r/UGKrishnamurti

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.

Hey everyone,

​I was wondering if UG Krishnamurti ever directly talked about loneliness.

​I’d really like to know what his perspective was on this. Did he give any reasons for why a human being is alone or feels alone? Did he view it as just another trick of the mind trying to preserve itself?

​If anyone knows any quotes, passages or videos where UG addresses this, please let me know.

I have lots of favorites of him being so insightful and blowing past the science of the day and current science that I'll share. Please share any of your favorites!

Evolution:

For someone that said "I don't know if there is such a thing as evolution..." he had a really meaningful contribution that I don't think we've even started to integrate into scientific theory yet. He said "Nature does not use anything as a model. It is only interested in perfecting the species." I don't think that the profound nature of this statement is taken seriously enough. He's saying that Nature is searching for something that can survive no matter what. Aka evolution is a search function with a goal of the the "The Probability of species existing in the next year is 100% for all future years". That means that evolution looks for something that can survive in any climate, is not limited to a single world, can understand future threats and mitigate extinction. Humans are really close, maybe something like 99%. Sadly the thing that got us that survival factor is the thing that's keeping us from getting to 100%. I mean it's mostly us and Tardigrades that are at that level. It's a profound concept with predictive powers.

AI:

In 1981, he called out the dangers of AI "The day you introduce thinking into computers, their usefulness will be completely gone" and "They, the computers, have become so sophisticated now that they are thinking and self-correcting themselves. We may, someday, just have to plug them in and then follow their advice. " This is something we are seeing play out now. We are not truly there in the LLM era but it's getting closer and closer. He also was way ahead in saying that human thought isn't anything special and is able to be replicated by a mechanical computer. And his maxim that self is a "demand for continuity" also shows perhaps some limits to current LLM AI approaches and thus has predictive power.

I'd love to know some other favorites that you may have thought of over the years! Please share!