Total Attention

Now the very attention you give to a problem is the energy that solves that problem. When you give your complete attention - I mean with everything in you-there is no observer at all. There is only the state of attention which is total energy, and that total energy is the highest form of intelligence. Naturally that state of mind must be completetly silent and that silence, that stilllness, comes when there is total attention, not disciplined stillness. That total silence in which there neither the observer nor the thing observed is the highest form of a religious mind. But what takes place in that state cannot be put in to words because what is said in words is not the fact. To find out for yourself you have to go through it.

Every problem is related to every other problem so that if you can solve one problem completely - it does not matter what it is-you will see that you are able to meet all other problems eeasily and resolve them. We are talkin, of course, of psychological problems. We have already seen that a problem exists only in time, that is wehn we meet the issue incompletely. So not only must we be aware of the nature and structure of the problem and see it completely, but meet it as it arises and resolve it immediately so that it does not take root in the mind. If one allows a problem to endure for a month or a day, ore even for a few minutes, it distorts the mind. So is it possible to meet a problem immediately without any distortion and be immeditately, completely, free of it and not allow a memory, a scratch on the mind, to remain? These memories are the images we carry about with us and its ithese images which meet this extraordinary thing called life and therefore there is a contradiction and hence conflict. Life is very real - life is not an abstraction - and when you meet it with images there are problems.

Is it possible to meet every issue without this space-time interval, without the gap between oneself and the thing of which one is afraid?It is possbile only when the observer has no continuity, the observer who is builder of the image, the observer who is a collection of memories and ideas, who is a bundle of abstractions.

When you look at the stars there is you who are looking at the stars in the sky; the sky is flooded with brilliant stars, there i cool air, and there is you, the observer, the experiencer, the thinker, you with your aching heart, you, the centre, creating space. You will never understand about thespace between yourself and teh stars, yourself and your wife or husband, or friend, because you have never looked without the image, and that is why you do not know what beauty is or what love is. You talk about it, you write about it, but you have never known it except perhaps at rare intervals of total self-abandonment. So long as there is a centre creating space around itself there is neither love nor beauty. When there is no centre and no circumference then there is love. And when you love you are beauty.

When you look at a face opposite, you ar looking from a centre and the centre creates the space between person and person and that is why your lives are so empty and callous. You cannot cultivate love or beauty, nor can you invent truth, but if you are all the time aware of what you are doing, you can cultivate awareness and out of that awareness you will begin to see the nature of pleasure, desire and sorrow and the utter loneliness and boredom of man, and then you will begin to come upon that thing called 'the space'.

When there is space between you and the object you are observing you will know there is no love, and without love, however hard you try to reform the world or bring about a new social oreder or however much you talk about improvements, you will only create agony. So it is up to you. There is no leader, there is no teacher, there is nobody to tell you what to do. You are alone in this mad brutal world.

J.Krishnamurti "Freedom from the Known" (Chapter XI, pp.92-94)