Krishnamurti

Krishnamurti came up in another thread, so I thought I’d start a thread about him, beginning with What Love Is Not. I am especially taken with:

What happens when you face the fact and know for yourself that you do not love your neighbour or your son? If you loved your son, you would educate him entirely differently; you would educate him not to fit into this rotten society, but to be self-sufficient, to be intelligent, to be aware of all the influences around him in which he is caught, smothered, and which never allow him to be free. If you loved your son, who is also your neighbour, there would be no wars because you would want to protect him, not your property, your petty little belief, your bank account, your ugly country or your narrow ideology. So you do not love, and that is a fact.

Click to expand...

So true! Your ugly country, your petty little belief, your narrow ideology, your bank account, all the rest of it!

In the other thread I mentioned that I once attended a Krishnamurti talk in San Francisco, and when we stood up to applaud at the end he waved his hands at us and snarled, “You’re only applauding yourselves!”

Tune in, turn on and drop out?
I think everyone on the planet should be force fed a heavy dose of LSD for their 18th birthday*.

Maybe not. But self awareness seems to have lost favor over the last decade, and it would be great if a pill could fix it.

Quite a life, chosen and raised by Theosophists, Leadbeater, Bessant, to be the world teacher.

I very much think LSD therapy should be at least strongly encouraged at 18 and then again at all the decades. Brains need it.

DBT said:

Quite a life, chosen and raised by Theosophists, Leadbeater, Bessant, to be the world teacher.

Click to expand...

To his credit, he did a number on that one in his dissolution speech.

DBT said:

Quite a life, chosen and raised by Theosophists, Leadbeater, Bessant, to be the world teacher.

Click to expand...

Which and who he completely repudiated. That is the Krishnamurti I am discussing.

Also, of course, to dismiss him or his ideas because of how he was raised is totally ad hom. I would like to discuss, for example, his ideas on love linked in the OP.

pood said:

DBT said:

Quite a life, chosen and raised by Theosophists, Leadbeater, Bessant, to be the world teacher.

Click to expand...

Which and who he completely repudiated. That is the Krishnamurti I am discussing.

Click to expand...

Of course, yet his upbringing is an inseparable part who he was, and his insights. Rejecting the role mapped out for him by the Theosophical society is a credit to him.

DBT said:

pood said:

DBT said:

Quite a life, chosen and raised by Theosophists, Leadbeater, Bessant, to be the world teacher.

Click to expand...

Which and who he completely repudiated. That is the Krishnamurti I am discussing.

Click to expand...

Of course, yet his upbringing is an inseparable part who he was, and his insights. Rejecting the role mapped out for him by the Theosophical society is a credit to him.

Click to expand...

Agree very much. He did what they asked and it turned out they hadn't really understood what they wanted.

Here is the dissolution speech. “Truth is a pathless land.”

Before Krishnamurti was even born, Dostoevsky anticipated him in his novel The Brothers Karamazov, in the person of Father Zosima, who counseled that no organizations, sects, dogmas, or isms could change the world or even the person, the person had to change from within, and to the extent that others do this, the world would gradually change for the better because of the bettering of each individual. By the time he wrote this novel Dostoevsky had rather come over to this point of view after embracing a brand of radical revolutionary politics that nearly got him executed and later shipped off to Siberia for a prison sentence. Like Krishnamurti, Zosima did not want to be worshiped, but of course the people ignored him, and when he died, they refused to inter his body or treat it in any way, because he was declared a saint and it was thought that dead saints could not rot. The body did rot though, to everyone’s chagrin, in a comical scene.

A key part of Krishnamurti’s teachings is that the brain is conditioned. It is conditioned by thought, words, by upbringing and other factors. This conditioning introduces strife and conflict into the world, including separating the thinker from the thought, and the observer from the observed, which in reality are one.

He holds that we must overcome this conditioning, but how? If we choose to end our conditioning by some method or means, that is just another form of conditioning, and hence futile. In this he disagrees with other traditional eastern teachings, which hold that we can gradually end conditioning over time, via meditation and other methods. Krishnamurti rejects this.

He contends, rather, that conditioning ends in an instant, as follows: One realizes, fully and wholly, that our minds are conditioned; and one further realizes, fully and wholly, that any effort we make to end this conditioning is just another form of conditioning, like meditation or eastern religioius practices. When we realize this, fully and wholly, Krishnamurti contends — conditioning instantly ends, and the mind is silent. empty of thought or judgment.

What is one to say about this? Is it really true? Untold numbers of people listened to him over the decades — are any of them unconditioned?

At the end of his life, Krishnamurti reportedly said, “No one has understood my teaching.”

