Jiddu Krishnamurti

The teaching

Taught from his talks and books, above all Freedom from the Known (1969) and The First and Last Freedom (1954).

Truth, a pathless land

Krishnamurti's teaching begins with a refusal. Truth cannot be reached by any path, organisation, creed, priest, ritual or method, and no one can lead another to it, not even the one who is speaking. A follower gives up the very thing that is needed, which is to see for oneself; an authority in matters of the spirit, however wise, makes the mind dull and dependent. So he asks his hearers to take nothing on his word, and to use what he says only as a mirror in which to look at themselves.

The known

Every mind, he teaches, is conditioned: shaped by its nation, its religion, its family, its class and its long past of experience, and that conditioning is the known. People act from the known even when they seek the new, and so they repeat the past. The conflicts of the world are made of the conflicts in each person, for the mind of each is at bottom the mind of humanity: the individual is the world. Freedom does not come by escaping conditioning, nor by exchanging one conditioning for a better one, but only by seeing it fully as it works.

Choiceless awareness

The seeing he speaks of is choiceless awareness: watching what is, within and without, without choosing, judging, condemning, justifying or comparing. The moment one says this thought is bad and that one good, the past has stepped in and the seeing has stopped. Ideals do the same harm. To set what should be against what is, the brave self against the fearful one, divides the mind and makes conflict; the ideal is an escape from the fact. He asks for attention to the fact alone, the anger, the envy, the fear, as it actually is now.

The observer is the observed

In the ordinary way, a person looking at their anger feels that there is someone looking, a watcher who can control, suppress or improve what is watched. Krishnamurti asks who that watcher is, and answers that it is made of the same stuff: memory, the past, the stored judgements of the very self that is angry. The observer is the observed. When this is seen, not as a theory but as a fact, the division ends, and with it the effort of control; what remains is an attention in which the anger is wholly seen and, being wholly seen, is changed.

Thought and time

Thought is the response of memory, and so it is always old and always limited. It has its right place, in the skills, facts and technical work of living. But it also builds psychological time, the idea that one will become something tomorrow, better, calmer, enlightened; and that gap between what one is and what one will be is the home of fear, effort and conflict. Fear itself is thought: the mind, having known pain and pleasure, projects a future from them and dreads losing what it has. The ending of psychological time, the refusal of becoming, is for him the ending of fear.

Pleasure, sorrow and love

Pleasure, too, is thought keeping a past delight alive and demanding it again, and sorrow follows pleasure as its shadow. He asks that sorrow be met without escape: not explained, not consoled, not turned into self-pity, but stayed with completely, as it is. In that complete staying, he says, sorrow ends, and the ending of sorrow is the beginning of wisdom. Love is not desire, not pleasure, not jealousy or attachment; where the self with its demands is absent, there is love, and from love comes compassion.

Relationship as a mirror

Self-knowledge is not gained by withdrawing to study oneself, but in relationship, where the self shows itself moment by moment: in the irritation, the possessiveness, the wish to be approved. Between people the obstacle is the image. Each builds a picture of the other out of past hurts and pleasures, and then the two images relate rather than the two people. To see the other without the image, freshly, is the beginning of real relationship.

Meditation

Meditation, in his teaching, is not a technique: not the repeating of a word, the following of the breath or the control of thought, for any method practised only conditions the mind in a new way. Meditation is awareness of every thought and feeling as it arises, watched without judging and followed to its end, until the mind is quiet, not by force but because it has understood itself. In that silence, he says, there is no meditator and no centre, and something comes that he would not name, which his notebook calls the otherness and the immensity.

Learning

Learning, for him, is not the piling up of knowledge but a movement of seeing that holds nothing as final. His schools in India, England and California were founded on that ground. Education, he taught, should help the young to understand themselves and the world without fear and without comparison, so that they grow into whole human beings and not only into able workers; and teacher and pupil are to learn together.