Krishnamurti’s Ideas and Teachings
Krishnamurti teaches us how to waken to the ultimate reality in our world, becoming able to experience reality directly, not through thought, feeling, or desire. This awakening emerges out of an open aware mind – not through concentrating, but through knowing that we do not know. Krishnamurti’s teachings are primarily through negations, removing all preconceptions. He apprehends reality beyond the categories of space and time, categories that Emanuel Kant defined as determining human perception and knowledge. For Krishnamurti, unlike Kant, human consciousness is able to move beyond the limiting categories and awaken to the transcendent. Krishnamurti aims to experience the thing-in-itself, reality.
Krishnamurti’s teachings may at first sound like contemporary teachings on awareness, but his goal is awakening to the experience of pure reality. The awakening to pure reality allows us to live in the world with a sense of the transcendent. Awareness of the transcendent in our daily life takes us out of the consciousness-limiting aspects of the socio-cultural, political, commercial world.
After the deconstruction evoked by Krishnamurti’s teachings, one can manifest in the world, but without goal-driven action. There are no goals, because goals represent separation of where you are from where you want to be—a mind striving for something is not awakened to pure reality.
Krishnamurti lived a life very much in keeping with being in the world, but not of the world. In his early twenties, he turned down being appointed the head of the International Theosophical Society. At that time, the Society was an enormous worldwide organization founded in the latter half of the ninetieth century by Madam Blavatsky, with the assistance of Colonel Hollcott. In the 1920s, the organization was headed by a protégé of Blavatsky, Annie Bessant, who had encountered Jiddu Krishnamurti in his teens in India, identifying him as an adept, a channeling clairvoyant within the teachings of the Theosophical Society. When Krishnamurti came into his twenties, he was appointed the head of the Society and his first address to the organization all but dissolved the Theosophical Society. This address is reproduced in the book At the Feet of the Masters. In it he declares that an organization of any kind is a hindrance to true awakening. Facilitating awakening through occultist teachings was the foundational purpose of the Theosophical Society. After leaving the Theosophical Society, he went on to give talks on awakening for the rest of his life, never forming a school or association. He spent the last decades of his life living in the Ojai Valley in Southern California where he continued to give talks in his home.
Krishnamurti never formed a school or an institution, nor did he write a book or structure a teaching. He taught people that came to his home in Ojai, talking to them in his living room and under the giant oak trees on the expansive grounds. Upon his death the individuals who had benefited from his teachings turned the property in Ojai into a retreat and resource center. To this day, it is open to anyone seeking to experience the teachings of J Krishnamurti.
The Krishnamurti Foundation holds ongoing seminars and retreats on the Ojai, California property where Krishnamurti lived and taught. The Ojai Valley is a unique spiritual place with numerous spiritual centers; interestingly, the Theosophical Society at the Krotona School is at the opposite end of the Valley from the Krishnamurti Foundation. Krishnamurti had removed himself from the leadership of that society in the 1920s.
Resources
At The Feed of the Master, by J. Krishnamurti
This short book introduces Krishnamurti and his fundamental questioning of institutionalized spirituality. The book contains his address to the Theosophical Society upon his being appointed head of the Society. It is hardly an acceptance speech. In it he effectively disbands the organization by asserting that structured religion is adverse to true awakening to the ultimate reality.
Although Krishnamurti never wrote a book or established a school, he encouraged people to directly experience his teachings in personal visits to his property in Ojai. Those teachings, as well as the teachings he gave throughout the world, were recorded. Many teachings in his later-years were video-recorded and are widely available.
A fundamental concept for Krishnamurti was that consciousness could awaken beyond the limitations of Knowledge and Time. Here is a video clip that introduces aspects of this teaching.
Total Freedom: The Essential Krishnamurti, by J. Krishnamurti
Krishnamurti never wrote a book or organized his teachings. The existing publications are primarily verbatim records of his talks and teachings. These might each address a wide range of topics. The Krishnamurti Foundation has collected many of the ideas and topics addressed over the years into books or chapters focused on a particular idea or teaching. In this way a reader can approach an idea in its totality in one place rather than spread over hundreds of talks.
Total Freedom is a thorough exploration of Krishnamurti’s ideas in an organized, coherent manner.
Quotes from Total Freedom
“To understand the actual you must be in direct communion with it; your relationship with it cannot be through the screen of the ideal, or through the screen of the past, of tradition, of experience.”
“We said, and we are saying again, that there must be a transformation in the mind, not peripheral reformation but a revolution deep in the mind, to solve the problems that thought has created, whether they are religious, economic, social, or moral. If one is really serious, not flippant, not merely amused by intellectual theories or philosophies that are invented by thought, then one must be concerned and totally committed to this question of transforming the content of consciousness.”
The records of J. Krishnamurti’s talks are also available in chronological order in their entirety. The collected works contain all the recorded talks. Much of this material has been organized by topic into distinct books and chapters of books. However, for the reader familiar with Krishnamurti, the collected works offer the talks in their entirety in the order Krishnamurti delivered them, thereby reflecting his focus in a given talk at a specific time and place.
Quotes from Total Freedom
“I am suggesting that a mind that is aware requires that the mind must inquire into your ambition, your desire for power, prestige, position, the way you treat people; how you crawl on your knees when you meet a big man, your desire for security, a job, position.”
“The new mind does not come from a mind that is seeking achievement, wanting to be free. The new mind does not come through discipline. The new mind does not say, ‘How am I to be free?’; it bursts into that state, it explodes.”