“My Name is Red” by Orhan Pamuk (translated Erdag M. Goknar)

Pamuk has written an epic murder mystery set in sixteenth century Istanbul. The story centers around the miniaturist artists in the Ottoman sultan’s atelier, culled from the remote regions of his empire to illustrate his manuscripts. The first chapter is narrated by a corpse, so you know there will be some mysticism in this story right off the bat. “Only when one escapes the dungeons of time and space does it become evident that life is a straitjacket. However blissful it is being a soul without a body in the realm of the dead, so too is being a body without a soul among the living; what a pity nobody realizes this before dying.” However, the amount of historical detail in Pamuk’s novel is also astounding. He incorporates backstories of Ottoman battles, tales taken from eleventh century Persian epic poems, strictures of the Koran, and real legends of the master miniaturist, Bihzad’s life. “We owe Bihzad and the splendor of Persian painting to the meeting of an Arabic illustrating sensibility and Mongol-Chinese painting.” What propels the action of this intricate tale is the detailed descriptions of Ottoman life under the sultan’s rule. The sights, smells, and sounds of Istanbul make it bustle and pulse with vigor. “A city’s intellect ought not to be measured by its scholars, libraries, miniaturists, calligraphers and schools, but by the number of crimes insidiously committed on its dark streets over thousands of years. By this logic, doubtless, Istanbul is the world’s most intelligent city.”

A major theme of this novel is artistic integrity. Miniaturist painting in the Islamic style sought the suppression of individual technique and flourish. “Where there is true art and genuine virtuosity the artist can paint an incomparable masterpiece without leaving even a trace of his identity.” Works were often painted collectively and went unsigned. As masters passed on their methods to apprentices their prowess was extended from one generation to the next. “I now understand that by furtively and gradually re-creating the same pictures for hundreds and hundreds of years, thousands of artists had cunningly depicted the gradual transformation of their world into another.” An artist would give his life, through his eyes, to the perfection of detail. It was an honor to go blind in the mastery of the form. In fact, legends spoke of master miniaturists, who from memory, could paint majestic scenes years after sight had been taken away from them. “Blindness wasn’t a scourge, but rather the crowning reward bestowed by Allah upon the illuminator who had devoted an entire life to His glories; for illustrating was the miniaturist’s search for Allah’s vision of the earthly realm, and this unique perspective could only be attained through recollection after blindness descended.” Artistic skill, memory, and tradition were blended in the gifts of these miniaturist geniuses. “But hadn’t all the legendary illustrations by the old masters of Herat been drawn with fine lines that ran between death and beauty?” Blindness was an affliction in the creation of art and blindness was a gift to those who spent a life creating art. “To paint is to remember.”

Furthermore, these Muslim miniaturists were living in a time of turbulent mixing of East and West. Trade with Europe was brisk and, particularly, “Frankish portraiture” was becoming in vogue in the Ottoman court. “The Venetian masters had discovered painting techniques with which they could distinguish one man from another—without relying on his outfit or medals, just by the distinctive shape of his face.” However, strict Islamic preachers still viewed all depictions of figures and images as blasphemy. “I saw the lion, representing Islam, chase away a gray-and-pink pig, symbolizing the cunning Christian infidel.” This tension was battled out on each illustrated page. As Pamuk weaves his tale, master miniaturists, a coffeehouse storyteller, a Jewish matchmaker, a dog, a desperate widow, a tree, a child, and death, himself, all take turns narrating chapters of the story. In the end, as much as this novel is a mysterious love story, it is also a contemplation on the nature of time, artistic traditions, and the mastery of one’s craft. “Beauty is the eye discovering what the mind already knows.”

“Becoming Human- A Theory of Ontogeny” by Michael Tomasello

Tomasello is a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke. For the twenty years prior he worked at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, where along with human children he studied the behaviors of other primates- specifically gorillas, chimpanzees, and bonobos. This book aims to study the ontogeny unique to humans from birth until around six-years-old.

