What is the problem with Krishnamurti’s Teaching?
Or why we don’t get his message?
J. Krishnamurti or just K as he and as his followers called him, was one of the prominent spiritual teachers of the 20th Century, or better said he was a teacher who was teaching more at the intersection of spirituality, philosophy and psychology.
He once admitted in front of his audience that he didn’t know what spirituality is.
That comment is more understandable when one knows that K had a quite precise way of talking.
Krishnamurti often produced quite elaborate sentences and was careful in expressing his opinion. Once he said:
“A religious life is a factual life”.
If one is pondering over this sentence enough, then it reveals more of his thinking and his message than a long introduction.
He had his teaching together in the 30s of the last century and never changed it much, until his passing away in the middle of the 80s. He had a huge impact on many people, but according to him, his influence was very little on the world, and that is true too.
Why was his impact so small on humankind, despite a lifelong teaching
activity?
The answer is pretty simple. When a heavily conditioned mind, hears a
statement like: “Freedom must be at the beginning and not at the end” and is responding, as we usually do, with the thought: “Well, and how do I do that?”, then he is already lost in the search for a method. The wish for a method always comes with a motive and that brings in the time issue, to be free of psychological time was one of K’s recurring topics.
We approach this question as a problem we have to solve and after Krishnamurti, society is conditioning us as children to get used to having problems as our normal way of living.
“Freedom must be at the beginning and not in the end”, is just a simple, logical approach because where do we get when it is not clear what is dominating our investigation?
Intellectuality
Plenty of intellectual people were drawn to Krishnamurti, K even acknowledged that fact once, that numerous intellectual people were listener’s, when he made a joke in front of his audience about that, saying that smart people go to Zen and people who think that they are more advanced, go to Krishnamurti.
To call K’s teachings intellectual is as proper or wrong as to call it spiritual, it is pretty mental and deep. To understand K intellectual means one understands him only on a superficial level, Krishnamurti called that no understanding at all.
It is logical and comprehensible that intellectual guys are looking for an intellectual approach to spirituality because that is their strong side, and they feel good if they can tackle this issue with skills they are already developed, but when intellectual people are asked to meet or to integrate something on a deeper level, they may be failing. Intellectuality is not helping in the understanding of K.
Countless weird questions were put to K in his talks, and often these were questions that made more or less no sense.
I remember a talk from a video where a guy put a question to K and it
sounded like an arduous contrived question, that nevertheless made not
much sense, and K meet the question by saying, that he watched the questioner while he was eating and didn’t like it. But that’s how humans are, we have not enough presence of mind to eat properly and that lack corresponds and shows itself intellectual too.
When we turn our heads, for a moment, now away from Krishnamurti and look into C. G. Jung’s Typology and to Alchemy, then we are confronted with a personality model where cognitive abilities are only a part, a fraction of the personality, and we can learn that our superior orientation, in our case intellectual abilities are developed on the cost of an inferior part and that is after this theory, feeling.
In Alchemy, we have four elements, fire, water, earth, and air. C. G. Jung’s Typology consists, too, of four functions (or modes of orientation): thinking, sensation, intuition, and feeling.
Modern tarot interpretation is influenced by Jung and the tarot is too based on the elements and is teaching us that all the psychological representatives of the elements should be equally in us developed.
They are thinking, feeling, grounding energy as the earth element and our
ability to act, as the fire element.
The magician in the tarot represents a self-actualized person who
successfully incarnated all elements on his life journey towards self-realization, not necessarily as an enlightened being, but as a being
whose journey made him well-adjusted to life, and that is because he developed his potential.
The magician looked into all his dark and shadowy parts and brought light into them, he was able to develop his thinking skills as well as his feelings, his ability to act, equal to his ability to abide and to be connected to the earth.
Because of his act to transform darkness into light, he is not dominated anymore by useless processes that are just consuming energy.
When we are dominated by our intellectuality, then it is hard for life to touch our hearts.
As fond, we maybe are of K, we shouldn’t forget to develop our whole
personality, or better said to investigate into it and to discover our
full potentials, otherwise it may be a hindrance to understanding K.’s
teaching and would lead us into nowhere.
Focus, Awareness and Zen
What else does it need to listen, really, to K?
It certainly needs a no-problem-laden, fresh, not confused, brain, with the
ability to listen or at least the ability to focus, what are different things.
Listening to K can have a freshening effect on the brain, but for that, the ability to focus is needed too, the more, the better.
As wise as his teaching is, in an analogy spoken, when we have not enough ports open where his message can dock on to, then K’s teaching is a cul-de-sac for us.
That is not the fault of his teaching, but when people not even able to
focus on his teaching without distraction, then one of the main ports is
locked, quite simple.
Without the ability to focus, trying to understand Krishnamurti, is like an
illiterate trying to read a book to get smart.
My opinion is, that in such difficult matters as enlightenment or personal freedom, it is always a mistake to put one’s money on one
horse.
A zen master I met once, said to me, to understand Krishnamurti you need to be a zen master. He was not wrong with that. With a properly zen training comes the skill to focus and the ability to abide in oneself and to remain in silence and to listen.
K criticized zen for its mechanistic approach, its effort to train one’s own mind, to manipulate it. It was clear for him, that the operator or the manipulator on the mind could be not different from the operated or manipulated upon; therefore that is a process that is locked in itself, with no outcome.
Or differently said, is there a way over control to freedom? Zen has its way to freedom if we can take that for granted, but it may not have worked properly for everybody and always. For mentioned zen master sits right now still in prison, for a crime not many can relate to.
