Without knowing myself, I have no real basis for thinking.
Interpretation
Self-awareness is essential for genuine understanding and thought.
This quote by Jiddu Krishnamurti emphasizes the importance of self-knowledge as a foundation for all critical thinking. Without insight into our own thoughts, beliefs, and motivations, our reasoning may lack authenticity and depth, suggesting that self-exploration is crucial for true understanding of the world around us.
In practice
In a personal development workshop, when discussing the importance of introspection.
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.
In efforts to soar above our nature, we invariably fall below it.
What difference is there in the color of the soul?
That Hegelian dialectics should provide a wonderful instrument for always being right, because they permit the interpretations of all defeats as the beginning of victory, is obvious. One of the most beautiful examples of this kind of sophistry occurred after 1933 when the German Communists for nearly two years refused to recognize that Hitler's victory had been a defeat for the German Communist Party.
Life's errors cry for the merciful beauty that can modulate their isolation into a harmony with the whole.
Don't go outside your house to see flowers. My friend, don't bother with that excursion. Inside your body there are flowers. One flower has a thousand petals. That will do for a place to sit. Sitting there you will have a glimpse of beauty inside the body and out of it, before gardens and after gardens.
Death is not the greatest of evils; it is worse to want to die, and not be able to.
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