Tomasello suggests a defining characteristic of humans is join intentionality. “Whereas great apes could abstract common features across exemplars and form an abstract representation of a set of entities, early humans could not only do this but also see the same entity from different perspectives, under different descriptions…. Joint intentional activity constituted a shared conceptual world encompassing the partners’ distinct perspective.” This is the building block on which the rest of human ontogeny largely rests. It allows for a socially recursive inference process and the ability to embed one’s intentional state inside another persons and vice versa. This process begins with the “uniquely human gestures of pointing and pantomiming.”

Joint intentionality led, specifically, to humans developing a theory of mind. “Cognitively they were able to executively regulate their own thinking by anticipating how others would understand and evaluate this thinking.” Humans became social creatures with an “objective” moral worldview. “The deviant, if she wanted to stay in good cooperative standing, would actually join with the partner in condemning herself (internalizing into a sense of guilt), in a kind of we>me morality.” This created a second-person morality. Building upon this, “teaching and conformity generated cumulative cultural evolution characterized by the “ratchet effect”—and thus cultural organization in the form of the group’s specific set of conventions, norms, and institutions… group-mindedness, both in taking the perspective of the group cognitively and in caring about the group’s welfare.” In turn, this developed into a concept of the “inside” moral group, even beyond one’s personal relations. “Individuals had not just personal common ground with other individuals but also cultural common ground—even with individuals they had never met before…. They began self-regulating their thoughts via the group’s publicly accepted norms of rationality, and their actions via the group’s publicly accepted norms of morality.”

It is perspective-taking and not mind-reading that is unique to human ontogeny. “The issue is not just “mind-reading”—apes turn out to be pretty good at that. But they do it mostly in competition. Social and mental coordination with others for purposes of cooperation is something different…. Many of humans’ everyday acts are thus designed to actually help others read their minds.” It is the combining of the perspectives of two unique individuals, this joint attention, that is unique in humans among primates. By the time of the third birthday, humans can understand how something appears to another person, though it does not appear that way to them. Furthermore, after age three, humans begin to learn an “objective” perspective and collective intentionality. This is largely done through communication and, eventually, the learning of language. “Children do not need to conventionalize communicative symbols [whether it be pointing, gaze sharing, pantomime, or words] because the conventions already exist around them; they simply need to conform.” Unlike apes, “infants’ pointing and pantomiming are used referentially; that is, they are not just to demand action or draw attention to the self but to direct attention (that is, to share attention) to external entities or situations…. [The] motive is not just to demand something but also, just as often, to inform others of things helpfully or to share information and attitudes with others as a way of expanding common ground…. Iconic gestures would seem to be uniquely human. Great apes could easily gesture with their hands the way humans do to mime eating or drinking, but they do not.”

Tomasello suggests that there is a functional continuity between gestures and words in human ontogeny. “When [gestures] are integrated with language it is done seamlessly, in the same way that linguistic items such as words are combined with one another in grammatical constructions. The fact that they fit together so seamlessly—united by processes such as joint attention, perspective-taking, and emotion sharing—suggests that all are underlain by the same basic skills and motivations of shared intentionality.” This is learned behavior- culturally. Infants are doing all of this almost exclusively with adults. “Effective communication by infants and toddlers depends on an adult partner who scaffolds the interaction.” They are learning a cultural common ground from a mentor. “For the child to understand a word or piece of language she must understand it as something the adult is using to direct her attention to some referent in the environment—he is inviting her to jointly attend with him to that referent—in a way that she, the child, could do in reverse toward the adult if she so wished…. Word learning is thus not about putting labels on things but rather is about acquiring conventional means for coming to share attention with others in a variety of complex social contexts…. Children are inheriting from their culture a whole system of concepts that their forbears have found useful for categorizing and organizing their world. In acquiring the words of conventional language, children are learning to carve up the world in all the ways that others in their culture have found useful.” The child has learned how to use language properly when they can take the perspective of the listener. This requires self-regulation to anticipate what the listener does and does not know already, as well as what the listener might want to know. They become sensitive to feedback- both verbal and facial expressions. “Children begin to self-monitor and anticipate when their listener might have difficulties… imagining the comprehension processes of the listener and adjusting for her ahead of time.”

