Recently I got introduced to Jiddu Krishnamurti and I’ve been reading some of his books. He was a leading spiritual and philosophical thinker and I really found his ideas and his way of thinking to be fascinating to me. In one of his books called, Freedom from Known, Krishnamurti talks about how we can free ourselves from the past and bring a radical change to our lives. In this summary, I’ll share with you three key lessons that I learned from him.
Key Lesson #1: When it comes to unknown, accept no authority
For centuries we have been spoon-fed by our teachers, by our authorities, by our books, our saints. They claim to know everything about God, and the universe. And We say, ‘Tell me all about it – and we are satisfied with their descriptions, which means that we live on words and our life is shallow and empty. We are second-hand people. There is nothing new in us, nothing that we have discovered for ourselves; nothing original. The primary cause of disorder in ourselves is the seeking of reality promised by another.
Key Lesson #2: Acquiring knowledge about yourself and learning about yourself are two different things
The knowledge you accumulate about yourself is always of the past. A mind that is burdened with the past is a sorrowful mind. Learning about yourself is always in the present and knowledge is always in the past, and as most of us live in the past and are satisfied with the past, knowledge becomes extraordinarily important to us. To understand anything you must live with it, you must observe it, you must know all its content, its nature, its structure, its movement. When you learn about yourself, watch yourself, watch the way you walk, how you eat, what you say, the gossip, the hate, the jealousy – if you are aware of all that in yourself, then you start to know yourself.
Key Lesson #3: Meditation is not following any system
Most people think in order to meditate, you need to follow a system. Maybe repeat a mantra over and over again or imitate what a so called Guru told you to do. By repetition you can induce the mind to be gentle and soft but that’s not gonna solve anything. When your mind wanders off it means you are interested in something else. Meditation is not control of thought, for when thought is controlled it breeds conflict in the mind.
Meditation is to be aware of every thought and of every feeling, never to say it is right or wrong but just to watch it and move with it. And out of this awareness comes silence.
Meditation is a state of mind which looks at everything with complete attention, totally, not just parts of it.
And here is a quick summary of the philosophy of the Krishnamurti. It seems to me that he had nothing to say and he just went to reject everything that others said. Some of his disciples went to him for decades to learn something but he never taught anything to them. To me, it seems he was an anti-authority person and wanted us to experience the unknown by ourselves and not rely on anyone or anything.
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