The Core of Krishnamurti′s Teaching
The core of Krishnamurti′s teaching is contained in the statement he made in 1929 when he said:
Truth is a pathless land. Man cannot come to it
through any organization, through any creed, through any dogma, priest or
ritual, not through any philosophical knowledge or psychological technique.
He has to find it through the mirror of relationship, through the
understanding of the contents of his own mind, through observation and not
through intellectual analysis or introspective dissection.
Man has built in
himself images as a fence of security - religious, political, personal.
These manifest as symbols, ideas, beliefs. The burden of these images
dominates man′s thinking, his relationships and his daily life. These
images are the causes of our problems for they divide man from man. His
perception of life is shaped by the concepts already established in his
mind. The content of his consciousness is his entire existence. This
content is common to all humanity. The individuality is the name, the form
and superficial culture he acquires from tradition and environment. The
uniqueness of man does not lie in the superficial but in complete freedom
from the content of his consciousness, which is common to all mankind. So
he is not an individual.
Freedom is not a
reaction; freedom is not choice. It is man′s pretence that because he has
choice he is free. Freedom is pure observation without direction, without
fear of punishment and reward. Freedom is without motive; freedom is not
at the end of the evolution of man but lies in the first step of his
existence. In observation one begins to discover the lack of freedom.
Freedom is found in the choiceless awareness of our daily existence and
activity.
Thought is time.
Thought is born of experience and knowledge which are inseparable from
time and the past. Time is the psychological enemy of man. Our action is
based on knowledge and therefore time, so man is always a slave to the
past. Thought is ever limited and so we live in constant conflict and
struggle. There is no psychological evolution.
When man becomes
aware of the movement of his own thoughts he will see the division between
the thinker and the thought, the observer and the observed, the
experiencer and the experience. He will discover that this division is an
illusion. Then only is there pure observation which is insight without any
shadow of the past or of time. This timeless insight brings about a deep
radical mutation in the mind.
Total negation is
the essence of the positive. When there is negation of all those things
that thought has brought about psychologically, only then is there love,
which is compassion and intelligence.