Humans are unique in that they purposefully teach their young. “Cumulative cultural evolution via the ratchet effect is made possible by special skills of imitation and even conformity, as well as uniquely human pedagogy and instructed learning…. Human infants and toddlers do not just gather information for instrumental tasks by observing others, as apes do, but they actively conform to others.” Pedagogy transmits “objective” cultural knowledge from an expert. Cultural learning is about social solidarity just as much as specific skills. Unlike with apes, it is the action, itself, and not the outcome that is learned and imitated. “Active teaching is extremely rare in the animal kingdom; typically it occurs with a given species for only one specific function…. Among primates, only humans actively instruct their young…. Instructed learning requires that a learner understands that the instructor intends to instruct her, and that she trusts this information and generalizes it appropriately…. [The instructor] is passing on generic cultural knowledge.” Five-year-old children trust what people tell them just as much as what they have seen with their very own eyes. Learning cultural material, symbolic “artifacts,” and “objective” reasoning are not skills that humans are able to learn on their own.

Reasons are the way humans create an “objective” culture. “To argue for and justify their beliefs in the face of potential criticism, children relate to their partners the reason why they believe as they do, and they come to respect the reasons that others give for their beliefs…. Reasons may be normatively evaluated as valid or invalid based on their causal or logical connections to beliefs that we all share in cultural common ground.” This leads to social self-monitoring and a sense of an “objective We.” A critical step for human ontogeny is peer collaboration. “(1) Productive peer collaborations during school age can promote cognitive development (especially in using new conceptual knowledge flexibly) better than adult instruction; (2) productive collaborations are those in which participants directly engage one another’s differing perspectives; (3) it is crucial for the pair to develop a shared representation of the problem to which their differing perspectives are then anchored; and (4) argumentative discourse among peers—presumably because they are of equal status and competence—often ends up incorporating joint “meta-talk” about standards of evidence and argumentation in a way that direct instruction and dialogue with adults does not.”

Humans collaborate with each other in ways that the great apes do not. As per Kant, humans treat other humans as ends and not just as means. “Joint intentional activities also have a unique social-motivational dimension.” Humans decide to do something together. “This recognition of self-other equivalence generates a mutual respect.” Partners are assumed equal in status, even when performing differing roles. “The self is seen as just one agent or person among many.” Humans can practice role-reversal because they are able to take the perspective of others. “Second-personal agents are entitled to make normative claims on their partner.” Joint commitments can only be terminated by both parties. Social sanctions, perhaps culminating in ostracism, punish any defector. Most importantly, the defector realizes that they deserve the sanction, because social norms are “objective.”

Norms are strictly an “in-group” function. “We” is a group solidarity, which starts around the age of three, to include “those who resemble them in behavior and appearance.” At that age, norms also begin to take on a third-party perspective. Three-year-olds will call out a transgressor for norm violations that do not personally affect them. By four to five-years-old kids start to develop their own moral identity. “Children discover others are judging them in this same way, using the same normative standards, so they engage in active attempts at self-representation to influence those judgments.” They want to be cooperatively competent and trustworthy. Or, at least, to appear to be so. They begin to evaluate themselves from the perspective of others in the same way that they are evaluating others. “Only humans can simulate the perspectives and evaluations of others for the purpose of actively managing the impression they are making on them…. Seeing oneself from the outside, as it were—is the cognitive foundation for the moral capacity to have a conscience.” Only humans can create “objective” moral judgements created by a “We” greater than the Self. Feelings of guilt and shame are part of this unique moral framework. “The rational basis of morality lies in the shared justificatory structures of a moral community because these are grounded in the community’s shared ordering of values…. Justifications demonstrate one’s continued identification with the group and its value system…. Reasons, justifications, and excuses are aimed both at others and at the self, as members of the same moral community.”

