Deconstructing Krishnamurti

Sorry it took so long to get back here,  but am going to try to write more regularly.  So,  this topic seems to be attracting a lot of people. Am not sure why,  but probably because the subject is charged  in that there are these two different approaches, one involving what could be called releasing and the other involving a form of harnessing.  Anyone who knows even a little about these two approaches can see this is true, right?  So, if we figure out some way to reconcile this kind of  obvious discrepancy,  then we will have some kind of new understanding that we can apply to our own personal practice.  Now was Krishnamurti even advocating a particular  practice?  Well, yes he was, obviously. When you tell anyone to do or not do anything,  this is obviously related to doing. Not doing is a form of doing. Try to think about this.

From Google: ” There is a particular approach of negation that can be found in both Hinduism and Buddhism.   The Hindu version I will refer to as “neti neti”.  From Google: “neti neti (नेति नेति) is a Sanskrit expression which means “not this, not this”, or “neither this, nor that” (neti is sandhi from na iti “not so”). It is found in the Upanishads. Neti neti,is the method of Vedic analysis of negation.”

And from Wikopedia:  “Neti neti”:

“significance of Neti neti:  neti neti, meaning, “Not this, not this”, is the method of Vedic analysis of negation. It is a keynote of Vedic inquiry. With its aid the Jnani negates identification with all things of this world which is not the Atman, in this way he negates the Anatman. Through this gradual process he negates the mind and transcends all worldly experiences that are negated till nothing remains but the Self. He attains union with the Absolute by denying the body, name, form, intellect, senses and all limiting adjuncts and discovers what remains, the true “I” alone.^[1] L.C.Beckett in his book, Neti Neti, explains that this expression is an expression of something inexpressible, it expresses the ‘suchness’ (the essence) of that which it refers to when ‘no other definition applies to it’.^[2] Neti neti negates all descriptions about the Ultimate Reality but not the Reality itself. Intuitive interpretation of uncertainty principle can be expressed by “Neti neti”^[3] that annihilates ego and the world as non-self (Anatman), it annihilates our sense of self altogether.^[“

Note that when you strip everything away, you get to this larger “Self” which is kind of hiding underneath all of these false ideas and illusions about the nature of reality,and this self or Self is considered to be ones true self (Self:-)

But the approach of Gurdjieff was quite different, actually. He did speak about the essence of a person, but he was meaning something else.

To be continued; will go into this gradually,  little by little.

Due to a time consuming development in my personal life I have not been able to write here for a while, but am going to start writing again soon. I notice there is a big interest in Krishnamurti/Gurdjieff, so will kind of hone in from that angle and try to write something soon, maybe later today. Niko is very busy, too, but she will write here again, also.

” ‘There is a principle, proof against all argument, a bar against all progress,

and which if persisted in cannot but keep the mind in everlasting

ignorance-and that is, contempt prior to examination.’—PALEY.

Just read this quote and thought it described K perfectly. K was a master at Zen, Hinduism, Vedanta, Buddhism and Christianity. He spoke authoritatively of all these traditions as “time-binding nonsense”. All this, without first examining the tradition in question. Everything that others said was reduced to “time binding nonsense” and everything he himself said was gospel truth.

He asked his “followers” not to read books, and yet he wrote more than 70 books. Once when he was asked which books of his one should read. He said read them all, in the reverse sequence (the last book first, and the first book last). He said that there was an advantage in not knowing what Marx, or the Buddha or others said, as that could become a conditioning, not realizing or not wanting to realize that reading his own books could result in conditioning too.

He thought he was the greatest being on earth for all time (because of the process – which was experimental, and was being tried on a human being for the first time in history, specifically, leaving the crown chakra open for an extended period of time, which was very painful, and unique in the world’s history).

When Bohm at last becomes enlightened he will be a much better teacher than K.

-saurab”

This message is from the yahoo group J_Krishnamurti, 12/18. .Thank you very much, Saurab. Am also posting your qualifier which followed the above message, and will make some comments later.

