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:

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So I finished Total Freedom tonight. Now I read it years ago, and also I would refer back to it quite often. I do not remember what happened to my original copy, but I replaced it. But it is so different reading it years later, and then in the climate we are in.

Now the whole book really is about the foreign installation. Krishnamurti was very keen to the problems of the whole thing. I was reading, and highlighting along the way, and as I was reading about his views on violence, and the need for individuals to change their inner world, and to see they are the world. That is true. I was thinking "are we evolving, or is it the same, or worse?" I think I was kind of being like him, trying to figure out the whole wash, rinse, repeat of mankind and how it is torturing its own self.

I have met folks who are either evolving, or trying to. But then I have to yield back. That segment that finds me, is a smaller segment, and I know it. Many folks are totally ignorant, and programmed, and blame outside forces, for their own inner misery. They do not look inward to deal with their various traumas. They look outward for someone, anyone, to blame, but themselves. Now, clearly Krishnamurti was a non-dualist. He saw that the observer, and observed, are one. But say like here in the west, until folks flip the switch and see that perspective, and stop looking outward for an outside agency to be "the answer" we are in trouble.

I don't know exactly how the transformation can take place, when for a few thousand years or so it has been this way. It may be so like Jesus said, the gate is narrow, and few find it. But the gate is visible. It always has been. But I am not sure. When I look at the mess we are in, even today, the cycle that keeps repeating. The selfishness of the ego has always been the problem. But folks will cling pretty hard to it. I think we can only save ourselves at this point.