Tomasello claims his ontogeny fits into a neo-Vygotskian paradigm. Lev Vygotsky stated, “The internalization of socially rooted and historically developed activities is the distinguishing feature of human psychology, the basis of the qualitative leap from animal to human psychology.” To recap, Tomasello sees as uniquely human “our shared intentionality account, processes such as joint attention, perspective-taking, dual-level collaboration, cooperative communication, the enforcement and creation of social norms, and a sense of moral obligation.” This begins with new-borns in emotion sharing, which align psychological states with others. He considers there to be a “nine-month revolution” where infants now share intentional states aimed at external referents. This is where subjective/objective perspectives, a nascent sense of “We”, directed imitation, and the infrastructure of communication first begin. At three-years-old, Tomasello suggests collective intentionality, norms, and a group mind start to form, as nurture gradually begins to propel nature in specific directions. This is the age when peer interaction also becomes as important as adult interaction and executive-level multi-perspectival conceptualization grows. Cognitive contradictions and inconsistencies are first recognized and sorted out. Group norms begin to supersede the subjective Self. Finally, for Tomasello, at around six-years-old, humans can be said to begin the age of reason and responsibility that then continues on into adulthood. The ontogenetic process is fully formed, though, of course, each human has much more specific development to go.

“The Banished Immortal- A Life of Li Bai (Li Po)” by Ha Jin

Ha Jin has written a novelistic biography based on the limited details known about Li Bai’s life. He mixes concrete facts, contemporary legends, assumed history, and compelling stories to create a historic myth of the Tang dynasty poet. Even Li Bai’s name is a motley matter. In various times and places he was also known as Li Po, Li Bo, Li Taibai, Li T’ai Po, and Rihaku. In addition, he was often called by the monikers Li Twelve, zhexian (Banished Immortal), shixian (Poet Immortal), jiuxian (Wine Immortal), and Green Lotus Scholar. The many legends of his life due justice to his many names.

Li Bai wrote in many poetic styles, although he was not known as a strict structuralist in form, rhyme, or meter. He began his career by writing fu, rhapsody- a form of prose poetry that tended to be lengthy, resembling poetic essays, often on political topics. He also admired the more informal Chinese poetic traditions- “gufeng, or ancient folk poems, a kind of poetry written before the Tang dynasty without specific metric patterns or rhymes; yuefu, or folk songs, which Bai composed throughout his life; and Chuci, Songs of Chu, a body of poems composed mainly by Qu Yuan (340-278 BC).” Bai was also well-versed in the more traditional forms, such as the jueju, a metered and rhymed quatrain, and the yuefu, an eight-lined poem, although he often distorted the forms and added little twists to his own poems. Eventually, Bai would even incorporate Liangzhou Song-lyrics, war ballads from the frontier regions, into his repertoire.

Throughout his life, Bai was heavily influenced by Daoist teachings. Late in life, he even endured the rigors of a Daoist induction to become a full-fledged Fellow. He also studied swordsmanship and Buddhist texts at Daming Temple under the monk, Master Kong-ling, although Bai never subscribed to its philosophical tenets. At a young age, his father, a merchant, sensed literary promise in Bai and gave him money to travel the countryside and gain experience. Bai wandered to Changping Mountain where he met his first mentor, Zhao Rui (659?-742?). With Rui, Bai studied the ancient Legalist texts, the Dao, and zongheng jia, war strategies from the Warring States period. Since Bai did not come from the landed gentry, he was not eligible to take the civil-service exam, but had to hope for ganye, patronage from a high official, by xingjuan, presenting him with one’s own writings, essays, and poems, if he wanted to become a state official. Unlike his mentor, the recluse Rui, Bai was very ambitious and high court officialdom and political influence would be his lifelong goal.

The first poem Bai presented to a minister from the central government, Su Ting, was in an effort to become taken under his wing as a protege. It was a fu, titled “The Great Hunt,” which mixed Bai’s own ambitions with praise for the emperor, using hunting as a metaphor for governance. Bai began, “Rhapsodies are a branch of ancient poetry. The more splendid their words are, the further their meanings can reach. Otherwise, how could they be magnificent enough to move heaven and gods?” It is not his best poetic work and it did not gain him patronage from Su Ting either.

