Friday, April 5, 2013

Nuggets of J.Krishnamurti`s Teachings


  J.Krishnamurti is a well respected philosopher, seer and mystic. Though labeled as mystic by his friends in Europe and America his philosophy is far from it. Famous for his plain speaking and ruthless approach to man`s problems in living .He espouses a way of life for each individual  which can usher the entire mankind into a new consciousness.Krishnamurti didnot propagate any belief system .
Nuggets of his  philosophy:

1) Existence itself is beautiful. Reality is is. Accept the isness  of is. Anything that isnot is is fiction.

2) existence and living is the same which is the same as spontaneity.Life is a flowering process.It simply unfolds.

3) Living itself is the meaning of life. There is no purpose seperate from living.

4) Man has rational faculty but he has somehow failed to act rationally.

5) The chief  reason why man is irrational is because he is a conditioned being. A victim of his repetetive mind patterns.

6) Human beings are conditioned by habit, by beliefs, by fears, anxieties,pride, prestige, sorrow and so on. Thats his psychological being.

7) The human brain and the consequent functioning of human mind leads not only to  external division between human beings of different creed,caste, religion and race but also creates an internal conflict within himself.  . In reality there is  no division as existence is unitary and homogenous.

8) Man ,internally is in conflict because he seperates himself from his being. For instance thought creates a thinker. Thats the irrationality. Thinker and the thought is the same. There is only thinking.There is only thought This nondualism vs rene descartes who said I think therefore I am. descartes is right in a way but that led to dualism whereby thinker was seperated from thought. Better way to put it waould have been, I am and therefore I think..

9) Creation of seperate identity called thinker creates a new identity . This dichotomy is everywhere. Experience is seperated from experiencer. Descriptipn is seperate from described or describer. Actually , there is only living and  only experiencing . A seperate thinker invariably compares himself with another . Comparison leads to competetion and inferiority complex. It leadsto human misery and ultimately war.

10) Fear, anxiety, despair, sorrow all occur because the thinker assumes itself to be a real self, a real identity. Anything that threatens the identity of the thinker creates fear response. Similarly pleasure and desires are sought for its continuity. Anything that disrupts the continuity of pleasure is resisted by the thinker. In a way artificial identity of thinker assumes the proportion of real person hijacking human beings on the path of violence and suffering. Does this sound familiar? Heard of Matrix?
11) Freedom from  conditioning can be found here and now. It is immediate if one sees thru the falsity of the the whole phenomenon. Its is like  a rope in a dark corner. It appears to be a snake. When the light is switched on it becomes clear that its a rope and not a snake. Real freedom is freedom from comparison.
Now a mind that doesn't compare at all - you understand? - is a totally different kind of mind. It has got much more vitality.

12) Total freedom from predictable human behaviour can be obtained by choiceless awareness. It is a way of observing inwards in which there is  no judge or censor. There is only observation. Suppose a man observes that he is violent or greedy or envious he simply records it and let it pass. He doesnot resist or attempt to be judgemental about it. This is called choiceless awareness. The observer realises that he is the observation. He is greed. He is envy. He is violence. In  this way he neither encourages it nor resists any behaviour. In a natural way the negative traits evaporates and good traits which are inherent ,intrinsic and innate surface.

When there is no judge, no chooser there is no past or future . It's everlasting Present. Timelessness. Real freedom is in timelessness and not in past or future. Real freedom therefore lies is in choicelessness and not in choice.
 Real freedom  is freedom from the known. The known is my psychological identity, my belongings, my possession, my pride ,my trauma, my fears, my achievements. Real freedom is freedom from this knowledge. This knowledge gets continuity by memory function. Memory to remeber the past is required for learning skillsets. To remeber that fire burns is an useful part of memory. To remeber that somebody insulted me is useless piece of information not to be stored. Not to be a slave of memory is  the function of choiceless awareness. It enables man to live in the present moment . He neither wallows in past nor lives in the fantasy of future. To realise that brain or mind slips into past or future is the function of choiceless awareness. You are the world. You change the world changes.Choiceless awarenes is meditation.

13) In meditation there is no meditator. Meditation is not concentration. It is complete attention. In that state there is no attender.
14) Love , joy, beauty, and compassion exists by itself. It is humanity. It cannot be cultivated. When observer vanishes there is love and compassion.

15) Love and compassion provides the path to life. Every human being is endowed with insight on the path of choiceless awareness.

16) The entire preaching is based on factual observation and is not an  imagination or belief. Renowned scientist such as Dr David Bohm have had enormous dialogue with Krishnamurti to provide scientific bulwark to his preaching. For instance, krishnamurti said that brain cell mutates under choiceless awareness and new bran emerges out of regeneration of braincells. It was heretic to say so in the early 20 th century. Dr. David Bohm , a physicist confirmed that its possible. Today Brain Plasticity is the key concept in neuroscience..

17) Albert Einstein and J. Krishnamurti: A human being is a part of a whole, called by us _universe_, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest... a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."Albert Einstein

18)MIND
Neither Co-operate with it.
Nor confront against it
Observe mind
Watch it by being simply aware
Slowly it is subjugated
Lead your life thru unmotivated energy i.e. Action

19) Is there an area in the human brain, or in the very nature and structure of a human being, not merely in the outer world of his activities but inwardly, deep in the vast quiet recesses of his own brain, something that is not the outcome of memory, not the movement of a continuity?"… "There is most certainly, definitely, an area where the past doesn’t cast a shadow, where time, the past or the future or the present has no meaning."… "You can’t ascend through knowledge; there must be an end to knowledge for the new to be. New is a word for something which has never been before. And that area cannot be understood or grasped by words or symbols; it is beyond all remembrances."

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