LOVE

“Universal Love” and truth have a permanence and transcendence.  “Truth” is not the opposite of “falsehood” any more than “love” is the opposite of “hate.”  Duality cannot exist one without the other.  Good necessitates evil.  The truth is neither “good” nor “evil.”  It is motionless, unchanging, and unyielding.  It will destroy those who throw themselves against it as surely as it will support those who lean against it.

Pg 43: “Beauty is this love, in which measurement has come to an end.”

Love has no qualities.  It is boundless.

Pg 147: “The feeling of thought and the feeling of love are two different things.”

Pg 147: “Love is anonymous.”

The crux of Krishnamurti’s implied conclusions is:

True sight/awareness transcends gnostic/temporal thought.

Presence in the “now”/transcendence of time is freedom.

A recognition of duality/separation necessitates either balance or transcendence through unconditional love without attachments.

MEDITATION

Meditation is “difficult” in that it requires the discipline of constant awareness, outward and inward.  It’s a change of frequency/awareness in and of itself.  The goal of meditation is full awareness.

Krishnamurti suggests a Taoist fluidity and lack of resistance; as well as an individuality, and an independence from oppression (of authority, of the lower desires, of time).  Meditation is a stream you walk into and allow the current to take you.

Meditation is not so much a detachment from the world.  It’s more a detachment from the ego/identity.  Meditation is stripping away all the objects we grasp onto: “my” body, “my” ego, “my” mind, et cetera.  It is actually a unity with the world.  It comes naturally when you open yourself to “Universal Love” (the transcendence of the separation of “self” and “non-self”).  It is total sleep for the sleepless “self”.  Total healing for the wounds we accumulate in memory.  It is a release from beliefs, an autonomous freedom from opinion, complete agnosticism.

Pg 110: “Freeing the mind from the constant pressure of experience is meditation.”

In meditation we totally empty our “vessel”.  It is akin to the Zen Buddhist practice of zazen.

Pg 131: “Why shouldn’t the mind be empty?  Only when it is empty can it see clearly.”

It is rebirth.

Pg 157: “One has to die to death; only then is innocence born, only then does the timeless new come into being.”

Death, perhaps, can be viewed as a kind of meditation between incarnations.

The meditative mind has a spaciousness in which there is no center.  It is infinite.

AGNOSTICISM

As such, in order for a belief system to evolve towards truth, it should remain in constant flux.  Thought works by parsing the observer from the observed.  It reinforces dualities and necessitates the acceptance of assumptions as the basis for a belief system (which is fine, as long as we do not confuse “basic assumptions” with “truth”).

FREEDOM

Thought creates time.  The “now” is freedom.  Freedom is not relative.  It is infinite.

Freedom is seeing, awareness.

We are influenced by our memories, and our environment.  We are freed when we release them.

As such, we cannot contemplate permanent truth with thought.  An infinite God cannot be contemplated with a finite mind.  Permanent truth is an unattainable goal.  Thought is a method of approaching it, but never reaching it.  The goal is unattainable, but the trajectory is what’s important.  For this reason, agnosticism and flexibility are important.  Without them, thought stops striving towards permanent truth.  If our belief systems are not kept fluid by agnosticism, then we are no longer free.

We must accept discomfort if we want freedom.  We are free, not through thought, but through our understanding of the nature of thought.  Thought implies a temporal path.  Awareness implies the understanding of the nature of thought.

Pg. 49: “There is no path to truth.”

Once we become aware of the limitations of thought, we can progress to meditation.

THOUGHT

There are two ways of building a belief system.  One is by allowing our prejudices and biases to inform our subjective reality.  Another is by allowing our unbiased experiences to inform our beliefs.

If we allow ideas formed in a vacuum (in absence of a reception to all our experiences) we are prioritizing the comfort of knowing over the unpredictable nature of experience.  By filtering our experiences, we cannot find truth.  Raw experiences are more self-evident than thought.  When we are clear and unbiased, we are able to accept all experiences, good and bad, and can glimpse truth.

We are all free to create our own subjective reality.

Pg. 85: “The seeker finds what he wants.”

This is a powerful tool.  But we can use it to seek out the truth or we can use it to completely delude ourselves.  In order for us to use this tool, we must discard comfort and accept truth in whatever form in which it exists.

Thought is temporal and ever-changing.  It’s based in time and memory (which is a recorded series of experiences) and is limited.  How can we seek permanent truth with such a thing?  Our subjective reality (belief system) is always in flux.  To contemplate God, the mind must be measureless and unrestricted.

EVOLUTION FROM THOUGHT TO MEDITATION

We can summarize Krishnamurti’s ideas by categorizing the influences he cites as being restrictive to the “true self”.  He cites the environment and convention as being oppressive to the psyche.  Any prejudices or biases accepted into our belief systems cause a calcification of those beliefs that prevents us from evolving.  And our slothful pursuit of comforts allows our belief systems to become inflexible and “small”, fostering separateness and ignoring the possibility for universal unity.  In general, the attitude that allows us to overcome these influences is agnosticism.

Pg 120: “All commitment is self-destruction.”

COMFORTS

We seek comfort not only in the form of security, but also in the form of knowledge.  We feel stronger when we believe that we have knowledge.  This need will attract us to those who offer guidance, but we should do so with skepticism.  Krishnamurti maintains that we should not give total reverence to “masters.”  We tend to conform to fads.  We rejected the Church and religion only to be intellectually enslaved by science.  We should reject all idols, even though they make us feel comfortable and secure.  In some cases, especially because they make us feel comfortable and secure. Illusion is comfort.  The certainty of knowledge is an illusion, a fragile one that can break and leave us in shock.

Pg 12 “Any acceptance of authority is the very denial of truth.”

