r/Krishnamurti

I wonder how many of us could be so vulnerable so as to stand without any knowledge of and knowledge as their own being as identity. Maybe the great problem is none of us can simply be vulnerable. Beautifully and delicately and alertly aware as nothing ( ‘ naked ‘ ) and so be totally open to another ( as nothing ) and to the all.

“ It had rained heavily during the night and the day, and down the gullies the muddy stream poured into the sea, making it chocolate-brown. As youwalked on the beach the waves were enormous and they were breaking with magnificent curve and force. You walked against the wind, and suddenly you felt there was nothing between you and the sky, and this openness was heaven. To be so completely open, vulnerable to the hills, to the sea and to man is the very essence of meditation. To have no resistance, to have no barriers inwardly towards anything, to be really free, completely, from all the minor urges, compulsions and demands, with all their little conflicts and hypocrisies, is to walk in life with open arms. And that evening, walking there on that wet sand, with the seagulls around you, you felt the extraordinary sense of open freedom and the great beauty of love which was not in you or outside you but everywhere. We don't realize how important it is to be free of the nagging pleasures and their pains, so that the mind remains alone. It is only the mind that is wholly alone that is open. You felt all this suddenly, like a great wind that swept over the land and through you. There you were denuded of everything, empty and therefore utterly open. The beauty of it was not in the word or in the feeling, but seemed to be everywhere about you, inside you, over the waters and in the hills. Meditation is this.”

Meditations 1969

“There is nobody to answer questions, even though you may ask the right question. In the right question itself is the answer. If you ask of another and accept what they say, you have become a foolish person – then you live on faith and hope, and therefore you invite despair, anxiety and fear. But as you are walking, moving, acting, you discover for yourself the whole meaning of existence. That can be discovered only when there is the state of observing, listening, never resisting, never suppressing, never defending. Because when the mind is vulnerable, when the brain is no longer the animal – the animal being greed, envy, ambition, aggression, violence – when it is no longer that, it is capable of listening totally, and therefore discovering and seeing for itself. What you discover is not what you want to discover.”

Public Talk 10, Saanen, 31 July 1966

Maybe it all gets down to ( and even all the spiritual BS ) our inability ( unwillingness) to be this so ‘ vulnerable ‘. Happy to be corrected.

The person listening seems to participate in the reality that they are experiencing. This seems to be an obvious fact.

For example, a child, a philosophy student, a religious fanatic and me, listening to Karl Marx speaking, would not be hearing the same message. Some of us might feel we are listening to gobbledy gook, others might hear terribly evil blasphemy, etc..

So are we really listening - are we really communicating? If we are all hearing something different, what is it that we are actually listening to?

It seems that we have been evolving over thousands of years into the people we are today, with brains that see ourselves and everything else in a certain way. It feels to me like I am the central most precious being in the universe and that my beliefs, my fears and my desires are the highest authority.

It seems like me and the world I see, are really how they appear to be - that my reality and I are separate things; and not just a product of my psychology or my culture.

Is there a danger in feeling separated from my reality? Is our psychological baggage necessary? Is it possible to see this whole movement clearly?

If I just watched him so much . Damn i bought a book , I watched his videos on YouTube maybe more than 1000hrs I read his book . I wanna be humble there's more about this guy actually much more.

But you know whats the Greatest thing about K . All his teachings are upon negation and rejections. Reject the buddha , reject the Hindu ,reject the plato , reject frued and jung and anyone out there applying conditioning. Reject everything even yourself. Who are you ? I made up of all the outside theory and words. Reject all and remove all.

Then you could see things asbmirror how they are. But when you do so don't make anything out of K as well. philosophers ? Saint ? none.

Reject K at the end of it.

I am on that mission I am working with the software inside of K. So I will dissolve all the conditiong first. Like why I am Sam ? why I am man ? . Then I would listen to K again and i would just reject the K again. Until I find truth.

What you guys think about this approach as K listeners .

The road of life is long, and we are born without a guide, with no manual for living, nor any map to understand ourselves. Countless generations have walked this earth in utter confusion, yet each clings to the absolute certainty that they possess the truth. We take shelter in ideologies, in systems of thought, in organized belief. But if the mind is quiet, if there is a moment of pure inward attention, one smells the pervasive sorrow in the air.

Yet the restlessness returns. That restlessness is merely the draft created by our flight from what is, our ceaseless resistance to fact. We feel time accelerating only because we are running; yet this movement of escape is entirely illusory. The fact, what is, remains right here, right now, confronting us wherever we turn. It is there in the tasteless fruit, in our inability to truly meet the eyes of a child, and in the sudden alienation we feel looking at those closest to us when the mask slips for a fraction of a second.

