Knowledge is mechanical !

 

If you happen to be an engineer, your knowledge of engineering is something which you have acquired; and what you have acquired, learnt, becomes a habit. Whether you are an engineer, a scientist, a bureaucrat, or an office-worker, you establish a series of habits, and in those habits you are caught; your mind is held in the machinery of habit - in a habit of relationship, in a habit of thinking, in a habit of action.

Please, sirs, do watch your own minds. You are not merely listening to me, that is not important at all; but in listening to me, you are observing yourselves. And if you are in fact observing yourselves, you will see how the mind is caught in the machinery of habit. This is nothing to shudder or be anxious about, it is simply a fact; and the problem is to free the mind completely from habit, so that it does not continue in the old pattern, or establish a new set of habits in the process of relinquishing or destroying the old. 

Habits, surely, imply a mind that does not want to be disturbed. As long as the mind wants to be secure - it does not matter whether it is an engineering mind, a mathematical mind, a scientific mind, a political mind, or the mind of a seeker after truth, whatever that means - , it inevitably falls into the groove of habit, and is unaware that it is running in a groove. 

So one has to become conscious of the fact that one's mind, because it is seeking pleasure, security, a sense of non-disturbance, falls into a groove. Just to be conscious, aware of this fact, is what matters - not how to break down a particular habit. The very desire to break down a habit, produces another habit.  

J KRISHNAMURTI 

Mumbai ,8th Public Talk, 

17th January 1960