Seeing What Is...and Going Beyond It

In Yoga Journal’s Archives series, we share a curated collection of articles originally published in past issues beginning in 1975. These stories offer a glimpse into how yoga was interpreted, written about, and practiced throughout the years. This article first appeared in the July 1975 issue of Yoga Journal. Find more of our Archives here.

A Messiah. None other than a Christ.

That is how he was regarded as a young man by one of the world’s leading religious organizations, the Theosophical Society. Its leaders brought him from India to England for education in 1911, and were his mentors until 1929. His name is Jiddu Krishnamurti, in honor of a Hindu divinity, like himself born an eighth child.

At approximately the age Jesus Christ went public, J. Krishnamurti went private. Two years later he emerged and renounced not only his own role as a religious savior but all religions. “One has to go it alone, for they have all failed…eventually one realizes that one cannot depend on anyone, either on the priests, the scientists or the specialists.” Among the leading lights in the so-called spiritual revolution, he stands apart. He is considered by many as “one of the five to ten men on the planet who have reached the highest human evolution, enlightenment.” His praises are sung by such luminaries as Aldous Huxley and Rollo May. Yet he goes so far as to reject even applause when he speaks.

There is a parallel between him and the Buddha who after enlightenment travelled and spoke for 40 years. Krishnamurti, now 80, has not lived in the same place for more than a few months at a time since his life’s work began.

Krishnamurti and the Search for Truth

In San Francisco, recently, he professed the need for man to strip himself of all his attachments. The audience was as varied as the city itself, but for Jiddu Krishnamurti nothing was sacred. Our art, literature, practice of yoga, meditation, “which is not meditation at all but makes the mind stupid,” these things eventually bore us. “They are utterly meaningless,” Krishnamurti states. The problem is not in the things, but rather in the way in which we pursue them.

Consistently referring to himself as “the speaker” to remove the self between him and the audience, Krishnamurti says, his intent is “not to convince you, not to propagate a new philosophy but to help human beings with what they are doing. We are concerned with life. Not systems, discipline, belief…(I do not believe in anything)…conclusions or ideas…We are dealing with what is and when you are aware of what is, only then can you go beyond it.”

The true search for God or Ultimate Reality, he states, has “nothing to do with priests, churches, dogmas, or organized beliefs. These things are not religion at all, they are merely social conveniences to hold us within a particular pattern of thought and action; they are the means of exploiting our credulity, hope and fear.”

“…It is in…seeking of the immeasurable that there is right social action, not in the so-called reformation of a particular society…This very search brings about its own culture and it is our only hope. You see, the search for truth gives an explosive creative sense to mind, which is true revolution, because in this search the mind is uncontaminated…”

Rejecting Shortcuts

Krishnamurti practises what he preaches. He allows no disciples, no cults to form about him, and has no methods to sell. “You Americans, while sophisticated in some ways, are so gullible, so eager for a short cut to an experience you have heard of called enlightenment. Unfortunately it is possible for people from India to make a business of it.” Ironically, he sees this desire for a higher experience merely another pursuit of pleasure. In a city where the consciousness expansion movement has been most successfully turned into a paying business, these are tough words. The new religions and psychologies may have a lesson to learn from these talks, and so may those whose lives have been improved by the new movements.

This lesson might be found in the question, where do we go from here? What purpose have we in developing psychic powers, positive thinking, a meditative state? What do we really want? Krishnamurti’s purpose in his talks is to “set human beings absolutely, unconditionally free.” Free beyond not only fear but pleasure as well. You can’t keep one without the other. “Fear is sustained by memory, by thinking…”

He speaks very deliberately, interrupting himself at intervals to ask, “Are we following this. Are we journeying together? Or is the speaker merely addressing himself? Please listen, really listen. If you are interested. If you are not, it doesn’t matter.” His method is to assist the listener to the brink of realization. He asks that one engage in the development of what he says, neither believing nor evaluating. His approach of denying all authority and methods is kept in focus. The result is a freedom to choose whatever works for oneself, without dependence upon a preconceived result. He, himself, is known to practice Hatha yoga, “but not with my mind, sir.”

Resistance, too, is the product of thought, he says. Memory has no place in discovering what is true. And once we employ any form of thought, we cannot see anything new. There is no such thing as creative thought. “Thought is always utterly old, the product of memory”. Also he says, “If you have learned anything from the speaker, you have learned nothing at all.”

Then what is one to do?

Rather than tell us before we know it for ourselves, Krishnamurti expands the question further.

Understanding the Mind

In fact, knowledge, the product of thought, is essential to the conscious mind for survival. “That is, certain technical knowledge for daily life.” But, he asks, “What place has knowledge or thought in our relationships with one another?”

“Most of us are inattentive. To become aware of that inattention is attention; but the cultivation of attention is not attention.” To get started, he recommends, “Be aware for a single minute of everything that is going on, without any choice, observing very clearly; then spend an hour not giving attention and then take it up again at the end of the hour.” This approach may provide the initiation to awareness. The process can continue as true meditation every moment.

At the conclusion of his talks, questions are invited although he asks, “If you are inwardly quiet, isn’t that better than any question and answer?” People try to describe to him their experience in applying his suggestions. Some are almost mesmerized seeking an answer. They say, for example, “I was aware in my school last week. Then, I felt this fear…” He gives an answer which arcs back to the message. Did the person look at the fear? Observe it? Understand it? Another question demands: “What about activity? You scoff at the value of writing a poem, even. What about work. If we live this way will we do anything in life?” Halting the questioner to keep the problem clear he states, “When there is no confusion, no thought, and therefore no fragmentation, there is direct perception. There is no conflict between awareness of what is and action. And when there is direct perception, action takes place.”

Can we look at another without our idea of him intruding? Does not the idea, or image, veer our awareness of the other person? When the self, the observer, intrudes in that which is observed, is not the observer impinging upon the observed?

But when there is complete attention, the separate observer is absent. Then the observer is the observed. Extending further, all that we see in the world is oneself. “You are the world,” he states.

What are we to do to break free of our self-imposed prison? The way lies in choiceless awareness. Being aware, attentive of ourselves and our world, without evaluating or attempting to transform it.

Krishnamurti amplifies upon this in one of his collected talks, You Are The World. He says, “Meditation is not a fragmentation of life; it is not a withdrawal into a monastery or into a room, sitting quietly for ten minutes or an hour, trying to concentrate…One brushes all that aside as being unintelligent, as belonging to a state of mind that is incapable of really perceiving what truth is; only a mind that is completely capable of learning can do that; learning is not an accumulation of knowledge; learning is a movement from moment to moment.”

One of his prescriptions for life comes at the end of one of his recorded talks. “What then is your job? I can tell you mine is to speak and lead others to understand. If you have listened closely this will be your job too. But if you don’t love it, don’t do it.”

If you are on the right path for you, Krishnamurti states, “You will not think in terms of succeeding or failing. It is only when we don’t really love what we are doing that we think in these terms.”

His message is akin to the multi-faceted diamond; it is all too easy to see only the surface appearance and miss the essence. The substance of a diamond is totally simple, and although Krishnamurti approaches it through its many facets, his message is simple and direct.

In that simplicity may lie liberation.