The Awakening of Intelligence
I just watched a video of J. Krishnamurti for the first time. You can find it on YouTube. It’s called “A Mind That Is Free.” I was struck first and foremost by his eyes, how they rolled back in his head periodically, the lids almost closed, as if he were actually channeling something from another, higher plane. And his spine was straight as a board, as if to assist that energy or whatever in moving through with as much ease as possible. He spoke forcefully but also managed to sound like something else was making him speak, or like he was translating someone else whom only he could hear. Reading Krishnamurti’s words—or rather, transcriptions of his words—had already convinced me that he was an enlightened being. Actually seeing him speak those words was…arresting. I kept shaking my head and laughing in amazement. Some people are really a trip, and J. Krishnamurti is one of the trippiest. It’s fitting to start an episode about him by describing my first time seeing him speak, because he was all about seeing things as if for the first time. More on that later.
I think it was the oft-quoted phrase of his, “It is no sign of health of to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society,” that first brought Krishnamurti to my attention four or five years ago. I wanted to know more about the man who said those words, and I was delighted to find a Krishnamurti book already in my husband’s collection—a nice thick one, over five hundred pages long, called The Awakening of Intelligence.
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The “J” in J. Krishnamurti stands for Jiddu. He was born in May of 1895 in Madanapelle, a city located in the southeastern coastal state of Andhra Pradesh, India. He was one of eleven children, of whom only six survived childhood. He suffered recurrent bouts of malaria as a child and was often taken to be intellectually stunted. He was fond of his mother, who died in 1905, when Krishnamurti was ten. His school teachers and his father beat him regularly. In 1909, his father took a job as a clerk for the Theosophical Society, necessitating the family move to Adyar (a large neighborhood in south Chennai, formerly Madras). He’d been a Theosophist since 1882.
Theosophy was only established in 1875, in New York City, by a Russian immigrant named Helena Blavatsky and two Americans named Henry Olcott and William Quan Judge. Scholars have categorized Theosophy as part of the occultist stream of Western esotericism, incorporating aspects of Neoplatonism, Hinduism, and Buddhism. Blavatsky taught that there was a secretive, ancient brotherhood of spiritual Masters (with a capital M), largely centered in Tibet, who had cultivated great wisdom and supernatural powers. She and other Theosophists believed that these Masters were trying to revive knowledge of an ancient religion that would come to eclipse the existing world religions (Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism). A young Krishnamurti was thought to be one of these Masters.
In April of 1909, he met Charles Webster Leadbeater, who was a member of the Theosophical Society and who was struck by Krishnamurti’s aura, which he said was devoid of selfishness. Leadbeater and some of his associates undertook educating, protecting, and generally grooming Krishnamurti—then just fourteen years old—to become a “vehicle for the Lord Maitreya.” In 1911, at sixteen, he was named the head of the newly established Order of the Star in the East, and he began to give public speeches. His writings also started to appear at this time, in Theosophical Society booklets and magazines.
Although he wasn’t free of doubt about his alleged Master status, Krishnamurti continued his work as a Theosophist until 1929. He dissolved the Order of the Star in August of that year. He was thirty-four at that point, settled in Ojai, California, and for the past seven years he’d been regularly experiencing a condition that his associates called “the process.” The symptoms of this condition were a sharp pain at the nape of his neck, loss of appetite, occasional delirious ramblings and lapses into a childlike state. To outside observers it would appear that he sometimes lost consciousness but he himself would later assert that he’d maintained awareness of his surroundings the entire time and was actually in a state of “mystical union.” In his notebook, Krishnamurti wrote about the “strong feeling of otherness” that would overcome him after acute experiences of the process. This “otherness” was a heightened feeling of sensitivity to beauty and to everything else, that was present with him in daily events. “There is no possibility of getting used to it,” he wrote, “for it has never been nor will it ever be.”