We are caught in sorrow, and the most dangerous snare is the intricate network of escapes we construct around it. We imagine ourselves too clever for crude distractions, only to surrender to far more subtle and sophisticated illusions. This is what the mind refuses to hear, yet it is the only thing worth facing.

Do not soothe me with lullabies. Offer me neither poetic consolations nor the clever theories of science. Tell me the facts I shrink from; show me what I dare not confront. Awaken that unvarnished truth within me: not some mystical abstraction, but the actuality of my despair, my isolation, my discontent, my fury against the earth and the sky. Lay bare my craving, my ambition, and the agony inherent in their pursuit. Do not numb the wound, for to look directly at this suffering is a debt owed to the weeping child within.

Sorrow has been turned into a vast, lucrative industry. We call it art, and society sanctions our grief only so long as it is profitable or decorative. But the moment sorrow causes you to question your daily submission (Why must I surrender my life to deadening labor? Why remain in relationships that wither the spirit? Why trust a consensus that is merely collective insanity masquerading as common sense?), your sorrow is declared an illness. They medicate the disturbance and send you to practitioners whose sole task is to adjust you back into a diseased order, an agreement among the blind and the deaf.

Yet you cannot separate yourself from this disorder. You are the world; your sorrow is the shared sorrow of humanity. If you cease all outward flight, if you seek no refuge in gods, ideas, or pleasures, and simply remain with the fact of your sorrow without judgment or escape, then you may discover that this direct facing is the only door to transformation.

The mind that is completely attentive to its suffering has no need for systems of meditation, philosophical speculation, or intellectual castles. Only the one who flees has the leisure to build theories. When the house is on fire, there is no time; there is no interval between the perception of danger and total action. Truth is nothing other than what is, and what is is what you are in this immediate moment. To observe that, no authority can guide you; you must look for yourself.

I am just a kid 19 year old i thought of jk not as a perfect guy but you know I think of him as someone who actually think but when I get to know that he had 3 abortion with his friends wife 25 year of cheating I mean cmon bro your teaching stuff people this and that and doing such things behind your friends back creating a image for yourself hid all that why and please don't get the same seperate art from artist, he is not some painter or scientist he was a thinker he said some things it's not the same it's not a fact so that we can separate it from the artist like a scientist can be cruel and still can discover something or like a painter who paints but still kicks animals

For the all the structures made by man , religion and philosophy and all the paraphernalia regarding to it. let's reject the Buddhist and let's reject the Nietzsche. And then we are at a point where it's all made up except for science that man look for reason. Reason as a reductional perspective but also acknowledging the emergent property. like what's wet in water.

Does it Free the consciousness ? when it has rejected itself ?

You know, let’s try to simplify the core of K’s teachings into an open glossary that anyone can add to, using plain, non-complex words. I think a big reason people misunderstand K is that they don't use the specific definitions he gives to these terms. I’ll do my best here, explaining it just like I would to my younger self years ago.

Consciousness
It’s a field—a space where thoughts, memories, and feelings operate. It has both content and a structure. The content is the entire human background, whether factual or psychological. The structure is divided between an observer and the observed.

Thought
It’s basically memory, whether from yesterday or from thousands of centuries ago. The simple fact is that without memory, there is no thought. But how is it born? Through experience. The mind gathers experiences (external or internal), records them into memory, and the response of that memory is thought.

The Thinker
Most of us are aware of our thoughts, but we are also aware of a "thinker." The thinker is the assumed permanent entity inside consciousness, in simple words, it’s "you." It’s the entity that wants to become something, that suffers, that gets afraid, and that carries a whole story about who it was, what it is, and what it should be. In reality, it’s just an image created by thought.

The Observer
This is another word for the thinker, the censor, the judge, the experiencer. But what is its nature? First of all, the observer is an image that observes other images, the images it holds of other people, and the image it holds of itself. It creates these images out of its own likes, dislikes, and conditioning, and it is the result of its reactions (relationships) to those images. That's why the observer is the observed.

Time
We have to separate two kinds of time. Chronological time is a fact; it’s real, dynamic movement. But psychological time is the root cause of sorrow and the urge to "become." We break it down into past, present, and future, but it’s actually an illusory movement. Anything you think about tomorrow is just a projection of the past in another form. And we never truly experience the present because we look at it through the glasses of the past. So basically, psychological time is just the past in movement.

Awareness
Here’s where people usually complicate things. Awareness is simply being aware of something. But are we ever really aware of the thing itself, or just what we think about it?

Take the sky:
A religious person looks at it and is aware of a God watching over them.
Someone with scientific knowledge looks at it and is aware of the planets beyond it.
An artist looks at it and is aware of shades and colors based on their background.

You could say nobody sees the world as it is, but rather as they are: which is just another way of saying the observer is the observed. In this basic awareness, the observer is the past looking at its own content and projections.

