Over the years as one of the KFT editors, I have naturally read or listened to a great deal of K material, though very far from anything like the total of it—estimated as equal to four hundred average-sized books—only half of which is available electronically. Any attempt to summarise this massive output seems, therefore, practically impossible. But does this then rule out any kind of answer to the title of this article—What is Krishnamurti saying? Is it a question that should even never be put, because the answer can never be comprehensive? That seems a bit draconian!
Pondering this recently, it has seemed to me that each of us will of course know his or her particular ‘portion’ of K’s teaching, and be struck by particular aspects of it. This would seem to inevitably produce a range of ‘takes’ on what he is saying. Well, what is wrong with that? Nothing, of course, provided one doesn’t get fixated on one’s particular ‘take’ as being exclusively the ‘right’ one—a step on the slippery slope to dogmatic belief.
So, to approach the title of this article in a different way, what has K got me seriously interested in? Above all else, it is clarity in seeing and responding to the other in relationship. It is logically, rationally clear that an image of another based on thought coming from one’s limited knowledge and experience of that person has all the flaws of the stereotype. And how do I react to being the prisoner of such stereotyping by another? With a sense of injustice, perhaps of outrage! So here is something that really needs attending to—the unravelling of that stereotyping process, inwardly and outwardly.
Second—conditioning. Again, it is logically, rationally clear that the human brain has been moulded by millions of years in which day to day physical survival was the only lifestyle on offer. Having food, drink, shelter and safety from predators and rival tribes dominated the agenda. There is much in the world today that suggests our behaviour is still largely, if not almost entirely, driven by that agenda. “I am asking you”, K says, “to jump a million years.” The aeon-long clasp of our conditioning is something that it seems humanly reckless and irresponsible to ignore and leave intact.
Third—the relationship between brain and mind. K’s final account of this is found in the dialogue with David Bohm on 20 June 1983. The statement that it is the quietness of the brain—with thought in its rightful, limited place—that allows the higher functions of mind—intelligence, compassion, love—to operate is for me a statement of great beauty and explanatory power. It demands to be checked out, verified as far as one can.
Being inspired by live contact with K to explore his teaching is no longer possible nowadays for the new generation, which has to rely on videos, audio recordings, books, and the Internet. And among those who now visit our Centres there are those who ask, “Do you know anyone who has fundamentally changed?” To seek such a guarantee, as one would with an upgrade of Windows, is something K dismisses in the psychological area as dependency. We all have to go solo in looking at how our brains work. Taking responsibility for that is like one’s first dive into a swimming pool.
But if one is asked that question, what can one say? An aloof silence can suggest that I am the holder of a mystique. I think next time I shall say, “Yes, I have changed, but I haven’t the faintest idea of how much, in what way, and how it came about! Nor am I bothered about that.” I am confident I must have changed somewhat because whenever one reads, hears, or sees something serious it fires neurons in one’s brain, but how fully, to what effect … well, who knows! Of course, the significance of these firings will get reality-checked by life sooner or later, but our grasp of the relevant psychological process involved is elusive. The best one can say is that, overall, something seems to be OK, even at times great, but don’t rely on that, it may not be tomorrow. A leading American physician wrote of every medical diagnosis, “You have to face the stark reality of uncertainty.” Not that uncertainty in life has always to be ‘stark’—it might turn out sometimes to be blissful!
An all-encompassing area of interest to me in K is his constant stressing of the limitation—inherent limitation—of thought, knowledge and experience, and therefore of action based on that. Except for science and technology, this limitation applies across the board, to personal, family, professional, and international relations. Yet our educational systems award their highest praise to thought and knowledge, placing them firmly on a golden pedestal. K knocks them firmly off this pedestal. But the strong unspoken public assumption remains, as the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy puts it, that ‘the most evident display of our rationality is our capacity to think.’ We seem to ignore the fact that it is also the most evident display of our irrationality. This hasn’t been easy for me to digest. The first one in our family to go to a university, I graduated as a fully paid up, card-carrying intellectual, convinced that thinking was the royal way to go. Part of my further education in the deep sense has been to unpack much, though not all, of my formal education.
