Books

 

Excerpt

“You were talking about giving up the personality. Does giving up the personality include giving up the importance of things that are meaningful to you and make you happy? Let us say you are a musician, a composer, and you would like to find someone who supports you, so you would be able to compose and get a deep satisfaction from composing. Do you have to give that up when you give up the personality?

I would say, see that you are more than your personality. Why live in restriction? In other words, see that you identify yourself as a personality—you go around as a personality, you look at things around you, beauty, truth, with this personality; that means you live in restriction. See the real value of what you call the personality. Do not identify yourself with it any more than you identify with your house or your car. Then you are completely free. Nothing is wrong with the personality, absolutely nothing.
But do you have to give up that need for satisfaction from things that are important to the personality to get to the stage where you do not identify yourself with your personality, or are they simultaneously compatible?
See only that when you identify yourself with your personality you live in restriction. What is the use of the personality? Face your daily life free from restriction. See that all that is perceived, all that is thinkable is an expression of life, an extension of life. When you really understand that all existence is an expression of life and that the only mission of these expressions is to jubilate, to admire life, then you use your personality for thankfulness throughout your life; and then you use it in the right way.”

In the late 1980s Jean Klein was invited to give seminars in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California. In this isolated, peaceful mountain setting, a small group of students gathered with their life questions. The conversations of the 1988 seminar were transcribed and printed as a pamphlet entitled Mount Madonna Dialogues, but it was felt that the contents of all of the seminars were rich and rewarding enough to be gathered into a more substantial publication. ‘Living Truth’ is the result.

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Excerpt
“The root of all desires is the one desire: to come home, to be at peace. There may be a moment in life when our compensatory activities, the accumulation of money, learning and objects, leaves us feeling deeply apathetic. This can motivate us towards the search for our real nature beyond appearances. We may find ourselves asking, ‘Why am I here? What is life? Who am I?’ Sooner or later any intelligent person asks these questions.

What you are looking for is what you already are, not what you will become. What you already are is the answer and the source of the question. In this lies its power of transformation. It is a present actual fact. Looking to become something is completely conceptual, merely an idea. The seeker will discover that he is what he seeks and that what he seeks is the source of the inquiry.”
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Excerpt
“We have come to satisfy the inner need to know ourselves, to share our oneness, to hear directly what life is. To receive life one must be open to it. Life can only be understood by life. This means that the being open is life itself.

During these meetings, be open to the openness, allow yourself to be deeply impregnated by the sayings that come directly from life. To be impregnated, the mind must be free from wrong knowing, that is, free from imposing an independent existence on all that is objective. Nothing that can be known has existence in itself. It depends on a knower. The knower is consciousness. Only consciousness never changes. We must find out what never changes in us.”
Beyond Knowledge is a crystallization in word-form of this timeless wisdom. To read these dialogues is to enter into a scale of inquiry and clarity that knows no compromise. It carries one through to the end of thought and to the beginning of self-knowledge.
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Excerpt
“Questioner: In certain situations in life I feel blocked by a fear which prevents me from acting. How can I be free from this obstacle?

Jean Klein: First free yourself from the word, the concept, ‘fear’. It is loaded with memory. Face only the perception. Accept the sensation
completely. When the personality who judges and controls is completely absent, when there is no longer a psychological relationship with the
sensation, it is really welcomed and unfolds. Only in welcoming without a welcomer can there be real transformation.

We are in essence one with all existence; when we truly observe ourselves there is ultimately no observer, only observation – awareness.”
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Be Who You Are is one of the earliest published books of dialogues with Jean Klein. Written in the lucid and eloquent style which characterises his work, each chapter is composed of an introductory discourse followed by questions and answers.
“The ‘eternal present’, our theme in these meetings, lies within the depth of ourselves. It is the eternal awareness of the Self. Seen from the Ultimate, the world projected by the mind appears and disappears, in other words, it “becomes”. When we talk of time and space, it must be thoroughly understood that their reality is relative, it is a reality in the world of becoming. But beyond space-time is that stillness which knows no becoming.”
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Transmission of the Flame
“Your suffering is fundamentally because you feel yourself isolated. The moment you objectify yourself you are contracted. But be careful about taking yourself for nothing! Taking yourself for nothing is also something.”
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The Ease of Being
“Your physical appearance is the accidental result of two people and these two people are the accidental result of two other people. The birth with which you identify is completely accidental. The real birth is when you are free from the image which thinks it is born.”
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Open to the Unknown
More dialogues with Jean Klein in Delphi, Greece in 1990.
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The Book of Listening
Listening was produced by the Jean Klein Foundation in single volumes (ten volumes in total) over a six year period from 1989 – 1995. The Journal was not widely circulated and we felt that the quality of the material it contained warranted reissuing in one volume.As well as the original material by Jean Klein (Dialogues, Q&A’s, prose pieces) interwoven are extracts selected by Jean from his own favourite literature and poetry, covering many ages and cultures, which complement the depth and richness of his own expression.