Krishnamurti & the Art of Awakening

Krishnamurti Quote of the Day

Ojai, California | 9th Public Talk 1945

Questioner: In discussing the problem of illness you introduced the concept of psychological tension. If I remember correctly you stated that the non-use or abuse of psychological tension is the ca use of illness. Modern psychology on the other hand mostly stresses relaxation, release from nervous tension and so forth. What do you think?

Krishnamurti: Must we not be strenuous if we would understand? As you are listening to this talk is there not attention, a tension? Is not all awareness an intensity of right tension? Awareness is necessary for comprehension; a strenuous attention is needed if we would grasp the full significance of a problem. Relaxation is necessary, sometimes beneficial; but is not awareness, right tension, necessary for deep understanding? Must not the strings of a violin be tuned or stretched to produce the right tone? If they are stretched too much they break and if they are not stretched or tuned just rightly they do not give the correct tone. Likewise we break down when our nerves are strained too much; tension beyond endurance causes various forms of mental and physical disorders.

But is not awareness, the widening and stretching of the mind-heart, necessary for understanding? Is understanding the result of relaxation, inattention, or does it come with awareness in which there is not that tension caused by the desire to grasp, to gain? Is not alert stillness necessary for deep understanding?

Tension can either mend or mar. In all relationship is there not tension? This tension becomes harmful when relationship becomes an escape from one's own insufficiency, a self-protective shelter from painful self-discovery. Tension becomes harmful when relationship hardens and is no longer a self-revealing process. Most of us use relationship for self-gratification, self-aggrandizement, but when it fails us a harmful tension is created which leads to frustration, jealously, delusion and conflict. As long as the craving of the self continues there will be the harmful psychological tension of inner insufficiency that causes varieties of delusion and misery. But to understand emptiness, aching loneliness, there must be right awareness, right tension. The tension of greed, fear, ambition, hate, is destructive, is productive of psychological and physical ailments, and to transcend that tension there must be choiceless awareness.

Craving which expresses itself in many ways, in the material and so-called spiritual world, is the cause of conflict in all the different layers of consciousness. The tension of becoming is endless conflict and pain. In being aware of craving and so understanding it thought liberates itself from ignorance and sorrow.

Tags: awareness, tension

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