Krishnamurti on Listening and Love

From: The Awakening of Intelligence by J. Krishnamurti

Brockwood Park, October 7, 1972

I have loved reading Krishnamurti because he helped me to deeply reflect. The following quote I have found to be true and reinforces what Carl Rogers talked about all of his life.

Pat

Krishnamurti : “I think this is what really takes place. When you were

talking to me—I was noticing it—I was not listening to your words so much. I was

listening to you. I was open to you, not to your words, as you explained and so on. I

said to myself, all right, leave all that, I am listening to you, not to the words, which

you use, but to the meaning, to the inward quality of your feeling that you want to

communicate to me.”

Bohm: “I understand.”

Krishnamurti: “That changes me, not all this verbalization. So you can talk to me

about my idiocies, my illusions, my peculiar tendencies, without the conscious mind

interfering and saying, “Please don’t touch this, leave me alone!” . . .

What I am saying is: don’t listen to me with your conscious ears but listen to me

with the ears that hear much deeper. That is how I listened to you this morning,

because I am terribly interested in the source, as you are. You follow, Sir? I am really

interested in that one thing. All this is the explicable, easily understood-- - but to

come to that one thing together, feel it together! You follow? I think that is the way

to break a conditioning, a habit, an image which has been cultivated. You talk about

it at a level where the conscious mind is not totally interested. It sounds silly, but

you understand what I mean? . . .

But you see the truth, that as long as the mind is conditioned there must be conflict.

So you penetrate or push aside my resistance and get to that, get the unconscious to

listen to you, because the unconscious is much more subtle, much quicker. It may be

frightened but it sees this danger of fear much quicker than the conscious mind

does.

Bohm: To reach the unconscious you have to have an action which doesn’t directly

appeal to the conscious.

Krishnamurti: Yes. That is affection, that is love. When you talk to my waking

consciousness, it is hard, clever, subtle, brittle. And you penetrate that, penetrate it

with your look, with your affection, with all the feeling you have. That operates, not

anything else.”