The process and the resulting otherness was Krishnamurti’s alone, not planted in him by his Theosophical mentors, and it provided the soil in which his new vision of consciousness would continue to grow. Upon dissolving the Order of the Star, he returned the money and properties that had been donated to it (including a castle and 5,000 acres of land in the Netherlands) to their former owners, and he resigned from the Theosophical Society. His single-minded intention, as stated on August 3rd, 1929, was “to set man free. I desire to free him from all cages, from all fears, and not to found religions, new sects, nor to establish new theories and new philosophies.” He did not want followers. "The moment you follow someone you cease to follow Truth,” he said.
But of course, people did follow him. In his remaining fifty-seven years, Krishnamurti wrote various books and engaged in hundreds, if not thousands, of public talks, group discussions, and conversations with concerned individuals around the world. But he always emphasized, above all else, that he was not an authority of any kind, spiritual or otherwise. His typical response to any question was some version of “Let’s look at it together. Let’s go into it.” He died of pancreatic cancer at the age of ninety in Ojai, California, on February 17th, 1986. His mind was clear until the last moment.
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The Awakening of Intelligence consists of four sections that are subdivided into parts. The sections are titled America, India, Europe, and England. All four sections are transcriptions of talks he gave and conversations he had in those places. Today I’m going to focus on the America section, both because I’m most familiar with America, and it happens to be the first section of the book. Part One of the America section consists of two conversations that Krishnamurti had with author and philosophy professor Jacob Needleman; Part Two, of three talks he gave in New York City; and Part Three, of two conversations with musician Alain Naudé, who was closely associated with Krishnamurti for six years as his secretary, assistant, and student. I’m not going to summarize the America section in the order of its parts, though, because I don’t think Krishnamurti’s way of communicating lends itself to such linearity. He’s more associative and circular than linear. Every question leads to another question, and another and another, and he always circles back and through to the same core concepts, which always have a way of sounding new.
The first such concept that comes to mind when I think of Krishnamurti is conflict. His primary interest, far as I can tell, was how to live a life free of conflict. But by “conflict” he didn’t necessarily mean fighting or arguing. That would be a gross (as in not subtle) example of conflict, but Krishnamurti typically addressed the more subtle manifestations of it. However, whether conflict was occurring between two nations, two people, or within one person, its core reason for being was always the same: separateness. Or rather, the perception of separateness that, in actuality, did not exist.
We make distinctions, for instance, between cities, states, and countries. You look at a map and you see lines that represent the end of one state and the beginning of another. North Carolina has a very distinct shape to it. But that shape doesn’t actually exist. It’s a product of man’s imagination. We made it up. In reality, North Carolina is not a separate entity from South Carolina or any other state, and the same could be said of countries and continents. Though oceans appear to separate some countries and continents from others, they are in fact not separate. The land drops way down at some point and is covered by water, but the land is still there, as the ocean floor, and in this way what we call “countries” are not separate at all. It’s an illusion. And this illusion of separateness is the reason international wars happen. “They own that piece of land and we own this one, they are them and we are us.” But actually it’s all the same land and we’re all the same people. Separating things into fragments inevitably leads to conflict.
And of course we don’t just do this in the external world. We create conflict internally, as well. Let’s take the example of resisting what is. Let’s say you’re taking a walk, and it starts to rain, and you don’t have a rain jacket or an umbrella. And you tense up and scowl and start to walk faster and are generally embodying your distaste for the rain and your desire for it to not be happening. You are resisting the rain. Resisting what is. And “as long as there is resistance,” Krishnamurti said, “there must be conflict.” So if you can accept the rain—for the fact that it is—and Krishnamurti worked a lot with facts and had a very particular, sharp way of emphasizing the word in speech—then there will be no conflict within you.
The same could be said of how we relate to our own emotions. We tend to resist, for instance, sadness, fear, grief, loneliness, and any number of feelings that we label as “uncomfortable.” We resist certain aspects of our personality, as well as certain habits of thought. “I don’t want to feel this way, think this way, be this way," we say. “I want to feel happy, or I want to think positive thoughts, or I want to be a better person. Something other than what I am.” Conflict is baked right into that way of thinking, though, and that very conflict is what makes change impossible. We think we have to be disciplined about changing ourselves, but in our general conception of discipline, according to Krishnamurti, there is conflict. We are suppressing something, overcoming something, exercising will, etc. But the root of the word “discipline” means “to learn”—not to conform or suppress or otherwise try to change what is. And in fact no learning is happening when we’re engaged in any such battles.
