the solstice and the equinox!
The mystic cords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the angels of our nature.
Neither failure nor success has the power to change your inner state of Being.
Awareness is ever there. It need not be realized. Open the shutter of the mind, and it will be flooded with light.
Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.
From forty years' experience of the wretched guess-work of the newspapers of what is not done in open daylight, and of their falsehood even as to that, I rarely think them worth reading, and almost never worth notice.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.