The person, Krishnamurti, is not at all important. What is important is that we investigate, examine, observe and think clearly, not trying to understand him but together understand what has happened to humanity, what is happening in the world and our relationship to it.

Biography

Like a signpost, I am merely pointing the direction. The signpost is not important at all. What is important is the one who is journeying. The speaker is not a guru, he is not an authority, he is not a guide. One has to take the inward journey alone, not as a reaction away from outward things but as the inevitable process of trying to understand.

It is perhaps a contradiction for there to be biographies written about Krishnamurti, given his insistence that he ‘is not at all important’. With this in mind, and given much information readily available online, here we give only a brief overview of aspects of his life.

From the early 1930s until his death in the mid 80s, Krishnamurti travelled the world giving talks to large audiences. Until the 1980s, when they became question and answer meetings, he also engaged in public discussions with these same audiences. Based not on knowledge but on his own insights into the human mind and his vision of the sacred, he always communicated a sense of freshness, although the essence of his teachings remained unchanged over the decades. He never used notes or pre-planned his talks, always finding new avenues and angles to explore and communicate. In addition to these remarkable public meetings, Krishnamurti met individuals or small groups interested in dialogue inquiry, including teachers and students, scientists, psychologists and religious figures. He also featured in many television and radio interviews.

It has been said that Krishnamurti was protected from the everyday troubles humanity faces, yet he was acutely aware of worldly matters and of the problems that affect us all. These were no doubt informed by some of the experiences in his own early life, including homesickness and loneliness when he first came to England, disappointment at not passing university entrance exams, the misery that other people’s jealousy can cause, loss of faith, disillusionment, the embarrassment of being openly worshipped and also of being laughed at, adverse publicity, intense physical agony, grave anxiety over the health of his brother, Nitya, and above all he had known devastating grief at Nitya’s death. But as his biographer Mary Lutyens put it, no experience had to be repeated for him to learn its full lesson. Events that might scar some for life didn’t seem to touch Krishnamurti in the same way, or they became a source of the deep compassion he felt towards humanity. Not long after his brother’s death, he said:

A new strength born of suffering is pulsating in the veins, and a new sympathy and understanding are being born out of past suffering. I know now, with greater certainty than ever before, that there is real beauty in life, real happiness that cannot be shattered by any physical happening, and a great love which is permanent, imperishable and unconquerable.

The death of Nitya also contributed to his loss of faith in the Theosophical Society which had brought him to Europe at a young age. He was expected to become the new ‘World Teacher’, a part of the lineage the Society believed in. During the 1920s, Krishnamurti became increasingly disillusioned with the approach of look ing to others for help or salvation, and with the prom inence of ceremonies and hierarchies established by the theosophists. As he gained confidence in his talks, he saw that people were using him as a crutch, some thing abhorrent to him for the rest of his life. In 1928 he said, ‘I have no disciples. There is no understanding in the worship of the personality. All ceremonies are unnecessary for spiritual growth.’ The following year, he disbanded the Order of the Star, the organisation established for the coming of the World Teacher. In his dissolution speech he said:

Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. … Truth cannot be brought down, rather the individual must make the effort to ascend to it. … I desire to free man from all cages, from all fears, and not to found reli gions, new sects, nor to establish new theories and new philosophies. … For two years, I have been thinking about this, slowly, carefully, patiently, and I have now decided to disband the Order. You can form other organisations and expect someone else. With that, I am not concerned, nor with creating new cages, new decorations for those cages. My only concern is to set man absolutely, unconditionally free.

This speech set the tone for the coming decades, with many of his talks focussing on authority, inward dependence, truth, nationalism, religion and ambition, for example. In the 1930s, large tours were organised by some of those who stayed with him after the break from theosophy. During the Second World War, he was unable to travel and lived quietly in Ojai, California. After the war, he continued travelling to where he was invited, something he continued to do for decades, until less than two months before his death in 1986. The number of countries he visited decreased as he got older but he continued to speak in the USA, UK, Switzerland and India. In all these years of travel, he didn’t have a home as such but increasingly spent time in Ojai, Brockwood Park and Madras (Chennai). Asked why he spoke, Krishnamurti responded:

When one sees something true and beautiful, one wants to tell people about it, out of affection, out of compassion, out of love. Can you ask the flower why it grows, why it has perfume? It is for the same reason the speaker talks.

Krishnamurti left us a profound legacy. Increasingly his talks, discussions and conversations were recorded, at first by stenographers, then on audio and video tape. These recordings form a vast and unique body of work: around 600 video recordings and more than 2,500 audios. The archives hold transcriptions of over 5,000 events. More than 80 books have been published, independently and by major publishers, which have been translated into 60 languages. This material, the thriving schools and centres he established, and the efforts of the Krishnamurti Foundations, ensure that Krishnamurti will be known for generations to come.

Introduction

We are increasingly told by others what to think and what to do about the issues in our lives and the world around us. Krishnamurti counters this movement, saying that what is essential is to find out for ourselves. He rejects any authority of his own, and of gurus, religions, psychologists, philosophers and politicians, saying there is no teacher and no taught. Instead, he suggests that we are as two friends, perhaps sitting in a park or walking along a quiet lane, talking over the deep problems of life amicably, frankly and easily.

