What makes living and learning mechanical?
We are used to accepting authority, not only the outside authority but also our own peculiar authorities, secret authorities. We are apt to follow rather than investigate into the whole question of authority, the authority of the priest and your own authority of experience and knowledge. When you accept authority inwardly, you are merely following, and therefore you become mechanical.*
~ J Krishnamurti.
A note exploring the above: Aware living is all about the instant and ongoing abandonment of the mind’s conditioned and mechanical ways of “Looking for something I can believe in.” When all belief – including the believer who needs to believe – falls away, what remains is an empty, open and welcoming mind that functions well and truly as a servant to awareness, to simply being and enjoying life as it presents, here and now, moment to moment. That ’emptiness’ is empty of beliefs that formerly, seemingly, constituted the person – the ‘me’ myth of being a ‘self-centered’ entity.
Sans the stuff of belief, there remains a fullness which may be pointed to in merely symbolic words that vaguely describe this lived recognition of reality as being, as life itself, living freely without knowing. This beingness of emptiness is sugested with words like peaceful, beautiful, easeful, joyful, and wonderful. In fine, one’s common awareness is full of affection; it is an all-embracing love – not these words or feelings or personalized experiences about reality, but the certain knowing that remains when all pretension, all belief, falls away. Some call it love. 
James Waite
*From a Public Talk, Rome, 29 October 1972
~ You’re invited to Zoom in to the Aware Living Cafe hosted by James Waite and participant JC Tefft; to enjoy and contribute to a six-part series exploring K’s Book Of Life, first and second Saturdays, January to March, 2024 at 10am to 11:30, Victoria, BC (PCT) For more dates and details and to simply register: https://krishnamurti-canada.ca/…/aware-living-cafe-2…/
