For the last two decades I have taught as a professor of philosophy at Johannes Gutenberg-Universität in Mainz, Germany. Throughout my academic career I have mostly specialized in the area of analytical philosophy of mind and cognitive science. This has mainly involved working on theories of consciousness, self-consciousness, and subjectivity in a strongly interdisciplinary manner, always keeping an eye on the latest developments in related fields like neuroscience, empirical psychology, or artificial intelligence. I have travelled a lot, have interacted with researchers all over the world, and all in all have taught philosophy in eight German universities.
If you live the life of an academic philosopher, you meet a lot of truly great minds. You regularly encounter extremely sharp and intelligent people, women and men who are much smarter than you have ever been or could ever be yourself. Sometimes you may not even grasp how much smarter than you some of your colleagues actually are. But you quickly learn to feel humbled by intellects much clearer and faster than your own. It is certainly true that in academic philosophy, the overall psychodynamics and the social patterns of interaction are often highly pathological. Yet still, it is here that many of humankind’s greatest minds gather. Here, you will meet truly impressive scholars, researchers whose knowledge is profound and substantial, deep thinkers with an overview of the history of philosophy and a command of the canonical literature that is utterly unbelievable to an ordinary person. (I sometimes secretly call these people ‘libraries on legs’.) You will occasionally witness experts in formal logic and other highly technical subfields who are so brilliant that only a few can follow them. Some of them live lonely lives, because they operate on levels of abstraction so rarefied that few even understand the fundamental importance of the philosophical problems they are trying to solve. And then there are some fortunate ones for whom, by chance, it has all come together—gifted, motivated, and highly intelligent individuals who had the privilege of being born in rich countries during times of peace, young philosophers in affluent countries who received an excellent education in some of the best universities in the world and who were brought into contact with the right kind of mentors at exactly the right moment. Many of us may not be aware how, thanks to systematic and sustained efforts to improve educational systems, the numbers of these fortunate few have been steadily increasing since World War II. But there are now many smart kids around. They are impressive in their own way; they teach the old folks humility—and some of them are shaping up to be the great minds of the future.
Jiddu Krishnamurti was the greatest mind I have ever met. K was not an academic philosopher, and he fulfils almost none of the criteria for philosophical greatness, some of which I hinted at above. If you have never been in his physical presence, listening to his talks in Switzerland, in India, or anywhere else in the world, it will be hard for you to understand why I should say something like this about him. But he conveyed something. If you just have his books you will find them slightly unsystematic and repetitive— and if you are an academic philosopher it will be easy for you to isolate dozens of contradictions and all sorts of conceptual ambiguities that may border on unintelligibility. Most of all, you might find K’s teachings ‘thetic’—he certainly says things, but he never really presents an argument.
I talked to K all alone only once. This happened in Chalet Tannegg in Gstaad, and it may have been the most helpful personal instruction I have received in my life. I had written a letter to him and completely unexpectedly Mary Zimbalist (‘Maria Zimperlich’ as we called her at the time) invited me over to meet him. While I was waiting, his personal physician Dr Parchure had a look at me, and I still have fond memories of all the things I learned from him.
He straightened out my asanas, adapted my pranayama by integrating proper kapalbathi exercises into it, forced me to do different kinds of stride jumps with him, and urged me to grow comfrey for my asthma—which I later did in my untidy little hippie garden at home. In my early twenties, I was an arrogant brat who thought of himself as probably the greatest yogi of all time—and the brat was baffled and humbled by how somebody in his fifties could have such a perfect body and be so much more knowledgeable and generally advanced than the brat. Dr Parchure was an impressive man. Visiting him and his wife outside of Pune in November 2013, after some thirty years, was a great pleasure and meant a lot to me.
I will not share the conversation I had with K, because it was simply too personal and intimate. But one thing that can be shared is this simple point, which I have never forgotten, “Everything that creates a sense of effort is wrong.” And I have never known a parting “Good luck, sir!” touch me as deeply as his did.
The main function of a good teacher is to deflect all attention from himself and to bring the disciple into direct contact with his or her own inner teacher. Perhaps what I am most grateful to K for is that he liberated me from the search for a teacher so early in my life. Searching for a teacher—for the right kind of teacher— is an obsession that many people get tangled up in. For some, it lasts a lifetime, the delusion that you can only really ‘make progress’ or ‘take the leap’ if you find someone who has already done it and whom you can totally trust—it’s rather like searching for the one great love of your life, that single human being who will make everything fall into place. This creation of a ‘seeker’, a ‘disciple’, or a ‘devotee’ frequently kicks in at an early stage, and it is one of the subtler ways in which the ego-mechanism begins to protect and sustain its own existence once it realizes there is a threat. The threat is created by the discovery of effortless mindfulness, by the dawning insight that, ‘observing without an observer’ might actually be something that already happens all the time.