Even though Bai would never achieve the success he craved for in the political realm, there is no doubt that, even in his own lifetime, he was considered a poet for the ages. Jin recounts that early on Bai “had collected folk songs from the people he encountered and even written poems in the same style because the songs were so full of life and raw experience. He had begun to think about how to give his poems the same kind of fluidity, how to render them as spontaneous as natural speech while also maintaining a high level of energy and intensity. He imagined a style that seemed regulated but not burdened by restrictive rules, free but in good order.” For Bai, traveling the country roads was a form of research and inspiration. Bai was also unique in writing many of his poems from the perspective of a female character- in the voice of courtesans, barmaids, mothers, and weavers. He was one of the first Chinese poets to write openly addressing his wife. Bai also found much inspiration in his cups of wine. Many of his best poems were composed extemporaneously in taverns. He wrote, “The host grows more delighted, seeing me drunk/ Together we have forgotten this world.”

One of Bai’s influences was the courtier and poet, Chen Zi’ang. Chen also found Tang poetry to be too stiff and formulaic. He found inspiration in the poems of the Jian’an period (196-220), which were full of passion and raw beauty. Both Chen and Bai also modeled their own poems on the Book of Songs, a volume of 305 songs compiled by Confucius. From the earlier Tang dynasty, Bai was influenced by the poets Luo Binwang, Wang Bo, Yang Jiong, and Lu Zhaolin. His contemporary poet and friend, Meng Haoran commented to Bai, “Ancient poetry tends to be low in style and sentiment, while contemporary poetry is restricted by forms and metric patterns. Only folk songs can be flexible without a fixed form and have longer or shorter lines. My brother, you are a natural talent and this kind of poetry suits you best.” Jin writes, “Beginning in 747, Li Bai’s poetry began to register more of the dark aspects of common people’s lives, as though he was becoming a bard of the land.” Bai recounted the sorrow and hardships of the everyday existence of peasants and soldiers in his later poetry, rather than the frivolous themes of barmaids, drinking, and carousing of his youth. “The Huns take killing as their livelihood/ And since ancient times there have been only/ Yellow deserts growing white bones.”

Bai subscribed to the Daoist doctrine- first succeed spectacularly in politics and then, at one’s height, retire forever to a tranquil hermitage. He wrote, “I have observed the sages of ancient times—/ Whoever did not resign after success would suffer destruction.” Unfortunately, Bai never achieved the political success that would allow him to retire in peace. The highest that he rose was to Royal Secretary at the fifth rank. Time and again, he tried to influence Emperor Xuanzong, whether in court or in war, but he was always a failure. Bai could not master the intrigues and machinations of court life. “I’ll be ashamed of becoming another Jinan,/ Who at age ninety still pored over classics./ It will be better to rise with my sword/ And fight in the desert to do miraculous feats./ If I died in my homestead and fields,/ How could I earn and spread my name?”

At the end of Bai’s life, he picked the wrong prince, Prince Yong, in a succession battle with his older brother, Prince Li Hong, to become the next Tang emperor and so Bai was banished to the westernmost outskirts of the empire, Yelang, before being pardoned, and, eventually, dying in poverty and obscurity. At the end of his life, Bai lamented being pulled in two directions by both politics and his religious order and, therefore, never committing his energies fully to either side. “Trying to be prosperous and divine,/ I have simply wasted my life pursuing both.” In January of 764, the new emperor appointed Li Bai as a councilor. But no officials in his home of Dangtu County could find him. Unbeknownst to all, he had been dead for over a year. Bai might have written his own epitaph, “What I enjoy is a jar of wine when I’m alive/ Why should I need a name of ten thousand years after I’m gone?”

