“We must begin with ourselves before we can understand what the end purpose of life is, and what all this means—the wars, the national antagonisms, the conflicts, and all this mess. It seems very easy, but it is actually extraordinarily difficult. To study ourselves, to see how our thoughts operate, we must be unusually observant.
As one begins to follow the subtleties of one’s own thinking ever more closely, one begins to realize more clearly what one is, as well as what the people one interacts with are. To discover who you are, you must know yourself in the course of your actions, in your relationships with others. The difficulty lies in the fact that we are so impatient; we want to move forward, to reach a given goal, and therefore we have neither the time nor the opportunity to investigate and observe.
On the other hand, we are busy with various activities—earning a living, raising children, having responsibilities in different organizations—we have devoted ourselves so much to various things that we have no time to go within, to investigate and observe. Thus, the responsibility for our attitude toward things depends on us and no one else.
It seems to me that searching all over the world for spiritual teachers and their doctrines, reading the latest books on this or that, and so on, is completely vain and unnecessary, because you can travel the whole world, but in the end, you must return to yourself. And since most of us are completely inattentive to ourselves, it is difficult for us to see clearly the way we think, feel, and act.”
–Jiddu Krishnamurti, The First and Last Freedom
