These and other studies into the neurophysiology of emotion, such as the body’s evolved auto-response to fear, have important ramifications for some aspects of Krishnamurti’s teachings. In terms of conflict resolution strategies, learning based on a cognitive approach (such as objectively ‘observing’ one’s own behaviour) is not easy for us to adopt in contexts that include a conscious or unconscious perception of personal threat.

Modern research shows the complex nature of the different ways the body stores lived experience; how negative experience of the past affects responses in the present; that (and why) some experiences are inaccessible to one’s cognitive understanding and observation, yet have significant ramifications for ongoing behaviour; that the young of primates and rats — who presumably have no “self” — suffer similar long-term behavioural outcomes to human beings, after exposure to early deprivation and neglect.

Other research shows that there are indeed parts of yourself and your motivations that are beyond accessible awareness. A speaker at a recent conference on the psychoneurophysiology of forgetting demonstrated how psychogenic amnesia not only happens but is necessary for survival. What was described, with cogent real-life examples, is a blockage of awareness of pieces of experience that would otherwise disrupt a perso ’s ability to carry on. The pieces of blocked off experience remain dislocated and dissociated from the main memory, yet continue to drive the person’s actions and responses without their knowing.

K asks, “Are you all too conditioned?” I wonder if he appreciated that “self ” is inextricably bound into the narrative of memory as born by somatic, as well as cognitive, retention. That is to say, memories — or conditioning — are stored in the body as a whole, and some of it, at least, is beyond conscious access or control. K distinguishes the body’s “intelligent” response to danger without specifying that that “intelligence” works both ways. The body’s “intelligent” response to danger is part and parcel of evolutionary conditioning. The body has evolved complex responses to cues of perceived danger that bypass the (much later evolved) cognitive faculties. Speed is of the essence in situations that require fight or flight. However, precisely because this type of experience-based response bypasses thought, such conditioning — or “intelligence”, as K calls it — has no power to discriminate between a truly life-threatening circumstance and a false alarm, or between past and present, if the cue is the same, even if it arises outside of context (for example, the experience of returned soldiers).

K also seemed to imply that conditioning (versus “intelligence”?) is some kind of a habit you can break if you once observed without judgment your own behaviour and its negative/dangerous consequences. If that is the proposal, then the problem here is the assumption that through cognition, one has the power to affect evolved physiological survival strategies that in fact bypass the cognitive function.

All this is not to say there is no place for observation, for “reading the book of oneself”. This is clearly necessary for any insight at all into one’s behaviours and thinking habits. But I think what needs to be introduced into K thought at this point is an open-minded appraisal of the findings of modern research on the limits of self-observation — the psychological inhibitions (and prohibitions), the cognitive limitations, the neurodevelopmental limit- ations,and the evolutionary limitations. If you want K’s work to survive you have to look at where it stops short — find out why nobody “gets it”. There are real, built-in factors that limit our seeing into our own psyche that no amount of seriousness, passion, energy, intention, or the “right way of listening” will just sweep aside.

K expounded what he perceived to be the truth, but some of what K said can be understood to have been surmise. Once the legitimacy of cognitive limitation is acknowledged the question then becomes how to proceed in light of it.

Research by other people cannot be ignored or dismissed when it doesn’t gel with K ’s thinking. There are many people — scientists and researchers — equally serious about the same matters and who have never heard of K. Is it going too far to say that when you are seriously involved in K you think you need nothing else? This is a huge mistake. Dismissing the viability of others’ work buys into the feeling of being part of an exclusive elite: only K has it right and/or does it right, and others just can’t grasp this truth (but you do).

If the work of K is to be carried on then ‘followers’ need to continue the exploration where K wasn’t able to go. People need to be prepared to see if or where he was wrong. This isn’t a dismissal of K. It’s a willingness to distinguish what, in his deliverances, were facts and what was surmise concerning the brain’s neural workings and its capacity to observe — to find out what the limitations are, and find ways of enabling us as individuals to see round our own corners. Because the corners are definitely there. Observations about ‘what is’, based on what one’s own experience reveals (or conceals), is extremely hazardous terrain. K was right about this: You can’t know what you don’t know, and neither could he when it came to perceiving the limits of cognition itself.

I think it’s best to take what one can from the teachings at the ground level and then drop them. All of K’s experiences, including the World Teacher (non) persona, “the process”, his “miraculous” adaptation to his brother’s death, the absence of childhood memories, the contradictions and the “supernatural” aspects, are explainable in psychological terms without resort to the belief or conclusion that he was a special person with a special brain that had gone beyond “self ”.

That is not to say that Krishnamurti did not have an extraordinary insight into human psychology. His was a noble, even heroic life. But you could waste your whole life swanning around with the idea that one single enlightened insight is going to blow your brain cells inside-out and: voilà!...no “self”.

Carol Brandt
September 2002