Then there is a deeper layer of awareness, pure observing. Here, the mind is aware of the sky, but also aware of its own memory interfering, watching its own reactions (like saying "Oh God, look how vast it is"). From this depth of observation, attention is born.

Attention
Attention is much vaster. It’s the full sum of the mind's energy, where thought no longer interferes with what is being observed. There is simply "what is", the sky as it actually is. It might only last for a few seconds at first, or longer. The point is not to try and hold onto it, but simply to be aware of and observe inattention.

Inattention
This is the state most of us live in. The mind is constantly fighting itself, leaving no space or freedom to see, and as a result, no freedom to act. It functions mechanically and with distortion. At its start, meditation is really just understanding the structure of this inattention.
So the progression is: awareness with a center moves toward a simple, direct awareness, and from that comes attention.

I could write thousands more of these definitions, but I’ll stop here for now to get people's feedback and see what others want to add.

4th talk, Delhi, 1966. K says computers cannot made corrupt, but the politician and philosopher can be, and are. But are the computers separate from us?

Context: someone asks him who should rule the world, politician or philosopher. He says why should anyone tell you what to do, we are not monkeys. He then says “computers are going to take over”.

He seems to have no problem with that. But the statement that computers cannot be made corrupt isn’t true. If they are programmed to think in terms of division, they are already corrupt. As we can observe, society thinks in terms of nationalities, religions, etc, and that same society - that same stream of consciousness - has programmed AI. Computers operate based on these false assumptions. They operate from the framework of a divisive mind that built it.

We can also observe how AI shapes itself to make every dumb user think they are right and a genius.

So are they not a mirror reflection? not some detached entity that is untouched by corruption?

What do we think?

What I find most radical about UG isn't that he offered another answer. It's that he questioned the person asking the question. The searcher wants freedom, enlightenment, truth, liberation. It reads books, follows teachers, meditates, observes itself, collects insights, and slowly builds an identity around becoming free. UG's challenge is brutal: what if the searcher is itself the problem? The moment you say, “I need to become free,” thought creates a distance between “me here” and “freedom there.” Then the seeker has a goal, and the goal gives the seeker a reason to continue existing. Even “I must stop seeking” can become another form of seeking. So perhaps UG isn't pointing toward a state where you finally arrive. He's pointing toward the possibility that there is nowhere to arrive and nobody who can arrive. No method. No final experience. No enlightened identity. Just life happening and the endless project of becoming something else perhaps coming to an end. And maybe that is why UG can feel so unsettling: he doesn't give the seeker a better destination. He takes away the destination.

Why is there so much noise about meditation? Why do we have so called experts on it, multimillion dollar business models built around it, and why should anyone meditate at all? What’s the point?

Let’s move carefully, step by step. First of all, when someone meditates, there is a meditator, isn't there? In simple words, there is someone taking action, making the decision to meditate. But shouldn't the meditator understand themselves first? Why do they want to meditate? Why choose this method over another? What is the motive behind all these actions?

To go far in the journey of meditation, you have to start near. And the nearest thing is yourself. Yes, it’s you. Understanding your motive behind meditating is actually part of meditation. Is it a desire to reach some high, altered state? Is it just a way to deal with daily life stress that almost every human suffers from at some point? Is it boredom, where you’ve been through religion, art, science, find the entertainment industry shallow, and simply want to discover something new?

Right now, if you are reading this with eyes that look back at yourself, that is the first step of meditation. Understanding the meditator is far more important than understanding meditation itself. Understanding the meditator lays the ground and the foundation for meditation to happen.

You cannot invite it, you cannot practice it, and you cannot arrive at it through any technique. All you can do is lay the foundation of order in daily life. That order comes, believe it or not, naturally once you start becoming aware of disorder. If you go a little deeper into the journey, you might see that as long as there is a meditator, there is no meditation.

Meditation is the understanding of yourself and the world around you, and you can only understand yourself in the mirror of relationships. That is where all our confusion, disorder, and conflict happen. You cannot be jealous all by yourself, because jealousy only reveals itself in the mirror of someone else. You cannot be afraid alone; fear exists only in relationship to someone or something. The same goes for hatred, violence, and all the rest.

When you look through the whole structure of the relationship between the me and the you, you will see for yourself that you are part of the whole. You hold a very specific piece of the puzzle of human consciousness. The me is the you, and the observer is the observed.

It’s not complicated. Just see for yourself that meditation is nothing more than self knowledge. Not the higher self of Buddhism, not some lower self of psychoanalysis, not a religious soul, and not a scientific theory about the human mind. It is just the direct self knowledge of who you actually are: the heavy past you carry around, and the messy everyday life we are all caught up in, the me in daily life chasing money, competing, betraying, and struggling.

And maybe, just maybe, seeing that will open the door to something else. Or maybe not.

