True Listening and Learning – from The Book of Life by Jiddu Krishnamurti (vegetarian), Part 2 of 2

“...It seems to me that learning is astonishingly difficult, as is listening also. We never actually listen to anything because our mind is not free; our ears are stuffed up with those things that we already know, so listening becomes extraordinarily difficult. I think — or rather, it is a fact — that if one can listen to something with all of one’s being, with vigor, with vitality, then the very act of listening is a liberative factor, but unfortunately you never do listen, as you have never learned about it. After all, you only learn when you give your whole being to something.” 

“To learn, the mind must be quiet ‘To discover anything new you must start on your own; you must start on a journey completely denuded, especially of knowledge, because it is very easy, through knowledge and belief, to have experiences; but those experiences are merely the products of self-projection and therefore utterly unreal, false. If you are to discover for yourself what is the new, it is no good carrying the burden of the old, especially knowledge — the knowledge of another, however great. You use knowledge as a means of self-projection, security, and you want to be quite sure that you have the same experiences as the Buddha or the Christ or X. But a man who is protecting himself constantly through knowledge is obviously not a truth-seeker... For the discovery of truth there is no path... When you want to find something new, when you are experimenting with anything, your mind has to be very quiet, has it not?’” 

“Learning implies the love of understanding and the love of doing a thing for itself. Learning is possible only when there is no coercion of any kind.” “Learning is never accumulative. You cannot store up learning and then from that storehouse act. You learn as you are going along. Therefore, there is never a moment of retrogression or deterioration or decline.”