Again, we can consider a less subtle battle in the example of two people arguing. If my main goal is to somehow change the person I’m arguing with—change their mind, their perception—basically make them think how I think and see how I see—then I’m not going to learn much about how they think and they see. But if my goal in a given conversation is to simply understand the other person (i.e. learn about them), then there won’t be conflict. And conflict is further precluded from the whole interaction when I remember that the other person isn’t separate from me. We are all the same consciousness manifested as form. Likewise, our own individual consciousness is essentially uniform, not made of discrete fragments. At least, not in actuality. We merely imagine that it’s fragmented.
According to Krishnamurti—although even that phrase he’d likely take issue with because he insists that the following is a fact, not just an “according to”: the content of consciousness is consciousness. “The two are not separate…When we say there must be a change in consciousness, [we are saying so] within the field of consciousness…” He asserted, in other words, that there is not a separate entity within the consciousness that can bring about a transformation. Of the many fragments that comprise the average person’s consciousness, one becomes becomes “the authority, the censor…the boss. And so [a person] maintains fragmentation… Therefore he must maintain conflict.”
Another way he put it was in terms of the observer versus the observed. If I were to say to myself, for instance, “I need to control my thoughts,” then I would be separating myself—the I who’s doing the needing—from my thoughts. But I am actually not separate from my thoughts—Krishnamurti called this a fact. I believe that I am the observer, and that my thoughts are what I’m observing. But Krishnamurti said again and again that the observer is the observed. “If you really see,” he said, “that the observer is the observed, that the two are not separate, then you can observe the totality of consciousness without analysis. Then you see the whole content of it instantly.”
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If the concept of the observer being the observed is making your brain hurt a little, or if you’re having a does-not-compute experience, you’re not alone. If that phrase—the observer is the observed—were a painting, M.C. Escher would’ve painted it for sure. All those upside down staircases and overlapping archways… I have found that it’s best not to think too hard about it. What I can say about this concept is that it seems to run very counter to so much of what I’ve read and otherwise encountered in my spiritual and philosophical studies: the idea that I am not my thoughts, and not my feelings. My Self-with-a-capital-S actually is separate from my thoughts and feelings and can observe them without judgment, and maybe even with love. “Love your dark thoughts,” as Ram Dass said. Which implies that there is an “I” doing the loving, and that my dark thoughts are distinct from that “I.” But Krishnamurti seems to be saying that such a distinction only creates more conflict in a person. Whereas Ram Dass equates the Witness with the Soul and asserts that the “Soul loves everything,” Krishnamurti asks if we can look without the Witness—although he calls it the observer and perhaps I’m mistaken in conflating the two.
I’m also reminded of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (or ACT) and its concept of being “fused” with our thoughts. We totally identify with them, are just in them, instead of watching them with a detached curiosity. Cultivating that watcher perspective is a primary way of “defusing” with our thoughts and therefore not being beholden to them, so we can act in accordance with our values instead of our maladaptive cognitions. But it would seem that Krishnamurti is saying that such defusing is not possible. You are your thoughts. Any detached perspective we think we might have is just another form of thought, but we’ve placed it on a pedestal, thereby creating more fragmentation and exacerbating internal conflict.
So what are we to do, then? Krishnamurti says we must first and foremost “learn to look, not to make an effort to look. I must find out what it means to look.” He always circled back to the question of “how to observe ourselves, so that in that observation there is no conflict at all… I must be aware totally,” he said. “To be so aware, means that I am not trying to go beyond the conditioning, not trying to be free of the conditioning”—and for “conditioning” we can substitute the word “thought,” because Krishnamurti said that all thought is the product of conditioning, of accumulated knowledge—more on that in a minute—“I must see it as it actually is,” he said, “not bring in another element, such as: wanting to be free of it, because that is an escape from actuality.”
