Although I am a professor of Religious Studies, my fondness for Krishnamurti’s teachings is not solely academic. About forty years ago, I worked with passion at a Krishnamurti school in Canada, before going on to a career in academia, during which I have written books and articles on Krishnamurti’s thought. However, I value Krishnamurti’s teachings for what they did for me long before my teaching stint and formal research. This is because, to me, the academic study of Krishnamurti’s teachings, and even the remarkable efforts and activities that occur daily at the Krishnamurti Foundations and schools, pale in comparison to the value of validating his insights for oneself in one’s own life.
In my early twenties, in the final years of my BSc studies in Chemistry in Canada, I began to grow disenchanted with science’s ability to point me to a meaningful life. I held rationality and science in high regard, and greatly valued systematic, logical thinking. I still do. But science, despite its extraordinary achievements and promise for future generations, had no compelling answers for me in my personal quest for happiness in my lifetime. I had already abandoned the prospect of finding any comfort in my conventional religious upbringing, which I experienced as a conglomerate of unbelievable beliefs, hollow rituals, platitudes, and guilt-inducing teachings that appraised me as inherently flawed. Since this was the early 1970s, like many in my generation I had been exposed to counter-culture literature, such as the writings of Carlos Castaneda and Zen Buddhism, and Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha. These sources assured me my existential uncertainty was not abnormal and recommended a pivotal realization or shift in ordinary perception as a remedy. Ever on the lookout for popular philosophy/ psychology self-help volumes in local bookstores, I first noticed Krishnamurti books there, but initially avoided them. Since I was born in India, I was sceptical of the western fascination with Eastern gurus and would rather have received gleanings of wisdom from an Alan Watts or Thomas Merton than another Maharishi or Swami, or some guy named Krishnamurti. But, one day, desperate to read something new, I succumbed to buying a Krishnamurti book. Unlike someone anxious to lap up the words of a beloved teacher, I first read Krishnamurti wanting to find something to disagree with. I wanted to say to others, “Oh yes, I’ve read a bit of Krishnamurti, and I don’t really like this or that about what he is saying.” You can imagine my surprise when Krishnamurti not only disarmed my negativity but left me repeatedly resonating with his observations. I found his words very accessible. He spoke in clear, simple sentences, free of any foreign religious jargon. And quite importantly, he said I did not have to accept anything he said that did not align with my own experience and understanding. I liked that immediately.
I liked that book so much that I passed it to my friends to read, and went out and bought another, and then another. I had only read three Krishnamurti books by the time I set out from home in the direction of Asia, on what I think of as my Siddhartha quest. My main take-away from my limited readings of Krishnamurti at the time was the enormous value he, like others I had read, placed on attaining a profound psychological realization. To me, Krishnamurti stressed self-reliance, and pointed out the limitations of joining religious organizations, following teachers (including himself), adopting mechanical meditative techniques, and so on. Instead of helping, these could be hindrances, and become instances of the blind leading the blind! This was painfully evident in the many examples of spiritual teachers who led gullible seekers to terrible personal and social actions. When reading Krishnamurti, I found such pointers mostly sensible and several of them clearly stuck with me. In my years of subsequent wandering in search of the frustratingly elusive realization, I encountered appealing opportunities to join Buddhist monasteries or the communities of popular Indian religious teachers. I am sure that Krishnamurti’s words bolstered my decisions to avoid joining those captivating groups. For that, among other things, I am grateful. I honestly can say that I was not following Krishnamurti’s teachings, because I don’t recall him providing any method to follow. However, my observations had made it painfully clear to me that I was in the grip of a relentlessly thinking mind. So, thereafter, his encouragement to truly find out if thought could end became the only option that made any sense to me in my desperate search.
Years later, I worked at a Krishnamurti school, and eventually returned to university to pursue graduate degrees in the study of religion. But these activities were no longer part of my search. I did not and do not conduct research and write about Krishnamurti’s teachings in order to one day discover some hidden secret to the truth to which he points deeply embedded within them. To me, his message is plain to see, everywhere in his words, and verifiable for oneself. In a lifelong career spent studying the religions of humanity, I continue to regard Krishnamurti’s teachings as among the most relentless and beneficial pointers to what I have found most valuable in life. My academic writings are simply efforts to share my reflections on his teachings, as honestly and accurately as I can. These contributions take different forms. They may analyze the teachings to reveal internal structures. They may try to explain seemingly paradoxical perspectives. They may draw comparisons to or find contrasts with other similar teachings. They are mostly written for the benefit of those who, like myself, appreciate academic analyses. There is a part of me that hopes this work might inspire some readers in their own searches for a pivotal and radically transformative insight into the nature of thought. But I also know that they can have the unintended effect of encouraging more thinking about Krishnamurti and the analysis of his teachings, enhancing the focus on him rather than on oneself in relationship with the world.