Sloth is comfort.  Pride is comfort.  Truth and freedom come with discomfort.

Pg 113: “Freedom is not within the prison, however comfortable or decorated it may be.”

The removal of comfort causes “empty” pain, as opposed to the “healthy” pain of intellectual humility, freedom, training, and the search for truth.  To avoid “empty” pain we need agnosticism and the search for truth.  In actuality, “healthy” pain is not really “pain”, but a kind of truth which transcends the duality of pleasure/pain.

Pg 52: “If happiness is pleasure, then it is also pain.”

COUNTERFEIT CONNECTIONS

We naturally seek a “connection” with others.  This need may be used to force our acceptance of convention.  The sacrifice of our personal beliefs should never be required for our acceptance into a community.  If people only accept us when we share their beliefs, then no true “connection” is made.  Conformity and customs are self-enclosing.  If we allow a group to absorb us, all we do is become a part of conflicts with other groups.  We must seek “connection” with all human beings, and with nature.

Love is not compatible with “self”-centrism.  It is not meant to be applied to some entities and not others.  It cannot be “thought” because then it is symbolic love only, counterfeit, part of subjective reality.  Krishnamurti said: “Love is not to be broken up into fragments.”

It is egalitarian and unifying.  Not just between human beings, but in general, between “self” and “non-self”.

SOCIETY AND ENVIRONMENT

Our physical bodies are hard-wired with tendencies.  Our environment creates us to some extent, especially during the time of our lives when we are too immature to transcend our environment.  Christopher Hitchens noted the fallacy behind the popular Nietzschean mantra: “That which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.”  In fact, our experiences can cripple us in many ways, by making us fearful or close-minded.  Cuts leave scars, and scars are less flexible than flesh.  If our experiences cause our belief systems to calcify, then we are not stronger as a result; we are psychologically wounded.  Without awareness, the environment consumes the “self”.  If the “self” is aware, it will transcend the environment.  Society will pressure us to conform.  We can defend ourselves from this influence with skepticism.

Pg 60: “If you deny fear, belief is unnecessary, but if you cling to belief and dogma, then fear has its way.”

In any society, there tends to be a separation between an elite caste (“chosen”) and the masses (“preterite”).  The elite will seek to weaken the masses by dividing them.  Those who seek power will always try to propagate their beliefs to satisfy their egos.  The masses will seek to overthrow the elite.  Society has roles which each of us fills.  These roles become part of our identities.  Beneath our identities, we all share our many human similarities.

Society does not have to be antagonistic; it only becomes so when it is used by those in power for “self”-centric purposes.  Society’s legal and economic systems, if kept basic and libertarian, provide for the general welfare.  A society requires the enforcement of clearly codified regulations, but its reach should be kept at a minimum.  Customs are useful when they normalize relations between people, but should not be stifling.

DUALITY

Our dual nature and our existential human limitations will sometimes cause us to confuse actual truths with falsehoods that have similarities to truths.

We all have a deeply rooted need to overcome our existential separateness and make a “connection” with others.  Initially, we do this through conquest (sexual or material).  But we eventually discover this path to be misguided.  Still, it is not wrong to pursue it in life.  Without pursuing it ourselves, we never truly come to know that it is an illusion that reinforces separation and leads to attachment/suffering, not an actual means of connecting with others.

Pg 147: “The freedom of the senses is not the indulgence of them.”

The point is not to fight the body’s impulses, but to become aware of our true needs and change the source of our impulses.  There is beauty in the human body and the material world.  We should appreciate this beauty.  If the mind inhabits its proper place (or, rather, if “atman” inhabits the proper place within the mind) and if we are aware of the way the mind functions and the way it interacts with the “atman”, false desires are put into perspective and weakened.  False comforts are not sought, and the pain caused from losing such comforts is diminished.  If “atman” frees itself of ego/identity, if one loosens the belief system, the sense of separation (nihilism) is weakened.

We harmonize our dualities with balance.  Resistance (of one side of a duality) requires more energy than we lose by submitting to it.  Krishnamurti’s advice always calls attention to people’s forgetfulness of the “other facet” of some duality that they de-emphasize.  Whenever people try to make a change in their lives, they always seem to tilt a duality into imbalance to achieve it.  We are constantly falling into imbalance through striving.  Any “newness” typically causes us to de-emphasize the “old” and become unbalanced.

EGO

The separation of our “self” or “ego” from “non-self” or externality is derived from sensory perception.  Our bodies perceive externality, and we distinguish between the source of the stimuli and the perceiver of the stimuli.  We also separate ourselves from each other because we have our own experiences, and we presume others to have their own experiences which may be similar in nature, but separate, from ours.

Nihilism is the result of separation.  Both passive nihilism (the belief that our physical/material existence is unimportant) and active nihilism (the belief that life has no purpose or meaning) is “self”-centric and reinforces our sense of separation.

Krishnamurti makes a pointed criticism of passive nihilism:

Pg 44: “Without laying the foundation of a righteous life, meditation becomes an escape and therefore has no value whatsoever.”

The principle of separation is in direct opposition to “Universal Love” (which is the realization that separation is an illusion).

Pg 119: “Separation is suicide.”

We have the choice of serving the “self” (selfishly), or serving the “atman”/”true self” (selflessly).  Almost every activity we perform, possibly, is “self”-centric in a way.  To overcome this, we have to be a conduit; we have to surrender the ego and serve the “true self”.

The need for security is a necessary facet of our material existence.  Taken to extremes, it can create suffering.  If we overemphasize security, it’s because we’re driven by fear.  And we’ll reinforce separation and a preoccupation with ontological materialism.  Basic needs should be satisfied as required without fear or overindulgence.