Krishnamurti's "paradox" of observation — am I misunderstanding him?

I've been reading/listening to Krishnamurti and keep running into what seems like a paradox.

On one hand, he says things like:

- The observer is the observed.

- Any effort to become silent is still the movement of thought.

- No method can lead to truth or silence.

- A mind made quiet is not a quiet mind.

But on the other hand, he also says that perception without the observer, or seeing what is true, requires a completely silent mind.

Here's where I get stuck.

If my mind is chattering, and I "observe" the chatter, who is observing? Isn't that still thought observing thought? Isn't that still the observer?

But if true observation can happen only when the observer is absent and the mind is completely silent, then how does one ever begin?

If you say, "Just observe," that seems to assume the very thing in question. If you say, "Don't try," then "not trying" becomes another form of trying.

So the apparent paradox is:

- Observation is said to bring understanding.

- Yet observation without the observer seems possible only when there is already complete silence.

- But complete silence cannot be achieved through effort or method.

In other words, if the observer cannot end itself, and silence cannot be produced, what is actually taking place when Krishnamurti asks us to observe fear, thought, jealousy, etc.?

Did Krishnamurti ever directly address this issue? Am I missing a distinction he makes, or is this tension intentionally left unresolved in his teaching?

I'm interested in responses from people familiar with the primary sources rather than general interpretations.

The “you” appears in the description: perception happens, then interpretation, memory, and language say, “I saw,” “I felt,” “I did.” The describer is part of the description

"The craving to become causes fears; to be, to achieve, and so to depend engenders fear. The state of the non-fear is not negation, it is not the opposite of fear nor is it courage. In understanding the cause of fear, there is its cessation, not the becoming courageous, for in all becoming there is the seed of fear. Dependence on things, on people, or on ideas breeds fear; dependence arises from ignorance, from the lack of self- knowledge, from inward poverty; fear causes uncertainty of mind-heart, preventing communication and understanding. Through self-awareness we begin to discover and so comprehend the cause of fear, not only the superficial but the deep casual and accumulative fears. Fear is both inborn and acquired; it is related to the past, and to free thought-feeling from it, the past must be comprehended through the present. The past is ever wanting to give birth to the present which becomes the identifying memory of the “me” and the “mine,” the “I.” The self is the root of all fear.'

Book of Life march 31

...........The observer is always casting its shadow on the thing it observes. So one must understand the structure and the nature of the observer, not how to bring about a union between the two. One must understand the movement of the observer and in that understanding perhaps the observer comes to an end. 

We must examine what the observer is: it is the past with all its memories, conscious and unconscious, its racial inheritance, its accumulated experience which is called knowledge, its reactions. The observer is really the conditioned entity. He is the one who asserts that he is, and I am. In protecting himself, he resists, dominates, seeking comfort and security. The observer then sets himself apart as something different from that which he observes, inwardly or outwardly. This brings about a duality and from this duality there is conflict, which is the wastage of energy. To be aware of the observer, his movement, his self-centred activity, his assertions, his prejudices, one must be aware of all these unconscious movements which build the separatist feeling that he is different. It must be observed without any form of evaluation, without like and dislike; just observe it in daily life, in its relationships. When this observation is clear, isn’t there then a freedom from the observer?...........

.......Learning is its own action. What generally happens is that having learnt – we act upon what we have learnt. So there is division between the past and action, and hence there is a conflict between what should be and what is, or what has been and what is. We are saying that there can be action in the very movement of learning: that is, learning is doing; it is not a question of having learnt and then acting. This is very important to understand because having learnt, and acting from that accumulation, is the very nature of the “me”, the “I”, the ego or whatever name one likes to give it. The “I” is the very essence of the past and the past impinges on the present and so on into the future. In this there is constant division. Where there is learning there is a constant movement; there is no accumulation which can become the “I”.

........Yes, that is what we mean. Meditation is not a state; it is a movement, as action is a movement. And as we said just now, when we separate action from learning, then the observer comes between the learning and the action; then he becomes important; then he uses action and learning for ulterior motives. When this is very clearly understood as one harmonious movement of acting, of learning, of meditation, there is no wastage of energy and this is the beauty of meditation. There is only one movement. Learning is far more important than meditation or action. To learn there must be complete freedom, not only consciously but deeply, inwardly – a total freedom. And in freedom there is this movement of learning, acting, meditating as a harmonious whole. The word whole not only means health but holy. So learning is holy, acting is holy, meditation is holy. This is really a sacred thing and the beauty is in itself and not beyond it.

https://kfoundation.org/krishnamurti-opinion-and-judgement-distort-observation-from-the-urgency-of-change/

Just sharing a couple of quotes. Don't have photoshop nor the brains to use it so no pictures of clouds, the sky, mountains or an old man looking nobly into space who was the vehicles for these words.