"Tradition becomes our security, and when the mind is secure it is in decay"
About this Quote
Krishnamurti takes a word most cultures treat as a virtue and flips it into a sedative. "Tradition" here isn't just holidays and heirlooms; it's the whole inherited operating system: beliefs, rituals, identities, ready-made explanations. The psychological move he targets is the bargain people strike with uncertainty: trade aliveness for reassurance. Call it "security" and it sounds prudent. He hears it as fear wearing a respectable outfit.
The line works because it collapses comfort into corrosion. "Secure" isn’t neutral; it’s static. A mind that has stopped testing, doubting, and revising is protected from anxiety, but also from reality. "Decay" is deliberately biological, almost indecently physical: not a moral failing, a process. Once thought calcifies into habit, it doesn’t just stall; it rots. That harshness is the point. He’s not pleading for open-mindedness as etiquette; he’s warning that certainty has a metabolic cost.
Context matters: Krishnamurti built a career out of refusing spiritual bureaucracy, famously rejecting the messianic role others tried to crown him with. Mid-20th-century mass politics and mass religion offered prefab meaning at industrial scale, and he distrusted all of it - especially the parts that felt comforting. The subtext is a provocation to watch your own craving for shelter. If tradition is your security blanket, he implies, it’s also your blindfold. The real threat isn't change; it's the quiet relief of no longer needing to look.
The line works because it collapses comfort into corrosion. "Secure" isn’t neutral; it’s static. A mind that has stopped testing, doubting, and revising is protected from anxiety, but also from reality. "Decay" is deliberately biological, almost indecently physical: not a moral failing, a process. Once thought calcifies into habit, it doesn’t just stall; it rots. That harshness is the point. He’s not pleading for open-mindedness as etiquette; he’s warning that certainty has a metabolic cost.
Context matters: Krishnamurti built a career out of refusing spiritual bureaucracy, famously rejecting the messianic role others tried to crown him with. Mid-20th-century mass politics and mass religion offered prefab meaning at industrial scale, and he distrusted all of it - especially the parts that felt comforting. The subtext is a provocation to watch your own craving for shelter. If tradition is your security blanket, he implies, it’s also your blindfold. The real threat isn't change; it's the quiet relief of no longer needing to look.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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