J. Krishnamurti

the limits of the thinking mind

In this episode, I'll talk a little about J. Krishnamurti – not to be confused with UG Krishnamurti, another spiritual teacher.

J. Krishnamurti was teaching in the 20th century, and his teachings had a huge impact on me. I only read his works, he had died before I had heard of him, but I read almost everything he wrote, avidly.

Krishnamurti was a profound thinker, a deep thinker. More than that, though, there was something unique about his style of thinking. Perhaps partly because he was born in India, I don't know, but his thought, his pattern of thought, his train of thought had a different feel to anything else I had come across.

And for a long time, I struggled to understand Krishnamurti, to really comprehend what he was saying. I could sense he was trying to get at something very deep, something difficult to put into words, something difficult for the mind to grasp.

And it was through reading Krishnamurti that I began to really appreciate the profound difficulty of trying to understand the mind with the mind itself. It's fraught with challenges. Rather than just saying it's not possible, though, there was something in Krishnamurti's approach that encouraged me to keep going deeper and deeper into my own psychology, even though I only had my own mind to work with. It was the only instrument available to make that inquiry.

Krishnamurti taught for many years, so there was an enormous amount of material to study there. But really for me, the key teaching that came through to me, from all of Krishnamurti's work, was what happens to one when one has really probed into the depths of one's psychology. And not just the individual psychology, the mass psychology, too; into the conditions of society, everything to do with being human. There comes a point when the mind snookers itself.

It gets to the point where it suddenly has to stop. There's a sort of shock moment when the mind truly, profoundly realises its own limitation. And the amazing thing with that moment of stop is that it is not a terrible negative moment. Quite the opposite, in that full seeing of one's own limitation, especially the psychological limitation, when we really acknowledge that fully, a miracle happens.

And that's only possible if we really go into our own psychology, in the way that Krishnamurti encouraged me to do. And I say psychology, of course psychology affects our actions, our behaviour, our whole life. So really it's a study of one's own life: the way one thinks, the way one feels, the way one acts; one's relationship to society at large; the nature of society that we collectively have created – all of these things are part of the inquiry.

And through Krishnamurti I saw that the purpose of the inquiry is not so much to arrive at a solution. The thinking mind doesn't come up with an answer. All it can do is see its own fundamental limitations, and of course, the big mess that we have made.

And seeing all this, something else can come into being. Something deeper within us can come through and flower. And this mystical, magical aspect of our spiritual growth was something that I only began to taste through studying Krishnamurti. Probably more than any other great master, I am deeply indebted to Krishnamurti.