Total Freedom: The Essential Krishnamurti

K challenges every bit of our thinking about the truth. After quite a while, I realised why he does not provide answers but just swirls our heads around with questions. He keeps telling us what one is NOT instead of what one IS. He is trying to help us know the "unknowable". He is trying to help us conceive the "inconceivable". He is trying to make us understand why any attempt at organizing the truth only produces an effect to the contrary. How would one explain that in words? I could never do that. But K does that brilliantly. It just takes some effort on the reader's part to follow his words and give them their due moment.

This was my first of a few Krishnamurti books... and I cherish it. What one gains from the book depends on where the reader is on the path of understanding. My experience with this book has proven that the book (it's effect on me) evolves as I evolve. I can only guess what his words will bring me when I read it 10 years from now.


this collection includes YOU ARE THE WORLD....   June 4, 2000
Craig Chalquist, PhD, author of TERRAPSYCHOLOGY and DEEP CALIFORNIA (Bay Area, CA USA)
20 out of 24 found this review helpful

...and would be worthwhile for that alone, but there's lots of good stuff here. I've found there are (in general) three mistakes to avoid when reading K: 1. expecting him to provide all the answers rather than taking him at his word and seeking them within; 2. trying to "get" him through a purely intellectual approach ("You want to live in a world of concepts, Sir?" he once asked a heckler; "Then live there"); and 3. rating the book poorly at amazon.com because you haven't exercized the awareness required to master the ordering instructions....


The austere beauty of Truth   May 13, 2005
NorthernLights (Beijing, China)
17 out of 25 found this review helpful

Krishnamurti...

Who reads him nowadays? Who ever listened to him when he was still with us? At the end of his life, people were deriding him because apparently nobody, not a single child in all the schools he had founded in Europe, America and India, had awakened. Apparently, it was all a failure and today Brockwood Park, the school he helped set up in England, is begging money because hardly anybody sends gifts or remembers K's noble educational cause in his will.

This message is truly an austere and challenging message of no hope, of no tomorrow of guaranteed liberation. There is no comforting Krishnamurtite doctrine to hold onto. This the mind must irrevocably hate if it is flippant, looking for pleasure or security.

I first read Krishnaji when I was still a staunch traditionalist Catholic. I think the title of the unassuming little volume was "Letters to Students". Although it was couched in very simple terms and contained no slick neo-advaita paradoxes about nonpeople having ever bought any shoes, I didn't understand a word of what was said and thought the man must be some sort of crazy radical. The only idea that stuck with me was the saying "a truly humble man doesn't know he is humble". That sounds awfully trite, but it isn't. It is so true.

We never know it. We can never say: "This is it!"

Krishnamurti truly has nothing to offer you. Most of what he says are questions, invitations to enquire. But he also knows how to write delightful prose, describing nature and people with a love that is both quiet and poignant. In his essays, which make up about half of this superb collection of Krishnamurti's works, one is first invited to wonder at the fragile beauty of the world and to rest for a timeless moment in the innocence of trees, rivers, mountains and a clear starry night sky, before being taken to the enquiry and the clarity of its burning flame.

Who can enquire at all?, some clever neo-advaitists will perhaps ask derisively. You. You can look at your life and see all the deception and mischief wrought by the predatory "me", the "self". Although it is true that K. speaks of going beyond the self, there is not so much as a hint in all of K's works that people are walking nobodies devoid of volition. Buddha, who preached anatta, non-ego, also enjoined people to act. Krishnamurti assumed as a given truth that we could truly do something about ourselves and therefore about the terrible state of the world. But the doing was first and foremost a seeing. One is invited to see, and to keep seeing.

Seeing what? One's desperate and ugly face, one's mean ego and its for ever reborn attempts at escaping reality. To see it in the chaos and violence in the world outside and also within, for "the world is you and you are the world". This coming face to face with oneself happened through the teachings, which he liked to compare to a mirror.

It is important to see in the context of rampant teachings about Consciousness Already Realized and Being Perfect Right Now that the image K showed his hearers wasn't a hypothetical and dogmatically asserted feel-good "perfect oneness", but "what is" in all its disturbing crudeness. Therefore it is no wonder that the Ultimate Mystery, when he talked about it, which he did rarely, was expressed by the word "Otherness". How could "otherness" be "already the case"?

For that to arise, the reality of evil had to be faced. But it was to be faced without judgment, in choiceless or passive awareness. Then and only then, would the transformation occur as the observer would realize his fundamental identity with the observed. It is certainly one of the great and painful paradoxes of this teaching that it vehemently denounces evil within and without, but at the same time shows that colllective and individual holy wars against it will inevitably not only fail, but aggravate the situation. Yoga, rituals, breathing techniques and the rest of the religious arsenal of self-improvement are dismissed as so many routines of the ego. There only remains a passionate inquiry, which is wisdom in search of itself.

Asked by a swami how he would sum up his whole message, he reluctantly said: "Look". It is important to see, specially in our sense and eye-obsessed culture, that he didn't say, "See this", "this" referring to the outside world. K. is not inviting you to lose yourself in the object. Rather he is inviting you to observe, relentlessly but affectionately, the movement of thought, which is the ego. When its utter destructiveness is recognized WITHOUT any judgment or preconception, something else arises, which K. always refused to theorize about.

The difference between "Look" and "See this", which is the slogan of neo-advaita, is a crucial one, one that distinguishes a teaching about immanence and transcendence and the creative and challenging tension between the two, and one that confuses the Absolute with sensual experience and thereby dissolves all creative tension in the mere frictionless movement of the "already" known.

There can be no rest and its corollary, dogmatism, in this. Krishnaji often summed up our existential condition by conjuring the striking metaphor of someone living in a small room with a deadly cobra. As he often said, "It is only the serious man who lives". One is invited to realize the danger and seriousness of living in the world. And even when the transformation has occurred, it isn't the case that one simply self-contentedly celebrates, but there is a constant "learning", a deepening without end and without accumulation because Life is never known completely, because Life is for ever new. To use a word that is greatly appreciated in some quarters, there is for ever more "oneness" because the content of "oneness" is inexhaustible.

Therefore learn, o eternal beginner!



Krishnamurti does not answer.   August 28, 2002
Inmind (Melbourne, Victoria Australia)
14 out of 15 found this review helpful

Reading krishnamurti's work, one gets the impression that he does not answer any questions directly.
Instead, he draws you out into the open and ask you to look within yourself, ask you to "see" the situation clearly and keep guiding you back to the situation by asking/guiding you with probing questions.

Krishnamurti does not answer your life's problem for you. There is no authority, no rules and no laws. He simply shows you the way to see into your own nature, just simple observation. Can you observe without a centre ? without ego/thoughts ? No one can explain his words more clearly then himself. I felt very fortunate to be able to experience his insights straight from the source.