“There is one contribution that K has made in my life, and that is to expand the horizon of my personal enquiry.

Being a Hindu, before I read K, I was of the opinion that *devotion* was the most important thing in spirituality. Devotion to the guru, devotion to saints, devotion to God, and so on… which is more or less in line with mainstream Hinduism, and also Christianity (which is similar to Hinduism in this respect).
Even though today I do not accept his teachings fully, they have been responsible in shaping my world view. The topics he raised in his dialogues, the questions he would put forward, were all responsible in triggering my own enquiry into these things, even though my conclusions sometimes differed from his. For that I am very grateful to him.
–saurab”

So, thanks again to Niko for the work put into making this blog. We did not try as yet to promote it, so the number of readers is limited, but please share this link, as there is going to be more frequent activity here, with a focus, at least from my end, on comparing these two approaches. You know,  looking at different kinds of teachings  can be used as means or device to convey something else.  in principle there is nothing at all wrong with this, depending upon if/how much you distort the actual material to convey what you want to convey.  Of course, along the way there is also, hopefully, discovery–I know there is for me– but I do not find anything wrong about having a particular intent. The ground is not just to walk on. There are other functions for it;  in short, the earth needs to be turned in order to garden. Now let’s go slow.

Re what Krishnamurti wrote about Gurdjieff  ( https://www.jkrishnamurti.org/content/series-i-chapter-47-spiritual-leader ),  he used this material of what a particular person told him and deliberately turned it into something else.  Again, this is okay, as it is how the mind creates, but it depends where the intention is to go with it. Some people say that intention is the single most important thing, and with this I tend to concur, but K did not seem to have this perspective.  I believe he referred to intention as having a motive and he considered the mind working in this mode to be counterproductive in that it was interconnected with a person’s subjective sense of “the me ” as being independent from the (perceptual) field.  He was speaking, from the angle of accumulation on an emotional/psychological level as being counter-productive. Obviously some truth here,  even ‘great’ truth, but imo the way he put the emphasis is not only not helpful, but even counter-productive, and I will be going into this in detail, maybe in a different blog.

This is intended to be an inquiry.

Many of us have had very powerful and deeply meaningful experiences when reading and/or listening to Krishnamurti, which experiences (at this point in my understanding, which understanding  is radically greater then it was when I first read K) I would advise others having these kinds of experiences to not place so much store in.  I, for one, being prone to very strong and vivid experiences of the kind labeled “mystical” almost immediately became deeply hooked after finding in a library  a book from the series, Commentaries On Living (forget which one) and then reading Freedom From The Known. As I wrote on a K forum many years ago,  I was so energized with joy I was practically dancing in the streets! My personal subjective experiences as a result of reading K were of many different varieties, but all  very powerful. I found another person my own age who was also reading K to dialogue with and we had many thrilling conversations.

I do feel sad to have to say it,  but by the experiences I had from reading K, which experiences were to me so vivid, beautiful and meaningful at the time, I was led on my personal spiritual quest (to which I had already dedicated my life at the age of fourteen)  very far off track. So how to understand what I am saying to you now? How to explain this so as not to just deconstruct Krishnamurti, but to also make a greater sense?

Put another way, the question arises, if you take away what to you does not make sense,  will you find underneath it, sitting there waiting for you, what actually does make sense?  Does this really make sense? So, is sense or meaning already intact and just waiting to be uncovered? The analogy is often used of peeling the layers off an onion, but we know if we do this, we do not ultimately come to the real onion. Another analogy is used in Buddhism which is maybe more practical–that of clouds obscuring the light of the sun.

