Many years ago I found myself in the company of a small group of people drawn from widely different backgrounds in science, the arts, psychology, education and other walks of life. We had all been invited to participate in a seminar with J Krishnamurti (1895-1986) spending ten days together for dialogue, impromptu conversation and quiet walks in the countryside.
Krishnamurti’s cogent inquiry into the limitations of thought and the divided self had given his work a global significance. Its impact had been comparable to what Einstein’s had been on the world of physics. Extraordinary insight in each case had opened up new and deeper levels of inquiry. For his own part, Krishnamurti spoke of insight which sprang from an order of mind untouched by thought.
To understand the place of knowledge in a wider view of human potential one had to look beyond science as it is generally understood today.
However life had shaped us we had all reached a point in our lives where the realities of psychological conditioning were plain to see. The possibility of a mind free of conditioning had led many of us to the threshold of a fertile mystery in consciousness itself. To penetrate the troubled narrative of self, time and causality that dominated our lives, inquiry had to move to another level.
You may have heard the story of the woman about to give birth who was asked if she really wanted to go ahead with it ! Suffice it to say, our meetings with Krishnamurti left us in no doubt about the challenge that lay before us. What took place in the dialogues that followed was no intellectual exercise or practice aimed at self improvement. Indeed, when there is no such motivation and the brain is quiet enough to simply observe, something happens which is no longer predicated by thought. The meetings were intense and while some of the participants were more vocal, each day I was quietly resolved to follow the whole movement of inquiry and see where it would take us.
Observing the habitual distraction taking place in the thought process liberates energy caught up in psychological complexity. This may suggest a gradual change that occurs in time but as one can discover, wholehearted attention is not of time. When time, effort and a sense of oneself is the measure it proves worthless. Thought may play with the possibility of going beyond the perceptual boundaries that determine our sense of self, time and causality.
To move beyond the concept, word or image implies a whole new order of perception and different way of living.
Anthony P Berriman