To me, Krishnamurti was adamantly against anyone following him blindly, and I would venture to say he was even against thoughtful followers. Consider this striking comment on influence in one of his talks:
All influence is evil, as authority is evil. There is no good influence or bad influence, as all influence shapes the mind, corrupts the mind.1
Krishnamurti wanted us to discover the truth about our own conditioned and conflicted lives. He spent a lifetime encouraging people to do so. He ended that same talk about influence by saying:
So, you begin to discover for yourself how extraordinarily slavish thought is to a word. And you will find, if you will go into it very deeply, that there is no thought without a word. And you will find, if you go still deeper, that where there is a thinker and a thought there is a contradiction, and every form of experience only divides and strengthens the thinker and the thought as a separate process. So, it is only when this whole process which I have explained from the beginning till now, is understood, examined, watched, that the mind comes out of this social, environmental, verbal structure as an uncorrupted, clear, sane, rational mind. It is only then that the mind is no longer influenced, it is completely empty. It is only such a mind that can go beyond Time, and beyond all Space. It is only then the
Immeasurable, the Unknowable, can come into being.2
To Krishnamurti, such a discovery was not theoretical. “You will find,” he says. Even so, there is a widespread sentiment, tacitly in circulation, that nobody achieved the insight to which he points. It is an open challenge that is yet to be met. Did Krishnamurti spend his life pointing to a realization that he alone attained, insisting on the immense value of that realization for everyone, while knowing that it was virtually unattainable? Did he teach only to illustrate how extraordinarily special he was, knowing “the Immeasurable, the Unknowable,” and so on, with “an uncorrupted, clear, sane, rational mind,” and thereby propping himself up to a status worthy of veneration? Surely not. Surely, he surmised that his discovery was available to any sincere seeker.
According to Buddhist tradition, right after the Buddha departed the earth, 500 Arhats gathered to compile his teachings. An Arhat is a Buddhist, who, following the Buddha’s teachings, attains Buddhahood (i.e., nirvana, enlightenment). Thus, the Buddhist tradition insinuates that the Buddha was highly successful in his lifetime at pointing others to enlightenment. Mahayana Buddhism contends that Pratyeka-Buddhas are those who are somehow inspired to attain enlightenment, and do so not by following Buddhism but in their own ways. After all, Siddhartha Gautama did it that way, becoming a Buddha without following anybody else’s prescribed path. By analogy, Krishnamurti encourages us to discover pivotal psychological transformation without following anyone, including him. During his lifetime, the Buddha only travelled in a relatively small region of the Ganges river valley, and probably only spoke to a fraction of the number of people that Krishnamurti must have reached through his books, worldwide travels, and discourses. Writing in 1976, before the explosive proliferation of talks circulating via digital media, the philosophers Troxell and Snyder surmised that Krishnamurti had been, “heard and read by more people than any individual philosopher who is part of the contemporary academic tradition.”3 It is difficult to imagine, and probably an error to conclude, that among the countless persons who heard his message throughout the world for half a century no one was adequately inspired to attend to and come upon the insight to which Krishnamurti pointed.