If you look into the best current-day psychology and theoretical neuroscience, you will find that there are two major mechanisms by which the human self-model constantly recreates and stabilizes itself, fragmenting the ever-fresh space of pure awareness and contracting the primordial state of observation-without-an-observer into an individual first-person perspective. One is mirroring itself in another human being, projecting desires, hopes, and fears into it, attempting to establish a dyad or even a larger social context in which it can sustain itself. The self-model automatically tries to couple itself with other self-models, as the node of a network that helps maintain self-esteem and self-worth, and that, ideally, provides some clever form of mortality denial. The second mechanism has, metaphorically, been called ‘predicting oneself into existence’. By constantly hallucinating goals and making plans for the future, the human brain continuously designs what scientists call ‘action policies’ and tries to change the world in order to make it fit an internal model of reality—a process philosophers and neuroscientists today call ‘embodied active inference’. This process crucially and systematically involves misrepresentation, attenuating bodily self-awareness at the very moment of action initiation, redirecting attention to a virtual self, and thereby losing touch with the present moment. The inner experience we call ‘the conscious self ’ is created by exactly this process of trying to expand into the future. It is an attempt to make the mind ‘temporally thick’, to successfully predict and bring about future selves, by superimposing a self-fulfilling prophecy onto the timelessness of the present moment. It is an attempt to control an online hallucination. None of this is our fault, there is no reason to despise ourselves in a moral sense—we are this process, which in turn is a result of the process of evolution by natural selection. However, the deeper philosophical point is that as long as the self-model is ‘transparent’, as long as we do not directly experience it as a model, it will create the phenomenology of identification. We will feel that we are this, the content of our current self-model. We will have no choice but to act out the content of the model. I think that one of the things K was trying to make people see is that the whole process of creating a teacher-disciple relationship just creates more identification, an even deeper form of entanglement and immersion. The same is true of conjuring up the romantic idea of a ‘path’ with an oh-so-serious spiritual seeker travelling on it, including complicated action policies and a hallucinated final goal-state. The idea of a ‘path’ creates a new selfmodel, a spiritual ego continuously predicting itself into existence.
When I first arrived in Saanen, in the Bernese Oberland of Switzerland, I was a politically radical, critical, and sceptical young man. I immediately thought K’s hairdo was ridiculous—an obvious sign of vanity and bodily attachment. But, having listened to other Indian masters who narcissistically presented themselves to their devotees in a sea of flowers, often sitting on some huge sofa all covered in white silk, I was impressed that someone of his age could actually sit on a simple wooden folding chair, wearing a plain, clean blue shirt and trousers. He first won me over when, answering a question about how to live a good life in an insane society, he dryly said, “If you buy a stamp, you support war”. Here was someone who was in touch with reality, who saw things clearly. What really convinced me was when one time he looked at the crowd in the tent and said something to the effect of, “Am I speaking out of an infinite silence or am I just a confused old man? You will never know. You are all alone in this world.”
K certainly hurt me. After first encountering him, many of my old psychosomatic symptoms (which had dissolved after three or four years of regular meditation practice) came back, and it took me years to re-stabilize. This old man certainly pulled the rug out from under my slightly complacent sadhana-feet—and not just mine. He shocked a lot of us and plunged some people into crisis. A while ago I had some interesting conversations with Pathik Wadhwa in Germany and in Ojai, exploring the question of whether some of his listeners might have been traumatized by his charisma, developing a life-long addiction to the speaker himself and being unable to really look at the things he was so desperately and passionately trying to point us to. Have I simply been blinded by his charisma? How do I know that K was really the source of that ineffable quality? Might I simply have happened to be particularly receptive at that time and place in my life, and might my enduring conclusion of K being the greatest mind I have ever met be slightly delusional, some sort of post hoc attribution? As human beings, we are certainly all vulnerable to this kind of delusion. I remember talks of K’s in Vasanta Vihar in Madras, where he relentlessly lashed out at all forms of religious or spiritual authority, at Gurus of all kinds, and ruthlessly investigated the illusions involved in the teacher-disciple relationship. It came to the point where he actually stopped himself in the middle of the talk and said, “I am amazed that nobody throws a brick or a chair at me!” After ninety minutes, when he was trying to make his way off the stage and out, some of his Indian listeners rushed forward and immediately began to prostrate in front of him or hold babies up to be blessed—as if they hadn’t heard a single word.
