In earlier writings, I explored several questions surrounding David Bohm’s reservations about Krishnamurti’s teachings, including the broader issue of obscurity within the material and the difficulty of clarifying it. What follows revisits and draws together some of those earlier observations, while turning to a more specific question: what Bohm may have meant by a lack of “fine focus,” and how such a deficiency might appear in the structure of the teachings themselves.
Bohm is reported to have suggested that Krishnamurti’s work lacked a certain “fine focus” in its depiction of the nuances of consciousness. The remark is striking not because it directly contradicts Krishnamurti, but because it raises a question about articulation rather than truth. Bohm did not claim that the teachings were false. Instead, he implied that something in their presentation may have remained insufficiently developed.
Bohm was not an incidental or marginal figure. A theoretical physicist of considerable depth and originality, he was widely respected for his work on quantum theory and for his sustained engagement with the nature of thought and perception. His critique cannot be dismissed as casual or uninformed, but reflects a serious attempt to understand and articulate the implications of the teachings.
The remark is preserved in an account of a conversation between Moody and Krishnamurti, later recounted by David Moody in The Unconditioned Mind (2011). As that exchange does not proceed into detail, the nature of this lack is left open. It invites reflection on what it might mean for a teaching of this kind to be incomplete in its expression.
One response to Bohm’s concern has been to dismiss it on the grounds that Bohm himself was not enlightened. This introduces a more general difficulty. If only those who have realized the truth of the teachings are in a position to evaluate them, critique becomes circular. One would need to possess the very insight in question in order to recognize it, yet the criteria for such recognition would depend upon that same prior insight. Within such a framework, no deficiency could be meaningfully identified, nor could any distinction be drawn between clarity and confusion except from within the teaching itself.
Bohm himself suggested that all insight is insight into thought. This opens another possibility. Meaningful understanding may not require a final or independent standpoint, but may arise through careful attention to the movement and structure of thought itself. Such insight, if it is to be called insight at all, still occurs within the conventional domain, as a function of thought and perception. Yet it involves recognizing that what is observed does not exist independently or from its own side. If this is so, the demand for prior realization begins to lose its force. The question becomes whether such observation is sufficient to detect where something has not been fully articulated or brought into view.
In this more modest sense, Bohm’s remark takes on a different weight. A lack of “fine focus” need not imply error. It may instead point to a certain indeterminacy in how the workings of consciousness are described. Krishnamurti speaks with great force about the ending of psychological conditioning, the dissolution of the observer, and the possibility of a state beyond thought. Yet the structure of these claims is not always developed in detail. How conditioning operates, how it persists, and by what means it is said to end are often treated in a way that is suggestive rather than analytical. The emphasis falls on direct perception rather than on the articulation of process. Bohm may have sensed here a gap, not in insight, but in the precision with which that insight is communicated.
Bohm’s concern finds a more concrete echo in the observations of David Moody, an associate of Krishnamurti who knew him personally and later wrote extensively on the teachings. In a dialogue from a 2016 retreat sponsored by one of the foundations, Moody remarked that he did not see within the Krishnamurti community an acknowledgment that certain areas of the teachings remain unclear, nor a sustained effort to bring those areas into sharper focus. He allowed that such work might be taking place beyond his awareness, but noted that it did not appear to be a visible or shared priority.
In the same discussion, Moody drew a more detailed distinction. There are, he suggested, many points in the teachings that are intelligible in a general way, yet not fully comprehended. Statements such as “the future is now” or “time is thought” can be followed at a rough level, but resist precise articulation. Beyond this, he identified a further category of material, perhaps a quarter of the whole, that remains more obscure still. These are not only difficult to grasp, but are often presented by Krishnamurti as carrying particular significance. The result is a kind of compounded difficulty. The most emphasized elements are also those least clearly understood.
Moody’s remarks point to a persistent feature of how the teachings are received. Despite the many dialogues and gatherings sponsored by the foundations, there appears to be little convergence on the meaning of certain central claims. If anything, the interpretive field may have become more diffuse in the years following Krishnamurti’s death. This lack of shared clarity does not in itself invalidate the teachings, but it reinforces the question Bohm raised. Where articulation remains incomplete, understanding does not deepen through collective inquiry so much as disperse into parallel, and sometimes incompatible, readings.
