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Bombay, 6 January 1960
The Mind Is the known — the known being that which has been experienced. With that measure, we try to know the unknown. But the known can obviously never know the unknown; it can know only what it has experienced, what it has been taught, what it has gathered. Can the mind see the truth of its own incapacity to know the unknown?
Surely if I see very clearly that my mind cannot know the unknown, there is absolute quietness. If I feel that I can capture the unknown with the capacities of the known, I make a lot of noise; I talk, I reject, I choose, I try to find a way to it. But if the mind realizes its own absolute incapacity to know the unknown, if it perceives that it cannot take a single step towards the unknown, then what happens? Then the mind becomes utterly silent. It is not in despair; it is no longer seeking anything.
The movement of search can only be from the known to the known, and all that the mind can do is to be aware that this movement will never uncover the unknown. Any movement on the part of the known is still within the field of the known. That is the only thing I have to perceive; that is the only thing the mind has to realize. Then, without any stimulation, without any purpose, the mind is silent.
Have you not noticed that love is silence? It may be while holding the hand of another, or looking lovingly at a child, or taking in the beauty of an evening. Love has no past or future, and so it is with this extraordinary state of silence. And without this silence, which is complete emptiness, there is no creation. You may bevery clever in your capacity, but where there is no creation, there is destruction, decay, and the mind withers away.
When the mind is empty, silent, when it is in a state of complete negation — which is not blankness, nor the opposite of being positive, but a totally different state in which all thought has ceased — only then is it possible for that which is unnameable to come into being.
On God. Copyright © by Jiddu Krishnamurti. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
