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.”
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