Yet, at the same time, there is the famous statement enunciated by K in 1929 and from which his mature teaching derives: “Truth is a pathless land.” What does it mean? And, what is its relevance to the topic in hand? Clearly, there is a cutting away of certainties; there is a severing of the causal, A-to-B relationship. The significance of this cannot be overemphasized, as it corresponds to – and may well be a part of – the discovery of the quantum world. Where once we stood on solid ground with predictable goals and solid certainties – such as, after a succession of births, eventually merging in the One – we are now, dramatically, in some flux of Now: groundless, to use Kierkegaard’s term. This doesn’t mean that the same issues are not important – freedom, for instance, or meditation for that matter – but that the basic nature of the terrain has shifted. Where once we saw large shapes, mechanical causation, now we find randomness at the sub-atomic level. Where once we hung our hat on Cartesian pegs, sure it would be there the next day and the next, now we’re not sure if it will be there, not to mention the peg and the reality of the hat. We have arrived at the era of the Uncertainty Principle. We are on shifting ground, and the shift is in perception.

This, in itself, has a number of consequences. Krishnamurti is not a philosopher, in the sense that term is commonly used: he has no system, no tradition to adhere to; rather, his approach can be considered psychological, in that it turns about the issue of perception. Again, no “givens,” no build-up, no dress rehearsal: it is simply a matter of bringing us to the brink. And, what is the brink if not the limits of our knowledge, the just frontier of language and meaning? For, while K might well agree with the linguistic philosophers that it is language – words – that defines our world-view, he also says, “Unfortunately we are slaves to words and we are trying to reach something that is beyond words. To uproot, shatter the words and to be free of words gives an extraordinary perception, vitality, vigor.” In other words, there are words and their meanings, but also something beyond the word. We may or may not be able to describe it, but access to it comes not through argumentation – lucid analysis, sequential thinking – but rather by the crossing of that perceptual frontier that is etched in all our minds by virtue of conditioning. Language is linear, as we all know, and at a certain point we must concur with Wittgenstein in keeping silent when it comes to what we cannot talk about. This, however, merely defines the brink: it doesn’t take us over or beyond it. What, then, if anything, can be said to indicate the Further Field? Is the Pathless Land a free zone into which one stumbles, by chance or not at all? Let us examine the matter more closely.

There is a constant in the nature of insight that leads on to further unfoldment of itself. Hence, the statement “Truth is a pathless land” is not a static, dead-end affair; it condenses into the aphoristic “You are the world” and the equally pithy and more inward “The observer is the observed.” These are what one might call threshold statements, paradoxical to ordinary linear consciousness but pointing to and through the realm of the opposites to a unitive Ground beyond the mind. They are the kind of statement which, if understood, seem to carry within them the explosive capacity to “shatter the words” and give “an extraordinary perception.” What do they mean?

Among the many things Krishnamurti spoke of, one of the most important was “putting the house in order,” by which he meant the psychological house of oneself. Further, he insisted that it was only by so doing that one equipped oneself for real meditation. He had no truck with meditation practices, not to mention the teachers and gurus who brought these practices to the West. This is because, for him, meditation is not a practice, something over-and-above and distinct from daily life; rather, it takes place at the heart of daily life, in the observation of behavior, image-making, etc. There is no inner state to be attained as distinct and different from what is happening externally; there is, on the contrary, he affirms, only the perpetual flow and counter-flow of consciousness in its manifold guises and disguises. Perhaps this, in itself, is a kind of release, as it begins to break down the traditional sense – honored, moreover, in all cultures – of a world “out there” proceeding independently of the world “in here” which is my own reality. Krishnamurti challenges this fundamental premise. The sense that there is an altogether more living connection, an inter-relatedness of all things, is contained in the statement “You are the world.” It is a point of departure within living itself and hence quite different from the formulaic practices of those trying to enter a “state of meditation.”