To my question, if one is still the same after enlightenment, he only said,
that there are different opinions on that. I think the reason why he came
into prison, is because his way was based on control and not on K.’s approach to let emotions raise and to watch them in stillness until they wither away.
With K’s insight, not to touch dangerous things and just to walk away from them, he wouldn’t have committed the crime, and of course, the main question in this case is, in which I don’t want to delve further: “Where was the love”?
It is still a big question, nowadays, so-called spirituality; the way of control and the way of insight. Even in Buddhism, they have different opinions on that.
One of the many remarkable sentences of K, maybe the most remarkable, is on page 167, in the Book “A Wholly Different Way Of Living”, it contains 18 amazing conversations with Alan W. Anderson, when K is admitting to Anderson:
Personally, I have never controlled a thing.
This may sound rather absurd. But it is a fact.
People who know K, know that means that Krishnamurti never controlled or put pressure on himself or anything else. That is a remarkable sentence for a human to say or to hear, knowing that humans have a millennia-long culture of violence.
A non-violent mind is a mind without resistance and that is the reason that K could say, as he expressed it once, that his secret is, that he doesn’t mind what happens.
Traps and the integration of energy.
In writing this article, I was again thinking about the zen master, who I met more than a decade ago, and I remembered what I had forgotten, that he called my spiritual way dangerous.
My spiritual way was always a self-exploring street punk way, without a teacher, and I had no teacher because I didn’t find one.
That is one of the reasons, I stumbled into plenty of traps, that slowed down my “progress”, but my teacher-less way was the only way I had or found; therefore I kept on walking it.
It is one of Krishnamurti’s punchy phrases, that a teacher is destroying
his pupil and the pupil is destroying his master, but without a guide or a
mentor or a teacher, everybody is prone to make the same mistakes towards the pathless land of truth and one of them is the intellectual approach to K.
While K talked a lot about the energy, one needs to look into the things of
the consciousness, the integration of this energy was never communicated in his talks as far as I know, besides that, that he sometimes mentioned that he did yoga.
It is advised in Zen, to start the training not with psychological problems or with an unhinged personality because and that is only one under more things, psychological problems and a lot of energy is a combination that makes life not easier.
The same should be applied to Krishnamurti, but on the other hand, the
search for another life or possible living is for most of us based on
discontent or on problems with life, and we want to overcome them. So, in
the end, everybody has to answer the question for himself. Is he ready
or does he dare to enter the path, what some alchemists called, the
great work, or in Latin, Magnum Opus.
Krishnamurti and Psychology
Krishnamurti often expressed his dislike for Psychology in front of his
audience, sometimes he expressed it with the phrase — analyses is
paralysis.
He spoke against analysis because for him, it was a waste of time. The human psyche is a complicated thing, so a real analysis can take almost forever and in the end one can’t be sure, to have done it properly. What adds to it, is, that there is always something new to analyze, therefore no real end, one is paralyzed by analysis.
Instead, he spoke for mere observation, mere observation in a non-judging way, not condemning and therefore no labeling of good or bad, all mental things are just children’s of one’s psyche, nothing is rejected. That means everything is accessible, everything is allowed to show itself, how it is. Observation as a non-violence practice. Nothing is then between the observer and the observed, and if it is observed intensely, then even the observer is disappearing.
With that, he has right, but for people who are light years away to do this
act of observation, Krishnamurti is not of much help, and it may be best for them to talk things over with a psychologist, to get another perspective.
Krishnamurti’s message may even be a hindrance to getting more access to oneself, and it could be used as an excuse, to do nothing.
Avoidance through hiding behind, not or half-understood Krishnamurti
phrases are a terrible misuse of Krishnamurti.
When out of psychological reasons, people stay stuck, perhaps for years,
because they unconsciously want to stay stuck, self-pity could be one of these reasons for not moving further, hiding behind Krishnamurti is a very effective way to pretend to be on a spiritual path.
Hiding behind Krishnamurti is probably the most bulletproof shield that is
on earth and with Krishnamurti one can drive almost every psychologist crazy, but hiding was never Krishnamurti’s thing, openness was it.
A lot of work!
While K was stating that, truth is a pathless land and there is no way to enter it, what is comprehensible because he didn’t want to bring in the time perspective into this, therefore dispelling everything that stood in the way of immediacy to awakening.
I heard it only once, that K was saying, that unconditioning the mind requires significant effort. It was in a discussion with Alan Naudé in 1972, it was their forth discussion and after 1 h and 13 min, he was admitting it.
From my perspective, that is that of a guy, who has been studying almost for two decades, Krishnamurti, Zen, the Tarot, and plenty of other things and who is trying to integrate wisdom into his life, like a chicken picking at random seeds, discovering now and then a good one and realizing, that may his fate, to do, until the end of his life with no big breakthrough, knows, that understanding Krishnamurti is an awful lot of work, but this work makes often fun.
Another Zen master once told me, understanding K is difficult, but in the end very rewarding, with saying that, he held up a Krishnamurti book and said: “But you have to read it a hundred times.”
Krishnamurti passed away now over 35 years, with the impression that maybe no one may have understood his message. But his message is not dead, his books are selling better as ever, even in digital times. There are people who are taking care of his heritage and people who are spreading his message. That is a lot. K didn’t want to create a dynasty with a successor, and he neither wanted to bring more spiritual authorities into this world.
But what sad is, is that it is still quite a challenge, to find people who walked his pathless way to truth and who could be a help to others!
