“The first step is the last step. The first step is to perceive, perceive what you are thinking, perceive your ambition, perceive your anxiety, your loneliness, your despair, this extraordinary sense of sorrow, perceive it, without any condemnation, justification, without wishing it to be different.”
Source: 1970s, Krishnamurti in India, 1970-71 (1971), p. 50
Context: The first step is the last step. The first step is to perceive, perceive what you are thinking, perceive your ambition, perceive your anxiety, your loneliness, your despair, this extraordinary sense of sorrow, perceive it, without any condemnation, justification, without wishing it to be different. Just to perceive it, as it is. When you perceive it as it is, then there is a totally different kind of action taking place, and that action is the final action. Right? That is, when you perceive something as being false or as being true, that perception is the final action, which is the final step. Now listen to it. I perceive the falseness of following somebody else, somebody else’s instruction — Krishna, Buddha, Christ, it does not matter who it is. I see, there is the perception of the truth that following somebody is utterly false. Because your reason, your logic and everything points out how absurd it is to follow somebody. Now that perception is the final step, and when you have perceived, you leave it, forget it, because the next minute you have to perceive anew, which is again the final step.
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Jiddu Krishnamurti 233
Indian spiritual philosopher 1895–1986Related quotes
“He who perceives death perceives a sense of the human comedy, and quickly becomes a poet.”
Source: The Importance of Living (1937), pp. 39–40
Meditation:Insights and Inspirations (2010) https://books.google.com/books?id=s2ctBgAAQBAJ,
In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983)
Examples of self-translation (c. 2004), Quotes - Zitate - Citations - Citazioni
“The ability to perceive or think differently is more important than the knowledge gained.”
As quoted in New Scientist (February 1993), p. 42
The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge (1940). <!-- also quoted in Sense and Sensibilia (1962), edited by J. L. Austin, p. 85 Oxford University Press -->
Context: I am using the word "perceive". I am using it here in such a way that to say of an object that it is perceived does not entail saying that it exists in any sense at all. And this is a perfectly correct and familiar usage of the word. If there is thought to be a difficulty here, it is perhaps because there is also a correct and familiar usage of the word "perceive", in which to say of an object that it is perceived does carry the implication that it exists.
Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 261.