Also, what is the naturalistic response to these claims? The naturalist would contend, I think, that any effort to end strife and conditioning, conflict and division, including by sudden self-awareness, is futile. The world is red in tooth and claw and evolution has molded our minds for strife and conflict in the ceaseless effort to find food and reproduce while competitors are vying for the same objectives we are. As the character of Judge Holden said in Cormac McCarthy’s great novel Blood Meridian, “Man is made for war. Before man ever was, war was waiting for him.”

Krishnamurti holds that life and death are as one, as follows: The unconditioned, enlightened mind recognizes the the ego, the “I” and the “me” are nothing but conditioned memories, dead letters of the past, and all we have is the present. When we let go of the the ego, the “I,” we let go also of the dead letters of the past, and in so doing we, so to say, die every moment. And so actual death is as nothing to the unconditioned mind, because it just more of what the unconditioned mind has already been doing: letting go of the past. This is how I read him, at least.

The unconditioned mind is not affected by the past, is indifferent to the present, and has no anticipations of the future. It lives in the present, in a state of what K calls “choiceless perception.”

What I find interesting is this teaching, or call it what you will — Krishnamurti denied being a teacher, yet, as noted above, reportedly said at the eve of death, “No one has understood my teaching” — with the philosophy of Ayn Rand, as expressed mainly in her fiction. Her philosophy is the polar opposite of Krishnamurti’s, because she believed that the “I,” the ego, was paramount. In her great novel The Fountainhead she called this “egotism,” though in a later forward to her book she conceded that she ought more properly to have called it “egoism.”

In her book, the architect protagonist, Howard Roark, is the ultimate egoist. At one point he says something to the effect of, “Before one can say, “I choose,” one must be able to say “I.” Everything is “I.”

Roark/Rand vaporize the “I.” Krishnamurti rejects the “I.”

What I find interesting, though, is that in Rand’s fiction, the Roark of “I” is almost identical in practice to the Krishnamurti of “Not-I.”

Roark is indifferent to the external world. One character tells him that he lives as if the external world were in some fifth dimension, never touching him. This is consistent with Krishnamurti.

Roark tells another character that he has no need of others in a “close, personal way.” This echoes Krishnamurti, who counsels that instead of running away from loneliness, one ought to accept and even embrace it.

When the novel’s antagonist, who has done great harm to Roark, asks Roark to tell him what he really thinks of him, Roark replies, “but I don’t think of you.” This “I” of Roark/Rand is perfectly consistent with the “Not-I” of Krishnamurti.

Roark’s thought are entirely about architecture, and nothing else. This is consonant with Krishnamurti’s contention that words and thought should be reserved for technical matters only, like building a bridge.

When Roark tells another character that he has not read a certain best-selling book, the character replies incredulously, “Don’t you read books?” Krishnamurti was said to have read little, and rarely retained what he read.

There are other parallels.

I just find interesting how the “I/ego” of Rand/Roark, and the “Not I/ego-lessness of Krishnamurti, somehow start at polar opposites, yet meet at the same point.

pood said:

The naturalist would contend, I think, that any effort to end strife and conditioning, conflict and division, including by sudden self-awareness, is futile. The world is red in tooth and claw and evolution has molded our minds for strife and conflict in the ceaseless effort to find food and reproduce while competitors are vying for the same objectives we are. As the character of Judge Holden said in Cormac McCarthy’s great novel Blood Meridian, “Man is made for war. Before man ever was, war was waiting for him.”

Click to expand...

That is the simplest explaination for the observation that the children who get the least conditioning are the most likely to become violent and anti-social adults.

A "good upbringing" leads to less violent behaviour, and the more different adults are directly involved in that upbringing, the better - "it takes a village to raise a child".

Of course, simplest explaination isn't always also best, or right; But that's the smart way to bet, in the absence of hard evidence to the contrary.

pood said:

I just find interesting how the “I/ego” of Rand/Roark, and the “Not I/ego-lessness of Krishnamurti, somehow start at polar opposites, yet meet at the same point.

Click to expand...

I think Krishnamurti got many things right. But when it comes to his solution, which is not a solution according to him because a solution is always another form of conditioning, everything gets maddeningly vague, and ultimately somehow circular.

The way to solve conditioning and your problems and ultimately those of the world is to recognize that you are conditioned.

But any effort to end conditioning is just another form of conditioning, so don’t try to end conditioning.

Instead, recognize that you are conditioned and that any effort to end conditioning is futile. Then, instantly, conditioning will end.

It will? But how?

Go back to step one.

"Nondual" contemplatives found an important truth, but you have to get past their hyperbolic claims to figure out what it is. When you read them, you'll see talk about "the cessation of thought" and similar. (Or, in this instance, we're talking about the ending of conditioning.) But the brain thinks and is conditioned and no amount of meditating can stop the brain doing what it does.

Meditation can help gain a little control of what the attention focuses on. And, importantly, it can also help with becoming a more detached observer. But it can't make thoughts stop.