One way of approaching this question is to look to traditions in which the dynamics of consciousness are articulated with greater structural precision. In Prāsaṅgika Madhyamaka, for example, the relationship between conventional and ultimate truth is developed so that analysis does not reify either. The distinction between appearance and emptiness is used carefully and then recognized as conceptual, leaving no independent standpoint intact. This clarifies not only what is being negated, but how the act of negation itself operates. Whether or not one accepts such a framework, it suggests the kind of “fine focus” Bohm may have had in mind: a way of presenting insight that more fully specifies how consciousness and its contents are to be understood.
What is notable in such an approach is not only the insight it conveys, but the way the presentation guards against misinterpretation. The movement of analysis does not leave behind an unexamined standpoint. It continually turns back upon itself. This feature is less evident in teachings that rely more exclusively on immediate perception than on articulated structure.
This lack of articulation is not merely theoretical. It has consequences for how the teachings are encountered and taken up in practice. Where key elements remain underdetermined, they become difficult to examine critically. What cannot be clearly understood may nevertheless continue to exert influence, not through comprehension, but through suggestion. In this way, ambiguity itself may play a role in how the teachings function.
The question takes on additional weight when considered alongside biographical material concerning Krishnamurti’s early life. Accounts from his childhood suggest a range of experiences, including fear of school, deep attachment to his mother, and distress in the face of illness and death, that indicate the presence of emotional and psychological imprinting. These experiences are not unusual. Yet they raise a question when set beside Krishnamurti’s later descriptions of “the boy” as untouched, as though experience passed through him without residue.
The issue is not whether Krishnamurti was affected by these events. It is how such effects are to be understood within a teaching that emphasizes the possibility of a mind unconditioned by experience. If early events carry psychological force, then a more detailed account of how such conditioning is resolved would seem necessary. The absence of such an account may contribute to the impression of incompleteness that Bohm describes.
A further dimension emerges in the recollections of those who were close to Krishnamurti in his later years. In his memoir, Krishnamurti: Preparing to Leave, Scott Forbes makes clear that proximity to Krishnamurti did not confer understanding of the teachings. Krishnamurti himself maintained, even at the end of his life, that no one had fully lived them. Yet Forbes, like many others, remained deeply influenced by Krishnamurti’s presence and devoted to the continuation of his work.
In describing his own attitude, Forbes remarks that he does not understand gravity, but knows how to follow its dictates. The comparison is revealing. It suggests a relation to the teachings that does not depend on comprehension, but on a kind of acceptance of their directive force.
This introduces a subtle but important tension. Krishnamurti consistently rejected authority, urging his listeners to rely on no teacher, system, or belief. Yet where understanding is absent and articulation remains incomplete, something like authority may reappear in another form. If the teachings are not fully grasped, but are nevertheless felt to carry significance or truth, they may come to function as principles that are followed rather than examined.
The authority in question is no longer explicit or institutional. It becomes implicit, residing in the perceived depth or authenticity of the teaching itself. The lack of precise articulation may allow this shift to occur, not by intention, but as a consequence of how the teaching is received.
The question, then, is not whether Krishnamurti was right or wrong in any final sense. It is whether the form of his teaching sufficiently guards against the emergence of such authority. Bohm’s concern about “fine focus” can be read as pointing to the need for a clearer account of the dynamics of consciousness, one that does not leave key distinctions underdetermined. Without such clarity, the teaching becomes difficult to evaluate, and therefore difficult to question in a meaningful way. In that case, the rejection of authority may not prevent its return, but may give rise to a more subtle and less recognizable form of it.
I was recently rereading a piece I had written earlier on David Bohm, where I reflected on his fondness for Hegel’s phrase, “The owl of Minerva flies at dusk.” It is often taken to mean that understanding comes only after events have already run their course. Bohm would joke about it during evening walks, but the aphorism carries a more serious implication. It may be that he arrived at such a realization only later, after Krishnamurti’s death. In his own understated way, he may have been attempting to communicate something of that insight.
If there is a role for discernment here, it lies not in claiming access to ultimate truth, but in attending carefully to how a teaching functions, what it implies, and what it leaves unresolved. Such discernment does not require final realization. It requires only a willingness to observe where clarity gives way to suggestion, and where what is denied in principle reappears in practice. In this sense, Bohm’s critique retains its force, not as a refutation, but as an invitation to look more closely at what has, and has not, been fully brought into focus.
Deconstructing Krishnamurti 