Has the meeting of K with the theoretical physicist David Bohm a special significance for us? Perhaps even some kind of allegorical significance? Organized religions tussle with science, are often decried by it. But K says that the scientific mind is part of the religious mind. That is perhaps keenly relevant nowadays when neuroscience willingly describes the self as an illusion created by the brain. When in the late 1960s K began to speak of mutation of the brain cells, at roughly the same time the scientist Fernando Nottebohm was doing research on neuronal replacement in bird brains that was to lead to the later confirmation of ‘plasticity’ in our brains. The work of Nobel winning psychologist Daniel Kahnemann on cognitive bias also complements in detail much of what K says of perception.
The solitude needed for the greatest human exploits in religion, philosophy, science, art and literature is nowadays side-lined in our culture and seems even feared. Of course, none of these supportive findings by science on the plasticity of the brain will ever replace the ongoing inner and outer personal observing that K invites us to do.
The need to look within with an energy matching or surpassing the energy given to exploring the world outside us is something K points to repeatedly. The alternative is entertainment, whether provided by technology, social media or the rituals of religious belief, all of which distract from serious personal inquiry into what is happening in us here and now inwardly or outwardly. And driven by the isolating pain of the separative self, many of us now get attracted by nationalist fantasy—reviving epochs of past glory that on scrutiny prove to be mirages themselves.
A powerful magnet for me in K’s teaching is its essentially planetary nature. However much they struggle to go beyond them, the traditional religions are constrained by their limited geographical and cultural origins. Yet, as K has pointed out, human beings, wherever they are, act from thinking that is based on the inevitably limited knowledge and experience of the past. Failing to see that every problem is new, (and this demands openness to that), we fall back on what we’ve done before. And at a time when climate change threatens all of us, powerful voices are heard trumpeting ‘My Country First!’ when only unprecedented international cooperation will enable our planet to survive. K reminds us that the failure to see that we are all more alike than different, all variations on the same great themes of life—relationship, livelihood, pleasure, suffering and death—is a blinkered, doom-laden error of human perception. “We are all in the same boat”, K said many times in one of his last talks (Yet, as we all know, it is only too easy to hear an inner voice objecting ‘can’t my place be a bit special?’).
But the great leitmotif in K of the shared human condition has become clearly relevant in a world threatened not only by climate change, but one in which rash mortgage-lending in one large country can wreck the economies of all the others, and where the worldwide spread of diseases like Ebola or influenza or corona virus can be checked only by international action. So here is another basic human perception that needs attending to—the interdependence of our existence.
That last phrase leads well to the other great magnet I find in K—The Ending of Time. Like many of us, I can remember when very young, ‘wondering about the stars,’ I even read the books of the popularising physicist Sir James Jeans. And in the last twenty years the question as to what on earth (sorry, unintended pun) the role of human consciousness is in the universe began to nag increasingly. We are on a small third rock from a small star caught up in the expanding billion light-years outreach of the cosmos. Much, if not most, of what we get up to on this rock seems utterly inane in this immense vastness, with the human ego in particular claiming a ludicrously inflated status.
In The Ending of Time K cautions that the illusions of the separative self need to end before we can explore deeply the human place in the universe. But he also argues strongly that rational inquiry can clear the way for profound and transforming insight into it. And how such insight can come about is later discussed in detail with David Bohm in the second dialogue of The Future of Humanity.
These dialogues are a rich seedbed for one’s own inquiry, and are an effective countering of the absurdist or ‘unintelligible’ view of human existence. Rather than being a universe in which the human being is a baffled and uneasy outlier, K offers the prospect of one we can feel at home in.
And that seems a rather conveniently ultimate sentiment with which to end this article!