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So: Krishnamurti defines consciousness as its very content. Consciousness is the thought that comprises it, and you can’t change thought with thought. Or that’s what he asserted, anyway.
Let’s look at the example of meditation. Many people probably think of meditation as an exercise in trying to empty the mind of thoughts, or “quieten” the mind, as Krishnamurti would say. But he would also say that you cannot quieten the mind. “You can’t make the mind quiet,” he said, “because you are the mischief-maker, you are yourself disturbed, anxious, confused—how can you make the mind quiet?” He asserted that instead of trying to make the mind quiet, one has to find out—through the humblest investigation—whether the mind can ever be quiet. He eschewed any and all systems of meditation, such as the use of mantras, because “systems make the mind mechanical, they don’t give you freedom, they may promise freedom at the end, but freedom is at the beginning, not at the end…You must begin at the beginning and the first step is the last step, and this is meditation.”
The first step is the last step. There’s another Escher-esque way of phrasing things. But this pronouncement becomes easy to comprehend when you realize what that first and last step consist of. They consist of not knowing. And here we must go into Krishnamurti’s conception of thought. He defined thought as “the response of memory…the response of the past,” and therefore thought “is never free. Thought itself, in itself, is of the past and therefore is not free, it is always old.” He said, “[Thought cannot] work in any other field except the field of the known… It can’t work in something I don’t know.” And so to really meditate—to experience a mind that is free of thought—one must not know what meditation is. One must dispose entirely of all the systems that claim to know how to quiet the mind, that claim to know what meditation is. “One has to start,” Krishnamurti said, “as though one knew absolutely nothing.”
Wow. Talk about freedom. I don’t have to know anything? How liberating is that?
And it certainly does make sense that consciousness itself—in Krishnamurti’s conceptualization of it—could never quieten consciousness. “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” to quote Audre Lorde. (And I realize that this quote—the title to one of Lorde’s poetry books—is often misinterpreted, so please forgive me if I’m getting it wrong now.) It’s like asking fire to cool itself down, or ice to warm itself up. But in the case of meditation, it also begs the question: how do we go about this not-knowing? I honestly don’t know how to not know! At least in the case of meditation. But I will say that I’ve found it helpful, in my own recent attempts at meditating, to label my thoughts, when they arise, as “old”—i.e. as already known. If I’m meditating as a way to experience something new—something that is beyond knowledge—and if all thought occurs in the field of the known—then by labeling thought as old, space is made for something new and unknown. I do feel more freedom in this approach to meditation than I have through simply focusing on my breath, using a mantra or counting or even labeling thought as thought. Krishnamurti might say that having any set “approach” to meditation would count as using a system and would therefore preclude the experience of real freedom of mind, but so be it.
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But then I have to wonder: is all thought old? I mean, all of it? When I ponder ideas that are new to me—ideas like “all thought is old and based in past knowledge”—are the thoughts that comprise that pondering, old? They certainly don’t feel old. I can practically feel new synapses firing in my brain. Maybe Krishnamurti wouldn’t even categorize that as thought, but as learning, and surely learning, as a phenomenon itself, is not old. And what about ideas? Maybe those are in a category all their own, as well. But are ideas not the result of thought? Krishnamurti might say that ideas are in the same family as understanding is, and he said that “understanding has nothing to do with thought.” Most of us have probably had the experience of trying to solve a particular problem by thinking about it and thinking about it, and then it isn’t until we stop thinking about it, that a solution comes to us. As if out of nowhere, it appears. We understand what needs to be done. I’d say ideas are closely related.
Jack Kerouac is often quoted as saying, in reference to creative writing especially: “First thought, best thought.” But maybe “thought” in this case is more what Krishnamurti would call an idea, or a way of understanding, or seeing. Or maybe thought actually occurs on a spectrum of newness. Because what about fantasies? When a fiction writer imagines whole scenes in her head, complete with dialogue never before spoken, are those thoughts based in the past?
