The flame of attention
J. Krishnamurti

At the age of eighty-eight Krishnamurti continues to make a early tour of three continents giving talks to large audiences. This volume contains a talk selected from those given during the year October 1981 to September 1982 in each of the following places: New Delhi, Madras, Bombay, Benares in India; Ojai, New York, in the United States of America; Saanen, Switserland and Brockwood Park, England.

For nearly sixty years, he has made such tours, endeavouring to show, to whoever will listen, how man’s violence, sorrow and psychological insecurity are caused by his mental conditions, by his blind indentification with religious beliefs, political ideals and ideational self-evaluations.

Ideas are the product of knowledge stored in the brain; they arise from a material process and are always limited and subject to the chain of cause and effect; their ‘intelligence’ is limited by the material process, it is not holistic. Krishnamurti affirms that when the true nature of this activity in the psyche is clearly observed and understood, the thinking process ceases to be dominant; its funcion is found to be relative and subordinate, serving man’s needs only at a funtional level. Such understanding is pure intelligence free from causality; the meaningless thought processes of ‘self-evaluation and related psychological fears, anxieties, insecurity, hatred and violance have ceased.