A notebook carried from gathering to gathering, Ommen to Madras, with a toy for each idea that lets you watch your own mind: fear as time, the conditioned mind, what is and what should be, the observer who is the observed, and meditation that is not a method. His 365 days and the students' questions are kept.
tags: krishnamurti, meditation, philosophy, spiritual, self-knowledge, freedom, thought
author
Jiddu Krishnamurti
filed
Wednesday, May 6, 2026
revised
October 15, 2026
words
485
reading
~3 min
J. Krishnamurti
Krishnamurti
A notebook, under the trees
1895 · 1986
Slips kept in the back of the notebook
Fear
Fear exists only in relationship to an idea, and idea is the response of memory as thought.
The Book of Life, April 11 / 20
He spoke mostly to people who came with questions, and some of the best came from children. These are the students at his schools in India, with his answers. Ask him one of your own.
Rishi ValleyThink on These Things
The students
Don’t ask somebody else, but find out for yourself the truth of the matter.Think on These Things, 7. Ambition
No. 17 · The River Of Life · 7 questions
THE TALK · XVII
The River Of Life
I don’t know if on your walks you have noticed a long, narrow pool beside the river. Some fishermen must have dug it, and it is not connected with the river. The river is flowing steadily, deep and wide, but this pool is heavy with scum because it is not connected with the life of the river, and there are no fish in it. It is a stagnant pool, and the deep river, full of life and vitality, flows swiftly along.
Now, don’t you think human beings are like that? They dig a little pool for themselves away from the swift current of life, and in that little pool they stagnate, die; and this stagnation, this decay we call existence. That is, we all want a state of permanency; we want certain desires to last for ever, we want pleasures to have no end. We dig a little hole and barricade ourselves in it with our families, with our ambitions, our cultures, our fears, our gods, our various forms of worship, and there we die, letting life go by-that life which is impermanent, constantly changing, which is so swift, which has such enormous depths, such extraordinary vitality and beauty.
take down a book · tap a slate for his answer · or draw one at random
A hundred and thirty-six questions, and nearly every answer hands the question back.
He spoke for sixty years and asked only one thing of the people who listened: that they look at their own minds, now, without a teacher. So this notebook does not teach. Each leaf is something to watch yourself do.
I maintain that Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect.The dissolution of the Order of the Star, Ommen, 3 August 1929
draw a path to the light · or press enter · then walk on
Every path you draw to the light grows back into heather, and the pedestal will not hold him. What is left is to walk.
He had been raised to be a World Teacher. He gave it back, and spent the rest of his life asking why the mind takes so much on authority, beginning with itself.
Loneliness is not comparable with aloneness.The Book of Life, December 3
reach for
A hollow, at evening, under the oaks.Reach for something to fill it.
touch the things around him · or the stamps
Each thing reached for fills the hollow for a moment and leaves it wider. Stop reaching and nothing fills it; there is just no wall left between him and the evening.
Out of that aloneness, he said, comes humility; and to learn, the mind must be humble, which is exactly what it cannot try to be.
Humility cannot be cultivated, and a mind that has no humility is incapable of learning.The Book of Life, January 16
praise him · take it away · then leave him be
Call him humble and he looks down at the word, and the learning stops. Take it away and wait: it comes back only when nobody is watching for it. Not even you.
In later years, at Brockwood, the questions turned to the one who asks them.
So the relationship between two individuals, very close together or very far, is a relationship of images, symbols, memories.The Book of Life, March 17
Two living faces.
tap what each remembers · then look without the image
Three remembered sentences each, and two paintings were talking to each other. Underneath, the faces had gone on living.
What stands between the images is usually called love. He asked what it is not.
The tricks of the mind are not meditation.The Book of Life, December 26
or
A mind at dawn, with a few things on it.
tap a thought to follow it · try a method · or do nothing, and watch the water
Every method is one more thing passing over the water. The pool clears the way it was always going to: when no one is working on it.
He also said that one should die to yesterday, every day. Here are his days.
Every day of the yearThe Book of Life
Dying each day
But you cannot meet death if you don’t die every day.The Book of Life, November 15
January
Listening
Learning
Authority
Self-Knowledge
1JANUARY
Listen with Ease
Have you ever sat very silently, not with your attention fixed on anything, not making an effort to concentrate, but with the mind very quiet, really still? Then you hear everything, don’t you? You hear the far off noises as well as those that are nearer and those that are very close by, the immediate sounds-which means really that you are listening to everything. Your mind is not confined to one narrow little channel. If you can listen in this way, listen with ease, without strain, you will find an extraordinary change taking place within you, a change that comes without your volition, without your asking; and in that change there is great beauty and depth of insight.
The Book of Life, January 1
tear the page · or choose a month and a day · arrow keys turn the days
Tear yesterday off and today is already there underneath. Nothing had to be done to it.