forget all you know

Forget all you know about yourself, forget all that you have ever thought about yourself; we are going to start as if we knew nothing.

This quote from Krishnamurti follows on rather nicely from the last episode. He's still talking about self inquiry. Who am I? 

How does my mind work? What's going on inside myself? This sort of inquiry within oneself is a huge part of the spiritual path. It's really the work we have to do, if we are to allow our spiritual side to flourish.

But Krishnamurti here is saying, we're not going to even follow the normal way we analyse things, the normal approach. Usually, we have a bank of knowledge built up through study and through a lifetime of experience. We have all this background knowledge to call upon. And from that foundation, we try to take another little step in understanding something. We're building on our pre-existing knowledge. This is the normal way we inquire into things. And what Krishnamurti is suggesting here is, let's try something different. Let's try forgetting everything we think we know about ourself. Let's start with carte blanche, a blank slate. Let's drop all our knowledge. And from that space of not knowing anything, let's look at ourself.

It's a radical suggestion. And why would we want to do this? There are a few reasons. One is, of course, perhaps our knowledge is wrong. And of course, if we try and build on some incorrect knowledge, we're just going to end up with even more incorrect knowledge. Whatever new understanding comes will be wrong.

How might our existing knowledge be wrong? Well, of course, we might have made some false deductions in the first place. So we may have come up with an incorrect deduction in the past. But there are a couple of other ways that it's more likely to be wrong. One is: it's simply out of date. For example, when we're a small child, we're totally dependent on some adults, to feed us and to protect us, to look after us. And if we realise that as a small child, all well and good. But if we then keep that knowledge into adulthood, perhaps slowly modifying it step by step into something that looks a little bit different, then we might, for example, end up with a deep sense of depending on authority or an intimate partner. We may just transfer that sense of dependence, that was valid as a child, into a situation where it is no longer actually needed at all. So knowledge can become out of date.

And there's another common problem with our existing knowledge: most of it is secondhand. There's an awful lot of it that we haven't really discovered for ourself. It's been passed to us – by our parents, by our teachers, by society. We are all heavily conditioned. And some of that knowledge might be useful, some of that conditioning might be useful. There's an awful lot of it, though, that is not serving us at all. And until we question it, we're going to be living our life based on knowledge and rules that don't actually apply to us. So this is another common way in which our pre-existing knowledge is basically incorrect.

And there are many other subtleties in our knowledge mechanisms that can also lead us astray. We have a big tendency to reinforce our prejudices. So once we believe something, we see evidence for it, even though that evidence doesn't really exist. Nowadays on social media, we tend to gravitate towards our echo chambers: people who have the same sort of preconceptions and biases as ourself. And because a few other people are saying the same things, we believe those things even more, even though that echo chamber might only consist of a rather extreme tiny subset of the population.

So knowledge is fraught with difficulty. And this is one reason why Krishnamurti invites us just to forget everything we know about ourself. We're going to start as if we knew nothing. And this is another beautiful aspect of Krishnamurti's teachings. He's always inviting us to take a journey of exploration with him. He doesn't just tell us what the endpoint is. He doesn't just give us an answer. It's an invitation to explore. And he's really giving us hints as to how to go about our own exploration.

And this is really one of the key things in Krishnamurti's method: drop your pre-existing knowledge, start as if you knew nothing. It's very liberating in itself, if we can do this, because that knowledge that we've been living from is always rather stale, and it constrains us. It's really the material from which we've built our own gilded cage, our own prison. So if we can drop our own knowledge, start from a position of not knowing, then we already feel a lot lighter and freer.

And from this position of not knowing, of course, we've got some chance of seeing the truth, the truth as things are now, today, instead of just being coloured by what's gone before – yesterday, a year ago, ten, twenty, thirty years ago. Instead of being bogged down with all that mountain of past, we can start afresh, start with a clean sheet, not knowing, not knowing who we are, and start exploring from this place.

It forces us to be much more attentive, not just when inquiring into ourself – actually if we can meet every moment in the outside as well as the inside, if we can meet every moment with this attitude of not knowing. it forces us to really see the truth, the truth of the moment, in an uncoloured, unfiltered way. It makes us much more present. It makes us much more honest. And the amazing thing is we get so much more out of life when we are present in this way.

When we are just living from our knowledge, we are really just repeating yesterday, over and over again. Not just with this inner inquiry, and this express exploration of who I am, but also in the way we live our daily life, the way we interact with other people and the rest of the world – if we meet it from our knowledge, we are being stale ourself, and we're just repeating something rather mindlessly.

So start as if we know nothing. This is really a key hint from Krishnamurti, both in how we go about our inner inquiry, but also, we can use the same technique to approach every new day and every new moment. With it, there's a tremendous freshness and aliveness, a vitality. So I give thanks to Krishnamurti and echo this invitation of his. We're going to start as if we knew nothing.