This remarkably straightforward and simple approach is mirrored in the language Krishnamurti uses. Despite talking about the most profound and serious matters, he uses everyday words, refreshingly free of jargon and rhetoric, to explore universal themes that affect us all, such as fear, loneliness, education and relationship. His approach might be considered uncompromising, yet he speaks with genuine care for humanity, punctuated with wise humour. It can seem that Krishnamurti’s teachings are intellectual and that we need to make an effort to understand them cognitively. After all, this is how we are generally taught to learn, by accumulating knowledge and experience.

In discussions with people from all walks of life, he rejects the intellectual responses of thought and memory, looking for genuine replies that deepen inquiry or meet him at ‘the same level, with the same intensity, at the same time’. Only then, he says, insight and new understanding are possible. Of course, dialoguing with Krishnamurti is no longer possible, so our challenge today is to engage in this meeting at depth when reading or watching Krishnamurti, or listening to the unique body of work he left behind, and use his words, and our relationships, as a mirror:

He is acting as a mirror for you to look into. That mirror is not an authority. It has no authority, it’s just a mirror. And when you see it clearly, understand what you see in that mirror, then throw it away, break it up.

Krishnamurti’s teachings are unique in their scope, depth and approach. Seeing the readiness in which we create ideas and concepts, he often refused to define or expound the fundamentals in life that he explored so radically – freedom, compassion, love, religion, creativity, to name a few – in positive terms, instead approaching them negatively:

Actually, what is religion? To find out what religion is, we must negate what it is not. Then it is. The same with love. Love is not hate, jealousy, ambition or violence – so when you negate all that, the other is, which is compassion. In the same way, if you negate what is not religion, you will find out what is true religion: what is the truly religious mind.

What is this negation central to Krishnamurti’s teachings? Is it definable without making it into an idea or something to practice? It may be as simple as seeing the false as the false and its dropping away. This brings in the question of seeing, looking or observing. It is clear that we operate from the past, and indeed consist of the past, so in looking at the world, our life or a problem, can we see afresh, free of the past, without thought? This seeing without the observer, and the realization that the observer is the thing observed, is fundamental to the possibility of transformation. Indeed, the illusory division between the observer and the observed may well be the very division and conflict in ourselves and the world.

When one really understands, not verbally, not intellectually but as an actuality, as something true, then you will see that when the observer is the observed, all conflict comes to an end, and therefore our whole relationship with each other undergoes a radical transformation.

It is this transformation Krishnamurti sees as so urgently necessary in ourselves and hence the world. Wherever we look, there are problems of every kind. The same is often true in our relationships and inner life. Krishnamurti questions our tendency to try to solve these problems with thought and through time. Time and thought are synonymous for Krishnamurti, with thought always being of the past and therefore limited. Time is perhaps the most radical element in his teachings, countering the prevalent religions, techniques and systems that promote time as a means of change: I am this, I will become that; the ‘what is’ and the ‘what should be’. Krishnamurti points out:

Change as we know it implies a movement in time, and that movement is like cutting the air with a sword – it does nothing, it merely produces a lot of activity. But when you understand the whole process, the implications and the significance of change, and thereby let it drop away from you, you will see that the mind is in a state of silence in which all movement of time has ceased, and that new movement of silence is not recognisable and therefore not experience able. Such a state does not demand change; it is in eternal movement, and therefore beyond time. Then there is an action that is right and true, always and under all circumstances.

In our relationships, is it possible to see another with out the past that exists in us in the form of images, and meet someone anew? We quickly form images about ourselves and others, meaning our relationships take place through these images. We may think this brings security, or at least convenience, but as Krishnamurti points out:

Thought builds a great many images, both inwardly and outwardly, in all our relationships, and hence there is a division in relationship which invariably brings about conflict and separation.

Ultimately these images, manifesting in belonging to a country, religion or group, cause the conflicts and wars we see around the world. Krishnamurti often ends a talk or a series of talks by addressing an aspect of life we often keep at a distance: death. He speaks of our attachments to others, to things and ideas, and sees death as a true ending to all we hold onto. But is death something at the end of life, or is it part of life itself? Krishnamurti’s challenge is to end every day, at every moment, so that we are living with that ‘enormous thing called death’. Only then is there a new beginning.

Death is an ending of the things you are attached to – your furniture, your face, your ideals, or whatever it is. You have brought this faraway thing called death to the immediate action of life, which is the ending of your attachment. So death means a total renewal, a total renewal of a mind that has been caught in the past.So the mind becomes astonishingly alive, it is not living in the past.

Behind Krishnamurti’s inquiry, never far away, is something unnameable, immeasurable, something that cannot be known or even experienced. This time less, choiceless state is something he is reluctant to elaborate on, whilst acknowledging that humanity has always sought something ‘beyond’. Is this ‘something’ reachable by any known approach? Krishnamurti says not:

There is no path to truth, in spite of all the philosophies; because reality is the unknowable, unnameable, unthinkable. It is only the fresh, innocent, young mind that can discover what is true; and it is only to such a mind which is free of the known that the unnameable, the unknowable can come.