SOUNDLESS LANGUAGE

January 1

Listen with ease 

Have you ever sat very silently, not with your attention fixed on anything, not making an effort to concentrate, but with the mind very quiet, really still? Then you hear everything,

don’t you? You hear the far off noises as well as those that are nearer and those that are

very close by, the immediate sounds—which means really that you are listening to

everything. Your mind is not confined to one narrow little channel. If you can listen in

this way, listen with ease, without strain, you will find an extraordinary change taking

place within you, a change which comes without your volition, without your asking; and

in that change there is great beauty and depth of insight. 

January 2

Putting aside screens? 

How do you listen? Do you listen with your projections, through your projection, through

your ambitions, desires, fears, anxieties, through hearing only what you want to hear,

only what will be satisfactory, what will gratify, what will give comfort, what will for the

moment alleviate your suffering? If you listen through the screen of your desires, then

you obviously listen to your own voice; you are listening to your own desires. And is

there any other form of listening? Is it not important to find out how to listen not only to

what is being said but to everything— to the noise in the streets, to the chatter of birds, to

the noise of the tramcar, to the restless sea, to the voice of your husband, to your wife, to

your friends, to the cry of a baby? Listening has importance only when one is not

projecting one’s own desires through which one listens. Can one put aside all these

screens through which we listen, and really listen? 

January 3

Beyond the noise of words 

Listening is an art not easily come by, but in it there is beauty and great understanding.

We listen with the various depths of our being, but our listening is always with a

preconception or from a particular point of view. We do not listen simply; there is always

the intervening screen of our own thoughts, conclusions, and prejudices...To listen there

must be an inward quietness, a freedom from the strain of acquiring, a relaxed attention.

This alert yet passive state is able to hear what is beyond the verbal conclusion. Words

confuse; they are only the outward means of communication; but to commune beyond the

noise of words, there must be in listening an alert passivity. Those who love may listen;

but it is extremely rare to find a listener. Most of us are after results, achieving goals; we

are forever overcoming and conquering, and so there is no listening. It is only in listening

that one hears the song of the words. 

January 4

Listening without thought  I do not know whether you have listened to a bird. To listen to something demands that

your mind be quiet—not a mystical quietness, but just quietness. I am telling you

something, and to listen to me you have to be quiet, not have all kinds of ideas buzzing in

your mind. When you look at a flower, you look at it, not naming it, not classifying it, not

saying that it belongs to a certain species—when you do these, you cease to look at it.

Therefore I am saying that it is one of the most difficult things to listen—to listen to the

communist, to the socialist, to the congressman, to the capitalist, to anybody, to your

wife, to your children, to your neighbor, to the bus conductor, to the bird—just to listen.

It is only when you listen without the idea, without thought, that you are directly in

contact; and being in contact, you will understand whether what he is saying is true or

false; you do not have to discuss. 

January 5

Listening brings freedom 

When you make an effort to listen, are you listening? Is not that very effort a distraction

that prevents listening? Do you make an effort when  you listen to something that gives

you delight?...You are not aware of the truth, nor do you see the false as the false, as long

as your mind is occupied in any way with effort, with comparison, with justification or

condemnation...

Listening itself is a complete act; the very act of listening brings its own freedom. But are

you really concerned with listening, or with altering the turmoil within? If you would

listen, sir, in the sense of being aware of your conflicts and contradictions without forcing

them into any particular pattern of thought, perhaps they might altogether cease. You see,

we are constantly trying to be this or that, to achieve a particular state, to capture one

kind of experience and avoid another, so the mind is everlastingly occupied with

something; it is never still to listen to the noise of its own struggles and pains. Be

simple...and don’t try to become something or to capture some experience. 

January 6

Listening without effort 

You are now listening to me; you are not making an effort to pay attention, you are just

listening; and if there is truth in what you hear, you will find a remarkable change taking

place in you—a change that is not premeditated or wished for, a transformation, a

complete revolution in which the truth alone is master and not the creations of your mind.

And if I may suggest it, you should listen in that way to everything—not only to what I

am saying, but also to what other people are saying, to the birds, to the whistle of a

locomotive, to the noise of the bus going by. You will find that the more you listen to

everything, the greater is the silence, and that silence is then not broken by noise. It is

only when you are resisting something, when you are putting up a barrier between

yourself and that to which you do not want to listen—it is only then that there is a

struggle.  

 January 7

Listening to yourself 

Questioner: While I am here listening to you, I seem to understand, but when I am away

from here, I don’t understand, even though I try to apply what you have been saying.

Krishnamurti: You are listening to yourself, and not to the speaker. If you are listening to

the speaker, he becomes your leader, your way to understanding which is a horror, an

abomination, because you have then established the hierarchy of authority. So what you

are doing here is listening to yourself. You are looking at the picture the speaker is

painting, which is your own picture, not the speaker’s. If that much is clear, that you are

looking at yourself, then you can say, “Well, I see myself as I am, and I don’t want to do

anything about it”—and that is the end of it. But if you say, “I see myself as I am, and

there must be a change,” then you begin to work out of your own understanding—which

is entirely different from applying what the speaker is saying...But if, as the speaker is

speaking, you are listening to yourself, then out of that listening there is clarity, there is

sensitivity; out of that listening the mind becomes healthy, strong. Neither obeying nor

resisting, it becomes alive, intense—and it is only such a human being who can create a

new generation, a new world. 

