Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986) was found as a boy on a beach at Adyar by the
Theosophical Society, which raised him to be the vehicle of a coming World Teacher and
built an international organisation, the Order of the Star in the East, around him. In
1929, in front of three thousand members at Ommen in the Netherlands, he dissolved it.
The speech contains the line that defines everything he said afterwards: truth is a
pathless land, and it cannot be approached by any path, any religion, any sect.
He then spent fifty-seven years travelling and speaking, refusing to accept disciples,
authority or the role of guru. Most of his published work is transcribed talks and
dialogues rather than written books.
“The highest form of human intelligence is to observe yourself without judgment.”
— Jiddu Krishnamurti
“Truth is a pathless land.”
— Jiddu Krishnamurti
“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
— Jiddu Krishnamurti
“The moment you follow someone you cease to follow Truth.”
— Jiddu Krishnamurti
“Do you want to know what my secret is? I don’t mind what happens.”
— Jiddu Krishnamurti
“In obedience there is always fear, and fear darkens the mind.”
— Jiddu Krishnamurti
“The description is not the described; I can describe the mountain, but the description is not the mountain, and if you are caught up in the description, as most people are, then you will never see the mountain.”
— Jiddu Krishnamurti
“A man who is not afraid is not aggressive, a man who has no sense of fear of any kind is really a free, a peaceful man.”
— Jiddu Krishnamurti
“When we talk about understanding, surely it takes place only when the mind listens completely — the mind being your heart, your nerves, your ears — when you give your whole attention to it.”
— Jiddu Krishnamurti
“If you begin to understand what you are without trying to change it, then what you are undergoes a transformation.”
— Jiddu Krishnamurti
“We are always comparing what we are with what we should be.”
— Jiddu Krishnamurti
“Meditation is not a means to an end. It is both the means and the end.”
— Jiddu Krishnamurti
“The observer is the observed.”
— Jiddu Krishnamurti
“Happiness is not a thing to be pursued; it comes. But if you seek it, you will not find it.”
— Jiddu Krishnamurti
“Space and silence are two aspects of the same thing. The same as internal space and internal silence.”
— Jiddu Krishnamurti
Every other teacher on this site offers a practice. Krishnamurti’s position was that
any method — including meditation techniques, including his own words — becomes an
authority, and that authority is precisely what prevents seeing. This is a coherent
position and an uncomfortable one: it means his quotes cannot be turned into a programme
without contradicting them.
It also makes him unusually hard to quote well. A line like “it is no measure of
health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society” — frequently attributed to him,
though never located in his published talks — becomes a slogan, and slogans are exactly
what he spent his life dismantling.
His nearest thing to an instruction, and it is deliberately not a technique. Observe
what is happening in you — fear, ambition, the wish to become something — without the
observer trying to change it, condemn it or justify it. His claim is that the effort to
change is itself the problem, because the entity doing the changing is made of the same
material as the thing being changed.
The most substantial record of his thinking is not the public talks but the recorded
conversations with the theoretical physicist David Bohm, held over many years and
published as The Ending of Time and The Limits of Thought. Bohm pushes
where audiences did not, and Krishnamurti is at his least oracular and most precise.
Freedom from the Known is the standard entry point and is short. The
Krishnamurti’s Notebook is the strangest and most personal. The Krishnamurti
Foundation publishes the full talks free online, and reading a complete dialogue rather
than an extract is the only way to see what he was actually doing — he almost never
answers a question, he examines why it was asked.
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