Topic: Total Freedom by Krishnamurti

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One of my favorites. Read it at least three times. But it has been some years. It can be different reading books when older, per experiences and perceptions as they can change. Tho course, the observer never does. I'll share some quotes by him on here. I got the highlighter out for this one, sure:

"Your first concern is to become conscious of the prison; then you will see your own thought is continually trying to avoid coming into conflict with the values of the prison. This escape creates ideals which, however beautiful, are but illusions. It is one of the tricks of the mind to escape into an ideal, because it does not escape, it must come directly into conflict wth the prison, with the environment. That is, the mind wants to escape into an illusion rather than face the suffering which will inevitably arise when it begins to question the values, the morality, the religion of the prison.

So what matters is to come into conflict with the realizations and values of the society and religion in which you are caught, and not intellectually escape through an ideal. When you begin to question those values, you begin to awaken that true intelligence which alone can solve many human problems.

As long as the mind is caught up in false values, there cannot be fulfillment. Completeness alone will reveal truth, the movement of eternal life."

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“Truth liberates. Not your effort to be free.”

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There is a ton I can share I am highlighting but I just came across this. He wrote this part in March of 1983 (right before 1984):

"The twentieth century has had a tremendous lot of changes produced by two devastating wars, and the dialectal materialism, and the skepticism of religious beliefs, activities and rituals, and so on, apart from the technological world, which has brought about a great many changes, and there will be further changes when the computer is fully developed - you are just at the beginning of it. Then when the computer takes over, what is going to happen to our human minds? That is a different question, which we should go into at another time."

Man, I wonder if he were alive what he would think of all of this! Now I know how he was. He was not too keen on just filling the brain with knowledge and facts. He would speak on that. He was definitely one who was about doing away with nationalism and breaking free from the conditioning of family and society. But with the manipulation used by the internet, and then the AI and folks want it to think for us, and also they want to merge with it, which they feel is the only way to stay on top of it, and they even want to use it to achieve some kind of immortality? Oh he would come undone. He must have seen it coming to say this. He didn't say if the computer takes over, he said WHEN and asked the question, what happens to our human minds?

Notice he said human before mind. Yes, that is the point. To be human. We came into this life to be human and experience the fullness of it. Not become some flowering soulless machine for gods sake! I don't know if it can be stopped, this whole transhumanism deal. But I do not see all of society will accept it.

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Came across this last night: