Question: How can we truly understand ourselves, our infinite riches, without developing a whole complete perception first?otherwise with our comparative perception of thought, we get only a partial understanding of that infinite flow of cause in whose order we move and have our true conscious being.
KRISHNAMURTI: How can you understand the whole when you are worshipping the part! Being petty, partial, limited, how can you understand that which is boundless, infinite? The small cannot grasp the great, but the small can cease to be. In understanding what makes for limitation, for partiality, and transcending it, you will then be able to comprehend the whole, the limitless. From the known the unknown is realized, but to speculate about the unknowable is merely to deny the limited, the trivial; and so all speculation becomes a hindrance for the understanding of reality.
Begin to understand yourself and in that there will be discovered immeasurable riches. Begin with the known, with the trivial, the limited, the confused, the small that is bound by fear, by belief, by lust, by ill will. It is petty, partial, because it is the product of ignorance. How can such a mind understand the whole? It cannot. If thought-feeling frees itself from craving and so from ignorance and sorrow, then only is there a possibility of understanding the whole. How can there be understanding of the causeless when our thought-feeling is a result, when it is bound to time? This seems so obvious that it does not require much explanation, but yet so many are caught up in the illusion that we must first have the vision, the perception of the whole, a working hypothesis of it as a beginning, before there is understanding of the part. To have a perception of that completeness, the realization of that infinite reality, the singularistic, the limited mind must break down the barriers that confine it. From a small, narrow opening the wide heavens are not to be perceived. We try to perceive the whole through the small aperture of our thought-feeling, and what we see must inevitably be small, partial, incomplete. We say we want to understand the whole, yet we cling to the petty, to the me and the mine. Through self-awareness, which brings self-knowledge, right thinking is nurtured, which alone will free us from our triviality and sorrow. When the mind ceases to chatter, when it is not playing any part, when it is not grasping or becoming, when it is utterly still, in that creative emptiness is the whole, the uncreated.
The Collected Works of J. Krishnamurti – Volume III 1936-1944: The Mirror of RelationshipJiddu Krishnamurti