It’s probably best not to think too hard about the oldness or newness of thought. Too much metacognition probably has hurt some people. Best instead to just sit with questions like “What is thought?” And “What is meditation?”, and all along the way acknowledge that I don’t know what either of them are—except I do know, if I’m taking it as the fact that Krishnamurti says it is, that I am my thoughts. “When the mind understands the truth,” he says, “that the observer, the experiencer, the thinker, is the thought, is the experience, is the observed, then what takes place? When the observer, who wants to change, realizes he is part of what has to be changed?”
Indeed, what does take place? It’s really something quite profound, larger than words can capture. And that’s the whole point, isn’t it? To experience something that words can’t describe? But then, a word does come to mind: relief. It is immensely relieving and freeing to realize that any effort I make to change myself will only serve to make the change that less likely. Carl Rogers, a founder of humanistic psychology, said, “The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.” I think Krishnamurti would agree, but he’d probably go a step further and edit “I can change” to, simply, “I change.” When I accept myself, I change. Acceptance is the change that needs to happen.
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One thing I love about Krishnamurti is his steadfast insistence that people don’t need teachers, gurus, or systems of any kind to discover their inner truth. In The Awakening of Intelligence he said, “I don’t read any religious, philosophical, psychological books: one can go into oneself at tremendous depths and find out everything.” And then I guess one can go on to write one’s own religious, philosophical and psychological books.
What I’m seeing, as I continue to sit with Krishnamurti’s ideas, is that self-acceptance (a phrase I’m not sure he ever even used) is inextricably linked with acceptance of others and of the world at large, because we are not separate from any of it. And I think another way of defining acceptance is: to see things without any preconceived notions, to be open to and curious about all of it. Basically, to see things like a baby or child does. It’s like Jesus said, “Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.” I don’t know about the whole conversion piece, but I feel strongly that when Jesus said “become as little children,” he was referring to this way of seeing the world, and therefore of seeing ourselves. And the “kingdom of heaven” is not a place we must first die to get to—unless we’re talking about dying to ourselves, to all of our accumulated knowledge, based on the past—it is eternity right now. Again, to quote Jack Kerouac: “Eternity and the Here-and-Now are the exact same thing.” And Krishnamurti said, “When your mind and your eyes see life as something totally new, that is eternity. That is the quality of the mind that has come upon this timeless state, because it has known what it means to die every day to everything it has collected during the day.”
When we see life as something totally new, as a baby or child does, we are not trying to learn or trying to understand—we are learning, and we are understanding. When babies learn to speak, for instance, they do not wake up with the thought, “Today I’m going to learn how to say the name of the woman who breast feeds me.” They simply see their mother, and they simply hear her refer to herself as “mama.” They are pure seeing and pure listening. They are, therefore, always in the state that Krishnamurti would call meditation. He would also agree that meditation can look like sitting very still with one’s eyes closed, but he ultimately asserted that one can meditate all the time, all day long. One can even meditate while in conversation with someone else. Indeed, meditating—that is, really seeing and really listening, with a mind that is empty of judgments and evaluations and thoughts of what to say when the other person stops talking—doing this while in conversation with others is the ideal state in which to conduct conversations. Only in that state are we really with a person. Only in that state are we in true relationship with someone.
“Can you look,” Krishnamurti asked, “not only at a tree, but at your wife or your husband, without the image?…When you so observe, the actual ‘what is,’ is a living thing, not a thing looked upon as dead, recognizable by the past event, by past knowledge.” That’s what he means by “image”—“recognizable by the past event, by past knowledge.” And again, the idea here is not to try to look at one’s spouse or anyone else they know very well, without the image. The idea is to see if you can look at them in that way. It’s a subtle difference and hard to elucidate with language. It’s more like you’re embodying the question, “Can I look without the image?” than you are trying to look without the image. Krishnamurti also talks about this concept in terms of looking without the words. Can you at a tree without labeling it a tree in your mind? In that Angel Olsen song we heard a couple minutes ago, she sang, “The truth never really lives in the story of words we say.” Krishnamurti would most certainly agree. And by embodying that question in regards to how we observe the world around us—can I look without the images, without the words—we are simultaneously applying it to how we observe ourselves, too.
