Mary Lutyens on the core of Jiddu Krishnamurti’s teachings

"Mirror Reflection of Woman Outdoors" by Jessica Harp (June 17, 2009).
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The core of Krishnamurti’s teaching is contained in the statement he made in 1929 when he said “Truth is a pathless land.” Man cannot come to it through any organisation, through any creed, through any dogma, priest, or ritual, not through any philosophic knowledge or psychological technique. He has to find it through the mirror of relationship, through the understanding of the contents of his own mind, through observation, and not through intellectual analysis or introspective dissection. Man has built in himself images as a fence of security—religious, political, personal. These manifest as symbols, ideas, beliefs. The burden of these dominates man’s thinking, relationships, and daily life. These are the causes of our problems, for they divide man from man in every relationship. His perception of life is shaped by the concepts already established in his mind. The content of his consciousness is this consciousness. This content is common to all humanity. The individuality is the name, the form, and superficial culture he acquires from his environment. The uniqueness of the individual does not lie in the superficial but in the total freedom from the content of consciousness.

Freedom is not a reaction; freedom is not a choice. It is man’s pretence that because he has choice he is free. Freedom is pure observation without direction, without fear of punishment and reward. Freedom is without motive; freedom is not at the end of the evolution of man but lies in the first step of his existence. In observation one begins to discover the lack of freedom. Freedom is found in the choiceless awareness of our daily existence.

Thought is time. Thought is born of experience, of knowledge, which are inseparable from time. Time is the psychological enemy of man. Our action is based on knowledge and, therefore, time, so man is always a slave to the past.

When man becomes aware of the movement of his own consciousness he will see the division between thinker and the thought, the observer and the observed, the experiencer and the experience. He will discover that this division is an illusion. Then only is there pure observation, which is insight without any shadow of the past. This timeless insight brings about a deep radical change in the mind.
— Mary Lutyens‘ “The Core of Krishnamurti’s Teaching”, edited by Jiddu Krishnamurti, (1974-1975). Available in Mary Lutyens’ The Life and Death of Krishnamurti, (Bramdean: Krishnamurti Foundation Trust Ltd., 2003), p. 149-50. First published (London: John Murray, 1990). Also available in Total Freedom: The Essential Krishnamurti, (San Francisco, California: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996), p. 257.