I knew nothing whatever about Jiddu Krishnamurti until I read Jeremy Vaeni’s Urgency just a few weeks ago. I liked what I read. Very much. I had assumed that he was another “guru.” I was friends with a guy in Massachusetts long ago who said he’d been a guru for a while. He became a coke addict. Or maybe like that guy the Beatles followed, who of course might have been the real deal, I don’t know. But Krishnamurti seems to have been near-unique. Vaeni reprints his speech disbanding the Order of the Star in 1929, which is really cool. Got my attention. But this super short piece he wrote at the request of Mary Lutyens, his friend and biographer, is really succinct. And incredibly dense. In case you are like I was and don’t know about him, here it is.
THE CORE OF KRISHNAMURTI’S TEACHING
The core of Krishnamurti’s teaching is contained in the statement he made in 1929 when he said “Truth is a pathless land.” Man cannot come to it through any organization, through any creed, through any dogma, priest, or ritual, nor through any philosophical knowledge or psychological technique. He has to find it through the mirror of relationship, through the understanding of the contents of his own mind, through observation, and not through intellectual analysis or introspective dissection. Man has built in himself images as a sense of security—religious, political, personal. These manifest as symbols, ideas, beliefs. The burden of these dominates man’s thinking, relationships, and daily life. These are the causes of our problems, for they divide man from man in every relationship. His perception of life is shaped by the concepts already established in his mind. The content of his consciousness is this consciousness. This content is common to all humanity. The individuality is the name, the form, and superficial culture he acquires from his environment. The uniqueness of the individual does not lie in the superficial but in the total freedom from the content of consciousness.
Freedom is not a reaction; freedom is not choice. It is man’s pretense that because he has choice he is free. Freedom is pure observation without motive; freedom is not at the end of the evolution of man, but lies in the first step of his existence. In observation one begins to discover the lack of freedom. Freedom is found in the choiceless awareness of our daily existence.
Thought is time. Thought is born of experience, of knowledge, which are inseparable from time. Time is the psychological enemy of man. Our action is based on knowledge and, therefore, time, so man is always a slave to the past.
When man becomes aware of the movement of his own consciousness he will see the division between the thinker and the thought, the observer and the observed, the experiencer and the experience. He will discover that this division is an illusion. Then only is there pure observation, which is insight without any shadow of the past. This timeless insight brings about a deep radical change in the mind. Total negation is the essence of the positive. When there is negation of all those things which are not love—desire, pleasure—then love is, with its compassion and intelligence.
London, October 21, 1980
This is just down the road for me! https://krishnamurticentre.org.uk/
Built by Keith Critchlow, circa 1982, on the Brockwood Park School estate.
Krishnamurti’s Notebook, 1976, ed. Mary Lutyens, is worth chasing up, rich with the details of existed experience (no division of experience and experiencer). I’ve always supposed that this is what Blake meant by Vision.
Tom, you might enjoy the series of talks between Krishnamurti and David Bohm. They are incredible. I discovered them bc I'm really into we-space which is all imaginal realm work. David's work on Dialogue has been part of that investigation.