Can you look at yourself without the image of yourself? That is, without what’s recognizable about you based on past events and knowledge? Krishnamurti would say that if you can’t, then you’re relating to others all the time through an image of yourself, and therefore no actual relationships exist. “Relationship as we know it now,” he said, “is the continuation of division between individuals.” And he said that corruption of all kinds begins in the lack of relationship.
I can’t help but think of social media here. I realize that Krishnamurti wasn’t talking about actual images in the form of photographs, but certainly photographs are a potent, concrete representation of the images he was referring to. And certainly we as a society have become even more attached to images than we were in Krishnamurti’s day, an attachment made evident by the popularity of social media and the countless selfies and other snapshots—all pieces of the past—that comprise it. And even if someone doesn’t post pictures of themselves, if they post at all they are nonetheless creating an image of themselves, and they are relating to others on that platform through their created images.
I realize, of course, that we largely relate to one another through images even without social media. We play our various roles—whatever they might be—in the context of family, friendship, work, shopping at the grocery store, etc. But if we want to reduce our frequency of imaging, if you will, it seems like discontinuing or at least drastically reducing our social media use would be a relatively easy way to do so.
Also, if you want to practice seeing things with new eyes, I highly recommend the book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, by Betty Edwards. An actual drawing instruction book, its main premise is that most people look at things with the left side of their brain—the side responsible for all things logical and linear. This is the side that creates images of things, reducing them to lifeless symbols. Human eyes become almond shapes, and human noses become triangles. In short, Edwards asserts that we are not really seeing the things we’re trying to draw. Once we see them as they are, and not as a collection of learned (i.e., old, already known) symbols, then we can draw them much more realistically. If you don’t feel like taking on the whole book, you could try doing my favorite exercise from it: the upside down drawing. Find a picture in a magazine or wherever that you’d like to draw. Turn the picture upside down. Now the left brain can’t do its usual, automatic substituting of symbols and generic shapes, because it can’t make sense of the picture. Now the right brain can do its thing, which is to take in the gestalt of the picture, or see it in its wholeness, just as it is. So you draw the upside down image just as you see it, and when you’re done you turn your drawing right side up, and prepare to be amazed.
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The ability to observe without the observer—to see without images—is exactly what Anthony de Mello was talking about in his book Awareness (see my very first blog post) when he defined love as “Seeing something for what it really is—not what we imagine it to be—and giving it the response it deserves.” Not what we imagine it to be. The word “imagine” contains the word “image.” So to love someone is to see them for who and what they really are, moment to moment, and not for whatever images of them we’ve accumulated over time. De Mello would also agree with Krishnamurti’s proclamation that “Love is not attachment.” In other words, love is not need. In De Mello’s words, “love makes no demands.” Krishnamurti said in The Awakening of Intelligence, “To be related means not to be dependent on each other, not to escape from your loneliness through another, not to try to find comfort, companionship, through another. When you seek comfort through another, are dependent and all the rest of it, can there be any kind of relationship? Or are you then using each other?”
I’m also reminded of The Art of Loving, a book I explored in my third blog post, in which Erich Fromm states that the primary condition for mastering the art of loving is the overcoming of one’s narcissism. In that blog I referenced the oft-quoted line (which has been attributed to many people), “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” This is the kind of narcissism Fromm was talking about, and it’s the same thing de Mello and Krishnamurti were talking about, too. The idea of images, of imagining things and people to be a certain way, based on our past experiences with them, and also based on our past experiences with others who are not them. This way of seeing usually results in our not giving people the response they actually deserve—which might be no response aside from a deeper listening. Instead, we give them the response we think they deserve, and we know how problematic thought can be in this context, in as much as it is old and can only happen in the field of the known.
