Tradition, long conditioned thinking, can bring about a fixation, a concept that one readily accepts, perhaps not with a great deal of thought.
Interpretation
Tradition can limit our thinking and lead to uncritical acceptance of ideas.
In this quote, Jiddu Krishnamurti emphasizes that tradition and conditioned thinking can create mental fixations that hinder our ability to think independently. When we accept concepts without questioning, we risk becoming trapped in outdated beliefs, limiting our understanding and perspective on life.
In practice
During a debate on educational reform, one might reference this quote to emphasize the need for critical thinking.
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 isn't what people think that is important, but the reason they think what they think.
Even what people take to be their most personal desires are usually programmed by the imagined order.
I think it's too easy to recount your unhappy memories when you write about yourself. You bask in your own innocence. You revere your grief. You arrange your angers at their most becoming angles.
Medicine to produce health must examine disease; and music, to create harmony must investigate discord.
[The Pope] will make the king believe that three are only one, that the bread he eats is not bread... and a thousand other things of the same kind.
Public money ought to be touched with the most scrupulous conscientiousness of honor. It is not the produce of riches only, but of the hard earnings of labor and poverty. It is drawn even from the bitterness of want and misery. Not a beggar passes, or perishes in the streets, whose mite is not in that mass.
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