If you ignore the unfortunate choice of words, like "the cessation of thoughts", and keep in mind the context of the practices they advise, you see what's intended is that you step aside from the thoughts. The key word here is "non-attachment". Once you're in 'a space' that, in itself, is void of thoughts... then you're free of thoughts. Not because they're gone, but because (in keeping with my spatial metaphor) they are "over there" to the side of your mind instead of occupying center-stage.

How does one do that? Most of us have surely experienced it, unintentionally and momentarily, when captivated by something beautiful so that our sense of self disappeared and there was just the experiencing. It wasn't "Me" doing the experiencing. Everything was "just so", without an observing center that feels apart from, outside of, the rest of being or nature that was merely noting "that's beautiful". There's a world of difference in those two sorts of experience. A world of difference.

But that happens so infrequently, in random instances of "grace". And we "spiritual" types want more of that! Because it feels like heaven peeked out from behind the world of "things" for a moment. (I may regret saying "heaven" in the company of post-christians, but I mean in Blake's "heaven in a grain of sand" sense).

How to do it? One way is to meditate, to learn to become "non-attached" from the mind's distracting and suffering-inducing noises and identify with awareness itself.

One can meditate for years to achieve that... or just do it while sitting there in your chair right now, lol. It's simply a matter of bringing awareness itself to the foreground of awareness, so that you're in effect "meditating" always.

A tiny example of how mindful spaciousness can put thoughts "to the side": I have tinnitus, so there's a high-pitched screeching inside my head all day every day. Like with other ingrained behaviors of the brain, there's no getting rid of it. Yet I almost never hear it, and (nearly always) it doesn't bug me when I do hear it. How? By not being reactive to it, by not fusing with it, by not going "this is bad, this is wrong, reality shouldn't be doing this to me, it must stop and go away!" Instead I accept it's there - neither good nor bad but just simply there.

It took a while to stop energizing it by fusing my attention with it. When I "let go" the attachment (the aversion to it was an attachment to it), it retreated into the background of attention. That's how it not only no longer stresses me, but isn't even heard much of the time.

I intend this analogy to be universal. What I just said about tinnitus, is my idea of what the central feature of apophatic mysticism is (ie, a contemplative practice without using mythological imagery as the meditation-object). It's letting go the stories about the self and the world, so the sensate world can be there in the foreground of attention. In "mysticism", truth is experienced wordlessly - it's what is "just there" when you stop blocking the view with your self and its pile-up of propositions about reality, and its feelings and wanting and resenting and regrets and the fantasies we call "memories" that are supposed to tell "who I am".

What's left when you let all that go? The world of phenomena, hovering in the receptive spaciousness of Awareness. And that world is now experientially much more like Blake's "eternity in a grain of sand", now that the ego-self isn't categorizing it into "things I like" and "things I don't like" and "things I know cuz I'm such a smart engineer" and other ego-based flotsam of the mind.

Where do the thoughts, feelings, etc, go to, after you've "let go"? Nowhere. They stay right there where they've always been. They're as accessible as ever. This isn't brain damage being touted here; it's an expansion of abilities. The difference is now there's a spaciousness where "you" (ie, awareness) may step aside from the noise that distracts from simply being.


Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase “each other”
doesn’t make any sense.
The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don’t go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don’t go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don’t go back to sleep.

~ Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī

I am trying to pin down a quote from Van Gogh, which I believe was to the effect that, “When I paint, I don’t think.”

So I Googled it, and I notice that Google now has AI responses at the top of searches! This is so wonderful, because AI recently learned that there are three r’s in the word strawberry, after previously not knowing that, so now obviously the sky is the limit for AI.

AI says Van Gogh did not say that. I think he did, somewhere, but I’m not going to try to nail it down now. I once owned a book of his collected letters and other writings, but don’t have it now, but I think he said somewhere in there, in one of his letters. I could be wrong. Anyway.

I am an artist, a pretty good one I guess, since I sell a lot of work, though that is not necessarily the metric for making good art. Van Gogh apparently sold only one painting in his lifetime, though that, too, is disputed.

Art is not how I have earned my living, but it is one of the things I do.

And I would like to say that, when I draw or paint, I don’t think.

I don’t know if this is the state that Krishnamurti, the eastern mystics, and @abaddon are referring to, but it is really quite extraordinary, and it happens in no other endeavor in my life. When I am making a work of art, there is just nothing. Nothing else. Just the art and I, and otherwise total mental silence. Like a trance state. No thoughts or memories. No past or future. Even sound seems largely blocked out. You might say, I suppose, that I am at one with the art, and the observer is the observed.

Now, I have earned a living as a writer and editor, and I do not have that experience in those endeavors at all, except on those comparatively rare occasions when I seem to be “taking dictation” from works my subconscious has worked out before I am consciously aware of them.

Make of it what you will. It is of quite acute interest to me.

I wonder if Krishnamurti’s “choiceless perception” means being like me and my art, except, being like that, all of the time.