The distinction is critical enough to dwell on. Since truth itself is a “pathless land,” there is no field of action but the immediate present. Indeed – and in fact – everything is present; it is also im-mediate, that is, not mediated. This is an aspect of what we may call pathlessness. It also links up with other statements of Krishnamurti such as “Freedom is at the beginning, not the end.” For, just as there are no “givens” in Krishnamurti’s teachings, no philosophical underpinnings, so also there is no attainment, as that would imply an attainer and something to be attained, and the whole point of meditation is to go beyond both. This discovery frees the mind of time, for time is the prison we are all “doing time” in. It is the Now moment disclosing its content, freeing the mind from the shackles of time. And, there is no other moment in which one can be free. This is the constant of insight, its unblinking actuality.

Let us return to the quantum proposition. If reality is not as we thought it was – gross, predictable, causal, A-to-B (these descriptions cover the whole field of consciousness: the religious, moral/ethical, as well as the scientific) – and is indeed, at the sub-atomic level, swift, unpredictable, a-causal, A-to-Z, then we are per force in a very different world. The past as knowledge cannot be our lodestone; indeed, if we use it, and we use it all the time – religiously, politically, socially, and morally – we are only going to recreate and strengthen the welter of confusion we are already in. As this becomes daily more and more obvious and the search for national and personal security in fact brings us closer and closer to destruction, it behoves us to look with a fresh eye at what is required of us in the present.

We are apt to look at life fragmentarily and to see, say, science and religion as existing in totally different “boxes”. This is largely because of our capacity to create categories – Aristotelian in origin, it is the very substance of the education system – and to work these categories to exhaustion. Rarely do we think “outside the box”, that is, in terms of consciousness itself, which is the generative matrix of all categories. Yet it is precisely here, if we listen to Krishnamurti, that the current crisis in humanity lies. We cannot fix the human problem – and it is a global human problem – through any of the established categories: religion, ethics/morality, politics, economics, art, or science. These have all been tried and found wanting. We must look further, deeper, to the ground of consciousness, the origin of consciousness, from which these spring. For it is only by addressing consciousness at the root – with all its darting, quantum movement – that we can begin to realize for ourselves what it is that is driving us.

Constantly, we overlook ourselves, forecast the future, draw up a blueprint – it is in the nature of the brain to do this – in all the categories, at every level, we project a fuller version of what is: be it self-perfection or the perfection of society, we are never wholly present to what is. We think perfection is just-around-the-corner, in heaven or the next life, very rarely here-and-now. We are inured to Progress, “getting better all the time,” although in the train of perfection and progress lie environmental degradation and shattered lives. We just don’t seem to see the connection. And, of course, this dullness has consequences.

Viewed in this light, Krishnamurti’s meditation can be seen as a wake-up call. It is an invitation to begin afresh, without the past. But, how can a brain – the human brain that is the past – suddenly free itself of its shackles, its categories, conditioning, and pervasive self-image? Not by effort, not by practice, K says. Is there, then, within the mind-brain complex some space or area that is “untouched”, in the sense that it is not entirely governed by the thunderous traffic of the past? It seems Krishnamurti thought there was; indeed, it was that he was talking to. He speaks of talking to the “unconscious” in us – not the individual or collective unconscious but that untapped reservoir of potential which normally lies dormant in humankind and which constitutes, some say, 90% of “grey matter”. In other words, though his arguments are logical, Krishnamurti is working through the brain to a part of it that might be called “empty”: it has not been touched by thought and time which are the generative factors of consciousness as we know it. There is something – or no-thing – here for all of us. For it is only in this untouched space that what K calls “the new” can actually be born. “The new” is not new as opposed to “the old”, nor does being born mean that it will die. Rather, this birth is out of time; it is a release from time and everything that goes with it.

Which does not mean that time with its many-headed attributes – fear, guilt, envy, comparison, etc. – will not come back to haunt us again. What it does mean is that these are no longer all there is. Even in moments of intense reaction, there is the underlying sense of a different ground, a place of origin other than oneself. Of course, this is only the first step but, as Krishnamurti says frequently, “the first step is the last.” It does not mean that we don’t have work to do – on the contrary, one sees the importance of that work, which is now the work of humanity on/for itself – but, in the very perception of its urgency, an energy is aroused that is not time-bound or -binding. It is simply there, available; it doesn’t need to be worked up. It is this that distinguishes it from motivated energy, behind which the ego is always lurking – if I do this, I shall get that – which again puts us back in the field of time/causation with its weight of friction, effort, and conflict. In fact, it is like a vast web, escape from which is by no means obvious. But there is a threshold and a common concern, one which brought together Krishnamurti and David Bohm, quantum physics and the teachings of K: that common concern is with the observer and the observed.