To be continued…

Wry: Yes it is a matter of discernment in that each human being’s experience is contextual and also to some degree on the bias (at least on the bias according to someone else:-) I think a good teaching needs to account for this, which K did not really do; rather than attempting to shape a given situation at the bias (shape being an interesting concept:-), he attempted (or pretended?) to directly do away with the bias, whereas in actuality it is necessary for each person to work out for himself in his daily activity the non-functional flaws in his own discriminatory processing of data. This is not as easy as K made it sound; he many times used the word effortless, yet at other times, though less frequently, spoke about the process being difficult or hard or work). So… is there a way to address this conundrum that we want our lives to flow, yet sometimes our lives flow in the wrong direction? It is about orientation, isn’t it?

Can someone else help us learn or does each person completely on his own just do it? As we know, any teacher presents information to a student within a certain framework, and also, the bias is to support the way one is processing data so as not to experience suffering, which does make sense on a rudimentary level, and most everyone who has considered this situation, would agree that only self-serving past a certain point is not socially functional.

Re David Bohm, he was not the only one who discerned that K’s teaching lacked fine-tuning. Imo the reason many people do not want to look into this is simply because it does not fit into their own story. So what is the ‘true’ story about David Bohm and how do we fit it into our own story which is interconnecting with this story, or do we omit him? You know, if you know how to really spin a good story you can fit almost anything into it. The question is, what makes a story be good? Again, this would depend upon the perceived function of the story.  -Wry

What bothers me about David Bohm’s story is that K crushed him with the weight of his supposedly non-existent authority.  David Bohm had interesting and insightful things to say about “truth” (the conversations in Truth and Actuality come to mind); in fact things that were more insightful than K’s own replies.  These insights relate directly to certain interpretations of the Two Truths in Buddhism, but K really (and interestingly) didn’t go there.  These encounters shed light onto the question of  how David Bohm plays into the larger “story” of where K’s explanations fall short, and why it is possible to discern this.

A quote I came upon recently from one of Guy Newland’s books:  “To underestimate the importance of terminological distinctions is to ignore the vast power of language to demonstrate a correct or incorrect consciousness in those who hear it.”   To me this is analogous to Bohm’s comment about “fine tuning.”  Yet it’s also true that different people understand the two truths differently, even if they are listening to the same teacher. With this in mind, it may be possible to see that in some respects, Bohm’s understanding could have been greater than K’s.

Niko wrote:

“In an earlier post on this blog, I talked about David Bohm’s doubts concerning the ultimate usefulness of Krishnamurti’s teachings. In his book about the Oak Grove School, David Moody recounts a conversation with David Bohm in which Bohm states that Krishnamurti’s work lacked a “fine focus” in its depiction of the nuances of consciousness. Apparently their exchange did not go forward into the details of why they perceived this “lack”, leaving the question of where the deficiency lies. Many people who are devotees of Krishnamurti tend to dismiss Bohm’s doubts because Bohm was not (even by his own admission), “enlightened.”

This situation is interesting in and of itself because it comes back to the issue of questioning the teachings. Krishnamurti encouraged this “questioning” as long as it was set up as a sort of Koan in his listeners’ minds. There were boundaries set as to what the questioning could be. For example, questions about K himself were off limits. K seemingly knew where he wanted people to go with their “questions” and David Bohm was unable to get there. He also suffered from depression and had dependency issues which Krishnamurti viewed as a sign failure on Bohm’s part.

It had to be Bohm’s failure and not Krishnamurti’s.

Many people think that someone like K is beyond criticism because they take it as a matter of faith that he was enlightened. Following this manner of thinking, David Bohm cannot be right about a lack of fine focus in the teachings because he himself was not enlightened. A question comes to mind: in what way can one’s discernment about a supposed enlightened person be valid if one is not himself enlightened? How might this idea even be functional? How can David Bohm discern that the teachings lack something?

A tentative answer: everything comes down to discernment.

Also, there are different kinds of “enlightenment”.

