[Notes on] Krishnamurti's As One Is

The full title of this small collection of talks (the former equivalent of today's podcast transmissions I guess) is As One Is - To Free the Mind of All Conditioning. And as a good friend recently pointed out, you don't really need to read the book once you read and understand the title...

In any case, this is definitely a key theme for Jiddu Krishnamurti (who I wrote about in a previous post) and the toughest injunction he left us: free your mind from all conditioning! To get there, it seems to me like he is asking each and every one of us to do two things - a permanent auto-psychoanalysis and meditation. The first is about trying to bring to light the different influences that may be operating on us (family, culture, religion, tradition, country, wealth, color of skin, place of birth, morals, society, peer pressure, expectations, desires, wants, needs, dogma, ideology, isms, etc. etc. etc.). Not to judge ourselves about them, but to try to understand them, not to avoid them or hide from them, just to bring them to the light and look them over so to speak.

The latter, meditation, is different (I get the impression) from the mainstream understanding of what meditation is or what it is for. I cannot profess to completely understand what he means when he says or talks about meditation, but most of all he tells us that if meditation is about taking control over the chattiness of the brain, or any other form of attempting to control, then that is not meditation and that is not helpful.

It is hard to relate here how dense his thinking is; dense in the sense that when I start to underline the hard-hitting ideas and sentences (as I am wont to do), I end up underlining almost the entire book. An example can get this point across and especially share with you the wonder that is Krishnamurti - the powerhouse spiritual thinker:

To stand alone is to be uncorrupted, innocent, free of all tradition, dogma, of opinion, of what another says, and so on. Such a mind does not seek because there is nothing to seek; being free, such a mind is completely still without a want, without movement. But this state is not to be achieved; it isn't a thing that you buy through discipline; it doesn't come into being by giving up sex, or practicing a certain yoga. It comes into being only when there is understanding of the ways of the self, the 'me', which shows itself through the conscious mind in everyday activity, and also in the unconscious. What matters is to understand for oneself, not through the direction of others, the total content of consciousness, which is conditioned, which is the result of society, of religion, of various impacts, impressions, memories--to understand all that conditioning and be free of it. But there is no "how" to be free. If you ask how to be free, you are not listening.

When you read Krishnamurti you also realize, because he tells you, that the whole notion of 'spiritual progress'--so dear to East and West--is not where it's at. By seeking with an objective in mind we are not truly seeking, we are simply continuing our conditioning... He also helped me to understand the difference between aloneness (something very positive as he explains it--reread the above quote for his understanding of the concept) and loneliness...

Another quote linked to the first one, and to show you how with Krishnamurti you feel like he sees us in all our ugly and petty habits, names them, brings them to the light and challenges us to do something about, i.e. understand them, here is another short passage on listening:

Do you really listen, or are you interpreting what is being said in terms of your own understanding? Are you capable of listening to anybody? Or is it that in the process of listening, various thoughts, opinions, arise so that your own knowledge and experience intervene between what is being said and your comprehension of it?

Using this (his) strict definition, I don't think anyone could 'throw the first stone'...

He also has a wonderful passage on the explanation between concentration (which is narrow and excludes) and attention (which is open and includes); the latter which he defines as complete awareness without interpretation. Which I guess is true listening.

And I will finish this post, although I will continue to read and review the book for another post in the near future, on his take on meditation that I alluded to at the outset of this post. As usual, beautiful, right on and so difficult to apply:

Self-knowledge is the beginning of wisdom. Self-knowledge is not according to some psychologist, book, or philosopher but it is to know oneself as one is from moment to moment. Do you understand? To know oneself is to observe what one thinks, how one feels, not just superficially, but to be deeply aware of what is without condemnation, without judgment, without evaluation or comparison. Try it and you will see how extraordinarily difficult it is for a mind that has been trained for centuries to compare, to condemn, to judge, to evaluate, to stop that whole process and simply to observe what is; but unless this takes place, not only at the superficial level, but right through the whole content of consciousness, there can be no delving into the profundity of the mind. Please, if you are really here to understand what is being said, it is this that we are concerned with and nothing else. Our problem is not what societies you should belong to, what kind of activities you should indulge in, what books you should read, and all that superficial business, but how to free the mind from conditioning...

To be continued...