Why then does one repeatedly encounter the tacit idea that despite Krishnamurti’s long, full life of patient, and arguably intelligent, teachings, ‘nobody got it’? I would like to somewhat playfully and roughly sketch out some lines of thinking in response to this question. First of all, Krishnamurti did not want to form a religious tradition with a lineage of authorized, authoritative ‘psychologically transformed’ teachers, going out to proselytize ‘his’ message, and to whom ‘seekers’ could come to ask for advice or official acknowledgement of their own realizations. The Foundations direct seekers to Krishnamurti’s teachings, which in turn point the seekers to themselves. Were Krishnamurti to have told anyone, privately or publicly, “you have got it”, that person would have become the second patriarch of a Krishnamurti lineage and tradition, and be hounded by would-be disciples. Krishnamurti’s final recorded comments, of course, have fuelled these ideas, because they may be interpreted as he himself saying that nobody got it and that he was exceptional.4 However, unless we concede that Krishnamurti knew the states of consciousness of each and every human being on the planet, there is no reasonable way for him to have known if anyone else had attained the realization to which he pointed. So, it is unlikely that this is what he meant. Moreover, it is also unlikely such persons would have sought him out to authorize the validity of their realizations, as is done in Zen Buddhist monasteries and other traditions. Mind you, such authorization is done simply to propagate the lineage, or to inhibit someone who may be deluded about their ‘enlightenment’ from becoming the tradition’s torchbearer. In many Buddhist schools, falsely claiming to have attained nirvana, and purposely misleading others, can lead to expulsion from the Sangha, the community of monks. So, it is rare for Buddhist monks to proclaim having attained enlightenment. However, Krishnamurti left behind no lineage or community from which one may be expelled. So, we may surmise that people who were inspired by Krishnamurti and who may have attained the realization to which he pointed would likely continue to live with or without public assertions of their pivotal insights. Keeping quiet about it would clearly be the more peaceful option. Opening one’s mouth might elicit all sorts of reactions from others, many of them unpleasant.
To properly explore whether or not someone who attained the pivotal transformative insight to which Krishnamurti points would, should, or could assert it would require a separate essay. There circulates the implicit notion that since there is no unconditioned ‘I’, for someone to assert realization is a mark of delusion. Perhaps, but most apparently-realized teachers, including Krishnamurti, asserted their realizations. Therefore, perhaps holding onto the idea that one cannot, would not, or should not assert realization is simply an instance of one’s own thought-fixated entrapment. Even so, we may also reasonably assume that there are people that have been inspired by Krishnamurti, who are truly deluded about the nature and depth of their realizations, erroneously believing that they have fully grasped his teachings. Some of these may also keep silent, but offer judgments on others. It is conceivable that some segments from within both those groups (the realized and the deluded) have gone on to teach about their realizations, perhaps initiating some new lineages or inhibiting them from forming, just as Krishnamurti attempted to do.
Since many people worldwide, but particularly in Asia, believe in reincarnation, it would not at all be unusual for someone to claim to be a reincarnation of Krishnamurti. Speculations about reincarnations of Krishnamurti’s brother, Nitya, and others who were close to Krishnamurti circulate in some Theosophical circles. Krishnamurti’s final recorded message undercuts any such attempts at assertions about his reincarnated consciousness or even that his consciousness might be channelled psychically. He asserted that no portion of ‘Krishnamurti consciousness’ would endure after his death, or return like that of a reincarnating bodhisattva. To me, Krishnamurti’s final recorded message was partly intended to circumvent anyone from garnering spiritual authority by purporting any sort of attachment of their own consciousnesses and/or teachings to his. Thus far, he has been successful, because I am unaware of anyone making any such claims effectively.
Of course, in spite of this, ‘Krishnamurti-ism’ may be a tradition that inadvertently develops from those following Krishnamurti, against his wishes, under the guise of trying to understand or explicate him more and more deeply. Both the Krishnamurti Foundations and the Krishnamurti schools run the risk of inadvertently fuelling this phenomenon, while struggling to exercise their mandates effectively. It is extremely challenging to make Krishnamurti’s teachings widely available or apply his principles of education, while simultaneously generating adequate funds to sustain themselves, without encouraging a ‘dependency’ on Krishnamurti. And, I have already pointed out how academic studies, such as my own, may also unintentionally nourish this development. Let’s face it, if one concedes that the machinations of our conflicted, conditioned, and selfish natures are ever present and active, and incapable of radical change, they eventually could only collectively produce variations of the traditional, divisive, ideological, and conceptually-fashioned, self-serving entities that have existed in the past. If no one has changed, and no one can change, there is little hope for success.
I will conclude by reiterating some other seemingly paradoxical features posed by the profound psychological transformation to which Krishnamurti points, the so-called ‘challenge of change’
For one, Krishnamurti dismisses the value of ‘trying’.