+++++++

Wry: Yes it is a matter of discernment in that each human being’s experience is contextual and also to some degree on the bias (at least on the bias according to someone else:-) I think a good teaching needs to account for this, which K did not really do; rather then attempting to shape a given situation at the bias  (shape being an interesting concept:-), he attempted (or pretended?) to directly do away with the bias, whereas in actuality it is necessary for each person to work out for himself in his daily activity the non-functional flaws in his own discriminatory processing of data. This  is not as easy as K made it sound; he many times used the word effortless, yet at at other times, though less frequently, spoke about the process being difficult or hard or work).  So… is there a way to address this conundrum that we want our lives to flow, yet sometimes our lives flow in the wrong direction? It is about orientation, isn’t it?

Can someone else help us learn or does each person completely on his own just do it? As we know, any teacher presents information to a student within a certain framework, and also, the bias is to support the way one is processing data so as not to experience suffering, which does make sense on a rudimentary level, and most everyone who has considered this situation, would agree that only self-serving past a certain point is not socially functional.

Re David Bohm, he was not the only one who discerned that K’s teaching lacked fine-tuning. Imo the reason many people do not want to look into this is simply because it does not fit into their own story. So what is the ‘true’ story about  David Bohm and how do we fit it into our own story which is interconnecting with this story, or do we omit him? You know, if you know how to really spin a good story you can fit almost anything into it. The question is, what makes a story be good?  Again, this would depend upon the perceived function of the story.

In an earlier post on this blog, I talked about David Bohm’s doubts concerning the ultimate usefulness of Krishnamurti’s teachings.  In his book about the Oak Grove School, David Moody recounts a conversation with David Bohm in which Bohm states that Krishnamurti’s work lacked a “fine focus” in its depiction of the nuances of consciousness.  Apparently their exchange did not go forward into the details of why they perceived this “lack”, leaving the question of where the deficiency lies.  Many people who are devotees of Krishnamurti tend to dismiss Bohm’s doubts because Bohm was not (even by his own admission), “enlightened.”

This situation is interesting in and of itself because it comes back to the issue of questioning the teachings.  Krishnamurti encouraged this “questioning” as long as it was set up as a sort of Koan in his listeners’ minds.  There were boundaries set as to what the questioning could be.  For example, questions about K himself were off limits.  K seemingly knew where he wanted people to go with their “questions” and David Bohm was unable to get there.  He also suffered from depression and had dependency issues which Krishnamurti viewed as a sign of failure on Bohm’s part.

It had to be Bohm’s failure and not Krishnamurti’s.

Many people think that someone like K is beyond criticism because they take it as a matter of faith that he was enlightened.  Following this manner of thinking, David Bohm cannot be right about a lack of fine focus in the teachings because he himself was not enlightened.  A question comes to mind: in what way can one’s discernment about a supposed enlightened person be valid if one is not himself enlightened?  How might this idea even be functional?  How can David Bohm discern that the teachings lack something?

A tentative answer:  everything comes down to discernment.

Also, there are different kinds of “enlightenment”.

Am going to try to write more regularly now. Two topics Niko and I both are interested in are the comparison of the approach of the Chittamatrin (Mind Only) School of Buddhism to the approach of the Pransagika Madhyamika (Middle Way) School. This kind of focus significantly relates to the teaching of Krishnamurti and also Gurdjieff (which teachings many of the future readers here are probably interested in) and imo is a very productive simple way to begin to understand ones own mental processing. This subject also relates to the two aspects of truth which is probably the main defining characteristic of the Middle Way,  which school has a distinctive approach to working with this particular concept.

Secondly we are both interested in the subject of childhood trauma and how it may have possibly affected Krishnamurti. I had a quite traumatic childhood and feel this is related to my own strong attraction to K and also. because of my childhood I may have in this area a little more insight then the average person into how K’s childhood experience may have affected his subsequent responses when he was given an opportunity to wear fine clothes, receive lots of love and attention and then become “the great world teacher. I think he did rise to this occasion very creatively, and this is a wonderful testimony to human versatility coupled with the will to survive.