“Kafka on the Shore” by Haruki Murakami (translated by Philip Gabriel)

Murakami mixes detailed realism with the wildly fantastic so fluidly that one hardly notices (at first) that cats are talking to humans. ““Not to boast or anything, but I can’t write either,” the cat said, licking the pads of his right paw. “I’d say my mind is average, though, so I’ve never found it inconvenient.”” Colonel Sanders and Johnny Walker also make appearances, in the flesh. ““In everything there’s a proper order,” Johnny Walker said. “You can’t look too far ahead. Do that and you’ll lose sight of what you are doing and stumble.”” But, at the heart of Murakami’s novel is a coming of age story- one filled with loss, regret, and redemption. “Kafka, in everybody’s life there’s a point of no return. And in a very few cases, a point where you can’t go forward anymore. And when we reach that point, all we can do is quietly accept the fact. That’s how we survive.” The plot patiently unfolds as connected mysteries resolve. It is not in a hurry. “Slowly, like a movie fadeout, the real world evaporates. I’m alone, inside the world of the story. My favorite feeling in the world.”

Books, history, dreams, love, and memory all play integral roles in the novel. “When I open them, most of the books have the smell of an earlier time leaking out between the pages—a special odor of the knowledge  and emotions that for ages have been calmly resting between the covers.” Societal norms and familial bonds also are recurring themes. “As individuals each of us is extremely isolated, while at the same time we are all linked by a prototypical memory.” There are plenty of tangents and asides- digressions on Schubert, Sophocles, Beethoven, haiku, surfing, and, of course, Franz Kafka. “Works that have a certain imperfection to them have an appeal for that very reason—or at least they appeal to certain types of people…. all the performances are imperfect. A dense, artistic kind of imperfection stimulates your consciousness, keeps you alert.” There is also plenty of philosophy packed within the story. Murakami makes you think about metaphysical issues. “Necessity is an independent concept. It has a different structure from logic, morals, or meaning. Its function lies entirely in the role it plays. What doesn’t play a role shouldn’t exist. What necessity requires does need to exist.” The narration rotates between the first and third person as the plot follows a pair of protagonists. As their stories intertwine things get even weirder and truths reveal themselves. “As long as there’s such a thing as time, everybody’s damaged in the end, changed into something else. It always happens, sooner or later.”

“Think on These Things” by Krishnamurti

Krishnamurti’s wisdom is so powerful because it almost seems obvious after you have read his words. But if you think deeply upon his teachings they constantly bring new insights. This book is a series of his lectures, followed by question and answer periods with his students. Krishnamurti first propounds on a theme and then takes questions to further elucidate his meaning. He asks of his students, “And to observe, to watch, to give your whole attention to something beautiful, your mind must be free of preoccupations, must it not?” He goes on to develop his ideas of the mind, of the Self, of modern society, and of knowledge. “Your mind is the result of all humanity, and when you understand it you don’t have to study a single book, because the mind contains the whole knowledge of the past. So intelligence comes into being with the understanding of yourself.” He also relates how understanding your own mind is a prerequisite to understanding the first thing about society. “If you don’t know how your mind reacts, if your mind is not aware of its own activities, you will never find out what society is.”

Krishnamurti speaks about notions of truth and time. “The man who really wants to find out whether or not there is a state beyond the framework of time, must be free of civilization; that is, he must be free of the collective will and stand alone.” He speaks often on the impossibility of reforming society. Instead, one must transcend the mundane world— that alone is true education and the only way to be truly revolutionary. “The men who seek out what is truth, what is God—only such men can create a new civilization, a new culture; not the people who conform, or who merely revolt within the prison of the old conditioning…. You may be very learned and do the things which society calls good, but they are all within the prison-walls of tradition and therefore of no revolutionary value at all.” Krishnamurti, therefore, downplays all earthly success. “Our present education is rotten because it teaches us to love success and not what we are doing. The result has become more important than the action.” Striving for success is bound up with the ideals of society, with fears of failure, and with a preoccupation for safety. “We don’t want to invite life, we want to play a safe game; and those who play a safe game die very safely. Is that not so?”

