Krishnamurti - Exploration into Insight

Exploration into Insight

Copyright 1979 Krishnamurti Foundation Trust Ltd.

EXPLORATION INTO INSIGHT

J. KRISHNAMURTI

CONTENTS

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

K: Krishnaji (J. Krishnamurti)

A: Achyut (Achyut Patwardhan)

Apa: Apa Pant (Apa Pant)

B: Balasundaram (S. Balasundaram)

DS: David Shainberg (David Shainberg)

D: Deshpande (P. Y. Deshpande)

FW: Fritz Wilhelm (Fritz Wilhelm)

GM: Ghaneshyam Mehta (Ghaneshyam Mehta)

JC: John Coats (John Coats)

KB: Kabir Bedi (Kabir Bedi)

M: Maurice (Maurice Frydman)

N: Nandini (Nandini Mehta)

Par : Parchure ( T. K. Parchure)

PB: Parveen Babi ( Parveen Babi)

P: Pupul ( Pupul Jayakar)

Q: Questioner ( Questioner)

R: Radha ( Radha Burnier)

Raj: Rajesh Dalal (Rajesh Dalal)

Rad: Radhika (Radhika Herzberger)

S: Sunanda (S unanda Patwardhan)

SWS: Sundaram (S. W. Sundaram)

VA: Vijay Anand (Vijay Anand)

FOREWORD

These dialogues extend over a wide range of subjects. For over 30 years, a group of people from various disciplines, backgrounds and pursuits, deeply concerned with the enormity of the challenge facing humanity and with one central interest, the unfoldment of the self through the perceptive field of self-knowledge, have gathered around J. Krishnamurti to undertake together, through dialogue, the investigation of the structure and nature of mans mind and consciousness and the energy resources that lie dormant within mans being. The concern in these dialogues is the freedom of the mind from the bondages of memory and time, a mutation in consciousness and the arising of insight that gives deep roots of steadiness to the mind.

In the world today, scientific and technological revolution has unharnessed undreamt-of resources of power and knowledge. However, man has failed to discover in himself the sources of wisdom and compassion. What is needed is an inner revolution in the psyche of man. The insight that man lacks is the apprehension that he is the maker of his problems and that the root of this problem-making machinery is his mind. It is in this area of perception that the ultimate freedom of man lies.

Starting tentatively, there is in these dialogues a relentless questioning, probing and enquiry, a listening and a seeing in which depths of the self with its vast subtleties and hidden escapes are exposed. This exploration to Krishnamurti is a journey into time, into the past, into the limitless.

Man caught in the paradox of living, rarely questions. He escapes from his anguish, his loneliness, his sorrow. In a world sated with sensations, man turns to the guru, to the religious experience, or extrasensory powers that arise from various forms of concentration, as a further stimulus to his jaded appetites. Krishnamurtis teaching negates the guru and the psychic experience as a way to liberation. He demands a life of correctness, a daily life free from all self-centred activity. All psychic experiences as they arise have to be put aside for they can become obstacles and traps to insight, which alone frees man from duality and the bondage of time as the past.

Krishnamurtis role in these dialogues is of great interest. The dialogues are not questions and answers. Krishnamurtis mind is tentative, pliable, learning, seeking, probing; it is questioned, it pauses, observes, withdraws, to move forward again. There is no exchange of opinion, no spilling out of the verbal, no operation of memory as past experience, blocking the new. There is a listening with the total flowering of the senses. In that intensity of enquiry, insight arises. Speaking of the nature of this state, Krishnamurti says there is only perception and nothing else. Everything else is movement in time. Perception is without time. There is a momentum which is timeless.

The Krishnamurti Foundation India is offering these dialogues to those who seek fundamental answers to the problems of life.

P UPUL J AYAKAR

S UNANDA P ATWARDHAN

Self-knowledge and the Teaching

P: What is the relationship between your teaching, as expressed in the words you use in your books and in your talks, and the actual process of self-knowing? In all other ways of arriving at truth, the words of the teacher are taken as an indication of a direction, something to move towards. Are your words of the same nature and, if so, what is their relationship to the perceptive process of self-knowing?

K: I wonder whether I have understood the question. Am I right if I put it this way: What is the relationship between the word and the actuality that K is talking about? Is that it?

P: When K talks about discipline, or talks about the holistic approach, that is the word. Then there is the actual process of self-knowing and what is revealed in self-knowing. What is the relationship of Ks word to this revealed knowing?

K: I dont quite catch this.

P: You say no authority, no psychological or spiritual authority. We have a tendency to take that expression no authority and apply it to our lives; which is, not be in that state, not discover freedom from authority in the process of self-knowing, but simply to try to see whether we can reach a state of non-authority. We take your word as the truth.

K: I understand. No authority, is it an abstraction of words and therefore an idea and then one pursues that idea? When K says no authority, is it self-revealing, or is it merely a conclusion, a slogan?

A: There is also another side: when you say no authority, does it become a commandment, a commandment to which one tries the nearest approximation?

K: Yes, thats right.

A: One is in the field of action, and the other is in the field of abstraction.

P: There is self-knowing; that which is revealed in the process of self-knowing is not knowable through the word. One hears you speak, one takes in what you say, or one reads your books and applies it to ones daily life; therefore there is a gap between self-knowing and your word. Now, where does truth lie?

K: Neither in the word nor in the self-revealing. It is completely apart.

P: Can we discuss that?

K: I listen to K and he talks about self-knowing and lays emphasis on self-knowing, how important it is, that without self-knowing there is no foundation. He says this. I listen to it. In what manner do I listen to that statement? Do I listen to it as an idea, a commandment, a conclusion? Or is it that in my self-knowing, I realize the implications of authority and therefore see that what he says tallies with what I discover for myself? If I listen to the word and draw a conclusion about that word as an idea and pursue the idea, then it is not self-revealing. It is merely a conclusion. But when I am studying myself, when I am pursuing my own thoughts, then in the words of K there is a self-discovery?

P: Now, is the word of K necessary to self-discovery?

K: No. I make a statement: without self-knowing, whatever I think, whatever I do or proceed with, has no basis. So I come to talk or read a book because I am interested in self-knowing and I pursue that. And when I hear K talking about no authority, what is the state of my mind when I hear those words? Is it one of acceptance, is it a conclusion which I draw, or is it a fact?

P: How does it become a fact? Does it become a fact through the discovery of that in the perceptive process of self-knowing? Or is it a fact because you have said so?

K: The microphone is a fact. It is not because I say it is the microphone.

P: But when you say microphone, it is not a fact in the same sense as the microphone is a fact.

K: So, the word is not the thing. The description is not that which is described. So, am I clear on that point, that the word is never the thing? The word mountain is not the mountain. Am I clear on that? Or is the description good enough for me and I get entangled in the description? Do I accept the description wanting that which is described and clinging to the idea? Dont reject the verbal structure altogether. I use language to communicate; I want to tell you something. I use words which we both know. But we both know that the words we use are not the actual feeling which I have. So the word is not the thing.