I loved the atmosphere in Madras, when during his evening talks the sun set and the birds went to sleep in the trees. Sometimes there was a moon at the end of it. I remember how one evening I walked out with a quiet mind and an elated mood. As the gates to the street were opened, we were immediately attacked by a group of aggressive beggars, led by an old woman in very bad physical shape, saliva drooling from her half-open mouth with very few teeth left. She rammed an old tin bowl right into my stomach pit and firmly held it here, nailing me to the spot. Her eyes, glowing like coals, stared right into my deepest core, making clear that she demanded to be seen and that she would not tolerate any attempt to escape or ignore her. What does it really mean to be in touch with reality? Who or what is it that sees what is?
I am still convinced that K is the greatest mind I have met so far. But there were also the K-people—’K-non-disciples’—as Christa Winkler, Shyam Shembekar, and I sometimes called them in a self-ironizing way and not without a touch of sarcasm. I do miss those two thousand people at the Saanen gatherings. What a brilliant crowd! They were the most interesting group of human beings I have ever come across. All colours, all countries, beautiful lunatics, all sorts of strong and deep personalities—real existential seriousness from hippies to old-fashioned theosophists, people to talk to and to learn from, from theoretical physicists like David Bohm to Zen monks and breeders of the sacred mushroom. Many, potential friends for a lifetime. I also liked the fusion with nature— listening to K’s talk one day, getting up at five the next morning with my friend Wolfram Engelhardt and others to climb the Gummfluh. Which year was it when it rained nine nights and nine days without a single break, and we almost drowned in the campsite? At one point even K said, “I am sorry the weather is so foul!” In Saanen they began to hate those soaking-wet figures, who were starting to smell and only had money for a single hot chocolate—and then never wanted to leave. I am grateful to Manfred Schneider and his wife for so many things, one of them being that they ultimately rescued us by organizing some kitchen jobs in Saanenmöser. The size of the vats of chocolate sauce for the vanilla ice cream was amazing.
After K died, I deliberately kept my distance for some three decades. I was deeply disturbed when after his death I saw people continuing to organize ‘gatherings’. But talking to young folks in Mürren and Ojai a few years ago, I came to understand that for many of those who come into contact with K’s teachings after his death, it is crucial to have a place for exchange with like-minded others. Confronting all the things his teachings make you confront can be a lonely business, and it helps to learn about others’ perspectives, about other human beings’ insights and difficulties. I still think, though, that it is important to radically confront impermanence, as exemplified by K’s death and by the obvious fact that his teachings receive less and less attention. Perhaps the irrevocable dissolution of the social context he created during his lifetime is a good thing, because nothing new grows under a Banyan tree. When much later I visited Brockwood Park, Ojai, and the Valley School outside of Bangalore, what impressed me most about the excellent work being done by teachers and pupils inspired by K was precisely the freshness of it, and the fact that the teachers were learning from the pupils as much as the other way round.
I may be totally wrong, but precisely because I have spent my professional life as an academic philosopher, I have always thought it would be quite beside the point, absurd even, to introduce K’s work into academic discourse. K has been called the ‘world philosopher’, but what he was trying to make his audience see for themselves is something beyond any intellectual endeavour. To be sure, there is excellent and highly significant academic philosophy going on in many places on this planet, but that is a very different kind of enterprise. Again, I may be completely wrong about this, but I have always thought that the core of K’s teachings is not only ineffable but has the kind of importance that means it should probably be actively protected from attempts to drag it into the fray of academic discourse.
I have tried K out with my students, but only a few times. One time, I reserved his work for the very last session of a fourteen-week summer term, our final meeting before the summer break. The week before, I handed out copies of four or five brief excerpts of his writings I had prepared and said, “Next week, we are going to do an experiment with non-academic philosophy. Read this carefully! I want to know what you make of it!” Next week came and there was a clear and almost unanimous verdict. This was excellent stuff, but it was not something that could be discussed. It was something that could only be lived. And, given this was now a firmly established insight, a simple point seemingly everybody in the seminar agreed on—could we just call it a day and head off for the summer?
*I am greatly indebted to Dr Emily Troscianko for editorial help with this contribution.