Written by Krishnamurti in 1980 at the request of his biographer Mary Lutyens.
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. 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
humanity. 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 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.
Copyright
©1980 Krishnamurti Foundation Trust Ltd.