January 8

Look with intensity 

...It seems to me that learning is astonishingly difficult, as is listening also. We never

actually listen to anything because our mind is not free; our ears are stuffed up with those

things that we already know, so listening becomes extraordinarily difficult. I think—or

rather, it is a fact—that if one can listen to something with all of one’s being, with vigor,

with vitality, then the very act of listening is a liberative factor, but unfortunately you

never do listen, as you have never learned about it. After all, you only learn when you

give your whole being to something. When you give your whole being to mathematics,

you learn; but when you are in a state of contradiction, when you do not want to learn but

are forced to learn, then it becomes merely a process of accumulation. To learn is like

reading a novel with innumerable characters; it requires your full attention, not

contradictory attention. If you want to learn about a leaf—a leaf of the spring or a leaf of

the summer—you must really look at it, see the symmetry of it, the texture of it, the

quality of the living leaf. There is beauty, there is vigor, there is vitality in a single leaf.

So to learn about the leaf, the flower, the cloud, the sunset, or a human being, you must

look with all intensity. 

January 9

To learn, the mind must be quiet 

To discover anything new you must start on your own; you must start on a journey

completely denuded, especially of knowledge, because it is very easy, through knowledge

and belief, to have experiences; but those experiences are merely the products of selfprojection and therefore utterly unreal, false. If you are to discover for yourself what is the new, it is no good carrying the burden of the old, especially knowledge—the

knowledge of another, however great. You use knowledge as a means of self-projection,

security, and you want to be quite sure that you have the same experiences as the Buddha

or the Christ or X. But a man who is protecting himself constantly through knowledge is

obviously not a truth-seeker...

For the discovery of truth there is no path...When you want to find something new, when

you are experimenting with anything, your mind has to be very quiet, has it not? If your

mind is crowded, filled with facts, knowledge, they act as an impediment to the new; the

difficulty for most of us is that the mind has become so important, so predominantly

significant, that it interferes constantly with anything that may be new, with anything that

may exist simultaneously with the known. Thus knowledge and learning are impediments

for those who would seek, for those who would try to understand that which is timeless. 

January 10

Learning is not experience 

The word learning has great significance. There are two kinds of learning. For most of us

learning means the accumulation of knowledge, of experience, of technology, of a skill,

of a language. There is also psychological learning, learning through experience, either

the immediate experiences of life, which leave a certain residue, of tradition, of the race,

of society. There are these two kinds of learning how to meet life: psychological and

physiological; outward skill and inward skill. There is really no line of demarcation

between the two; they overlap. We are not considering for the moment the skill that we

learn through practice, the technological knowledge that we acquire through study. What

we are concerned about is the psychological learning that we have acquired through the

centuries or inherited as tradition, as knowledge, as experience. This we call learning, but

I question whether it is learning at all. I am not talking about learning a skill, a language,

a technique, but I am asking whether the mind ever learns psychologically. It has learned,

and with what it has learned it meets the challenge of life. It is always translating life or

the new challenge according to what it has learned. That is what we are doing. Is that

learning? Doesn’t learning imply something new, something that I don’t know and am

learning? If I am merely adding to what I already know, it is no longer learning. 

January 11

When is learning possible? 

To inquire and to learn is the function of the mind. By learning I do not mean the mere

cultivation of memory or the accumulation of knowledge, but the capacity to think clearly

and sanely without illusion, to start from facts and not from beliefs and ideals. There is no

learning if thought originates from conclusions. Merely to acquire information or

knowledge is not to learn. Learning implies the love of understanding and the love of

doing a thing for itself. Learning is possible only when there is no coercion of any kind.

And coercion takes many forms, does it not? There is coercion through influence,

through attachment or threat, through persuasive encouragement, or subtle forms of

reward.Most people think that learning is encouraged through comparison, whereas the contrary

is the fact. Comparison brings about frustration and merely encourages envy, which is

called competition. Like other forms of persuasion, comparison prevents learning and

breeds fear.  

January 12

Learning is never accumulative 

Learning is one thing and acquiring knowledge is another. Learning is a continuous

process, not a process of addition, not a process which you gather and then from there

act. Most of us gather knowledge as memory, as idea, store it up as experience, and from

there act. That is, we act from knowledge, technological knowledge, knowledge as

experience, knowledge as tradition, knowledge that one has derived through one’s

particular idiosyncratic tendencies; with that background, with that accumulation as

knowledge, as experience, as tradition, we act. In that process there is no learning.

Learning is never accumulative; it is a constant movement. I do not know if you have

ever gone into this question at all: what is learning and what is the acquisition of

knowledge?...Learning is never accumulative. You cannot store up learning and then

from that storehouse act. You learn as you are going along. Therefore, there is never a

moment of retrogression or deterioration or decline. 

January 13

Learning has no past 

Wisdom is something that has to be discovered by each one, and it is not the result of

knowledge. Knowledge and wisdom do not go together. Wisdom comes when there is the

maturity of self-knowing. Without knowing oneself, order is not possible, and therefore

there is no virtue.

Now, learning about oneself, and accumulating knowledge about oneself, are two

different things...A mind that is acquiring knowledge is never learning. What it is doing is

this: it is gathering to itself information, experience as knowledge, and from the

background of what it has gathered, it experiences, it learns; and therefore it is never

really learning, but always knowing, acquiring.

Learning is always in the active present; it has no past. The moment you say to yourself,

“I have learned,” it has already become knowledge, and from the background of that

knowledge you can accumulate, translate, but you cannot further learn. It is only a mind

that is not acquiring, but always learning—it is only such a mind that can understand this

whole entity that we call the “me,” the self. I have to know myself, the structure, the

nature, the significance of the total entity; but I can’t do that burdened with my previous

knowledge, with my previous experience, or with a mind that is conditioned, for then I

am not learning, I am merely interpreting, translating, looking with an eye that is already

clouded by the past.  

Continued on next Saturday 19 / 01 / 13 

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