A mind that is not toiling, that is not trying to become something socially or spiritually, that is completely nothing—it is only such a mind that can receive the new.5
Krishnamurti urges us ultimately not to struggle, to ‘try’ to understand him or his pointers with greater and greater intellectual depth, but to see ourselves as we really are at this moment. We generally do not pay adequate attention to how our thoughts and feelings affect our perceptions. We move away from careful observation of our ‘inner’ reality, moment by moment, and reinforce our identity through how we analyze and appraise ‘outer’ reality. Even though we may be looking at, listening to, or reading someone else, such as Krishnamurti or this article, everything is mediated through our own minds. By remaining sensitively aware of whatever is arising within us at this moment, we may see deeply into the play of our conditioning and self-centredness. ‘Not understanding’ Krishnamurti, or even ‘deepening one’s understanding’ of him, are among the ways in which the thinking mind sustains the self. Similarly, even ‘understanding’, or purporting to ‘explicate Krishnamurti’s teachings’, as in this article, are other self-creating and self-sustaining activities. So, too, is explicating our own understanding in our own words. On seeing our predicament, we mistakenly think that the conditioned self can become unconditioned through the right kind of lifestyle or knowledge. This fuels our search through our readings, analyses, diets, exercises, social actions, and our host of other self-, social-, and spiritual improvement regimens. We repeatedly fail to see the mechanisms of conditioning in everything we think and do. Even if we realize that lifestyle and knowledge won’t free us, we latch onto the idea that a profound psychological insight will grant us freedom from conditioning. After all, for those of us attached to Krishnamurti’s words, isn’t that what he seems to be saying? This sets us on our ‘spiritual journey’ in search of the pivotal realization that will yield the unconditioned mind.
Consider these words by Krishnamurti, “If you are at all serious, the question whether it is possible to uncondition the mind must be one of the most fundamental.” And he continues by saying, “If you start out with a formula that one will never be unconditioned, all enquiry ceases, one has already resisted and answered the problem and there it ends.”6 So clearly, our minds either give up on the question by jumping to a negative conclusion, or jump to the notion that the mind can be unconditioned. In actuality, both these are conclusions, even if the latter appears like an open-ended inquiry. Krishnamurti notes our predicament. “I know that my mind is conditioned; and how am I to free my mind from conditioning when the entity that tries to free it is also conditioned? Do you understand the issue? When a conditioned mind realizes that it is conditioned and wishes to uncondition itself, that very wish is also conditioned; so what is the mind to do?”7 However, he then elaborates by inquiring, “What is the state of the mind when it knows that it is conditioned and realizes that any effort it makes to uncondition itself is still conditioned?”8 And in no uncertain terms, he then answers that question saying, “When you see the truth that whatever the conditioned mind does to free itself, it is still conditioned, there is the cessation of all such effort, and it is this perception of what is true that is the liberating factor.”9 This stopping of effort is not the capitulation of a pessimistic conclusion, or the optimism of hope for freedom in a yet-to-occur realization. It is the instantaneous and realistic freedom of insight. Krishnamurti urges us to begin from freedom to remain with ‘what-is’, ever aware of the creative unfolding of the unknown, as experience and thought leave ripples of the known in its wake. Is this ‘liberating factor’ completely unavailable, or extremely rare and inaccessible? Consider these words of his:
You must begin, however little, to be conscious, to be aware, and this you can be when you talk, when you laugh, when you come into contact with people, or when you are still. This awareness becomes a flame, and this flame consumes all fear which causes isolation. The mind must reveal itself spontaneously to itself. And this is not given only to a few, nor is it an impossibility.10
Endnotes
1 Public Talk 3, Bombay (Mumbai), India, 28 February 1962
2 Ibid.
3 Eugene A. Troxell and William S. Snyder, Making Sense of Things: An Invitation to
Philosophy, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1976, pp. 148–49.
4 See Krishnamurti’s last recorded words in Mary Lutyens, Krishnamurti: The Open
Door, London: John Murray, 1988, pp. 148–49, where he speaks more about his own life and realization than that of others, saying, “You won’t find another body like this, or that supreme intelligence operating in a body for many hundred years. . . They’ll all pretend or try to imagine they can get into touch with that.
Perhaps they will somewhat if they live the Teachings. But nobody has done it.
Nobody. And so that’s that.”
5 Ojai 3rd Public Talk 13th July 1955
6 Part IV, Chapter 1, Brockwood Park, 3rd Public Talk, 12 September 1970, ‘The
Unconditioned Mind’
7 New Delhi, 6th Public Talk, 31 October 1956.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid.
10 Ommen, 3rd Public Talk, 4 August 1937
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