Societal norms tell us what is safe to strive for. Culture teaches each new generation the ideals which are acceptable to all. We are afraid of change and so we stagnate. Everything unique is feared. “We all want a state of permanency; we want certain desires to last for ever, we want pleasures to have no end. We dig a little hole and barricade ourselves in it with our families, with our ambitions, our cultures, our fears, our gods, our various forms of worship, and there we die, letting life go by—that life which is impermanent.” Even in dealing with other humans, we seek to pigeonhole them into permanent boxes. “If you see someone do something which you consider to be good or bad, you then have an opinion of him which tends to become fixed and, when you meet that person ten days or a year later, you still think of him in terms of your opinion. But during this period he may have changed; therefore it is very important not to say, “He is like that,” but to say, “He was like that in February,” because by the end of the year he may be entirely different. If you say of anyone, “I know that person,” you may be totally wrong…. So what is important is to meet another human being always with a fresh mind, and not with your prejudices, with your fixed ideas, with your opinions.”

One of the highest aims of life must be a proper understanding of the conceptions of beauty and love. “The deep appreciation of beauty is an essential part of your own life…. You cannot love if you are thinking about yourself—which does not mean that you must think about somebody else. Love is, it has no object.” Relationships with others can be important for what they teach us about the true nature of the Self. Krishnamurti explains, “Relationship is a mirror in which you can see yourself, not as you would wish to be, but as you are…. I can see myself exactly as I am in the mirror of my relationship with others.” One must understand reality through the prism of the Self. “The people who are sensitive in life may suffer much more than those who are insensitive; but if they understand and go beyond their suffering they will discover extraordinary things.”

Krishnamurti says of desire, “The moment we want to be something, we are no longer free.” Somewhat surprisingly, some of his themes echo Rene Girard’s theory of mimesis. Krishnamurti writes, “Living safely generally means living in imitation and therefore in fear.” He challenges the perception of life as a perpetual contest of striving and becoming. “When the mind is no longer comparing, judging, evaluating, and is therefore capable of seeing what is from moment to moment without wanting to change it—in that very perception is the eternal.” Again, Krishnamurti combats the false hopes of desire, “And are dreams worth fulfilling? To seek the fulfillment of any desire, no matter what it is, always brings sorrow…. Sorrow is the shade of desire…. Most of us are caught up in the desire to achieve, and success is more important to us than the understanding and dissolution of sorrow.” Humans are obsessed with the opinions of others, with rank, with fame, and with acknowledgement. “We all want to have prominence, recognition…. Being in ourselves empty, dull, sorrowful, we are psychological beggars, seeking someone or something to nourish us, to give us hope, to sustain us, and that is why we make normal things ugly.” Krishnamurti is always after what is, not appearances or facades, but the true reality of nature. “We all want to show off. The rich man in his expensive car, the girl who makes herself more beautiful, the boy who tries to be very smart—they all want to show that they have something. It is a strange world, is it not? You see, a lily or a rose never pretends, and its beauty is that it is what it is.”

Krishnamurti states, “If one doesn’t know how to meditate, one is not a mature human being.” However, he also has a nuanced view of the concept. “To understand what is right meditation is not to practice meditation…. To understand what is right meditation there must be an awareness of the operations of one’s consciousness, and then there is complete attention…. Without self-knowledge you cannot pay complete attention…. In understanding himself he will know what it is to pay attention without resistance, for the understanding of oneself is the way of meditation.” More conventionally, Krishnamurti continues, “Meditation is the process of understanding your own mind…. You will see how difficult it is to be aware of every moment of your own thought…. This slowing down of thinking and the examining of every thought is the process of meditation…. There is no “you” who experiences truth, but the mind being still, truth comes into it. The moment there is a “you” there is the experiencer, and the experiencer is merely the result of thought.”

Krishnamurti’s proper life is one full of self-inquiry, self-examination, self-reflection, and self-knowledge. (In so far as there is even a Self at all that is.) “The moment you stop asking questions you are already dead…. So right through life don’t accept a thing, but inquire, investigate. Then you will find that your mind is something really extraordinary, it has no end, and to such a mind there is no death.” In the end, “the problem of the “me” and the “mine” is one in which we are all involved. It is really the only problem we have.”