The movement that began a century ago and that is normally referred to as the Modern Movement has this issue, this focus, at its heart. Whether we consider Relativity Theory or the demise of the classical perspective in art – cubism, futurism, surrealism, etc. – we come upon the central question: Who/where is the observer and what does he observe? If time slows down as we approach the speed of light and, ultimately, stops when we reach that speed, then what becomes of our notions of Immutability; where is the fixed, idealized observer, standing outside the picture conferring depth and form? There is a revolution in the making, a revolution that manifested right across the board: in science, in art and literature, in society with its drive for a new beginning. One can think of Krishnamurti as part of that movement as, like all men, he was part of his time. The word revolution is a keynote of his message, though strictly in the sense of an inward mutation.

But, we cannot countenance that inward mutation unless we go into the observer and the observed. At one time thought to be separate and distinct – the artist and the picture, the designer and the graph – it turns out that, at the sub-atomic level, the observer impinges on the thing observed. He is not some clear-cut, white-coated figure whose ideal presence is outside the experiment. In other words, the Cartesian distinction between a consciousness “in here” and a world of objects “out there” is shown, scientifically, to be false: there is no idealized looker-on or looker-in, no such thing as pure objectivity, only different aspects of a Unified Field. And, the field itself is not static or controlled. This corresponds in a significant way to the view of the psyche proposed by Krishnamurti. He has, for instance, no time for analysis, since this presupposes the analyzer and the analyzed, the one who knows and the other who does not. Authority based on knowledge is implied, and this is antithetical to K’s approach. To see why that is so, we need to look at learning.

The traditional man of learning is one who knows a lot but, in Krishnamurti’s redefinition, knowledge and learning are poles apart. Knowledge inevitably belongs to the past. Not only is it the knowledge of the past, it also is the past in its operation: I am the past when I speak/act from what I know, be it at the practical or psychological level. Learning, however, is quite different. It is something that happens in the free space of the moment, without preamble or preparation, when I am directly aware of what is taking place. Naturally, this means a non-verbal awareness – first, perhaps, of material things but then, certainly, of my thoughts, feelings, and sensations which move and have their being in the field of awareness.

It is this that relates learning to meditation, since it is an unprepared, active-present dynamic independent of time and the stream of consciousness. In this sense, it may be said to be timeless, and timelessness is the essence of meditation. In timelessness, distinctions are not blurred – a person is still a person, a table a table – but the psychological pitch of separate identity undergoes a mutation from within itself. In other words, the calculating, controlling observer, ipso facto the false premise in every experience, cedes to the matrix from which he derives, the matrix of common consciousness. There is no distinction between the two. This is what Krishnamurti means when he says, searingly, “You are not an individual.” Difficult to accept in contemporary society, where the myth of egotistic individuality is so rampant, it is nonetheless a fundamental fact. The so-called individual is part of the stream and, except on the surface, identical with it.

From the false distinction between the observer and the observed every kind of dysfunction follows. We seek – but do not find – eternal happiness, we find only temporary palliatives. Is this because we remain inured to the mythic proportions of the “observer without” (God), readily assumed as the “God within” (myself)? Have we become so used to this static view of things that we have neither the interest nor the energy to enter into a different dimension? The observer is the observed is the gateway to that dimension.

Bohm often spoke of a “hidden absolute”, which is deeply embedded in thought itself, since thought can conceive of the absolute. The form it takes in Western culture is that of the creator or Prime Mover, God. Having created, first, in our own minds the notion of an observer “outside the picture”, we invest that observer with the powers of creation manifest in Nature and latent in our thinking. God is the supreme artificer. Not only that, but He takes on, in addition, the function of Law-maker: He lays down Commandments, guidelines for living, moral injunctions, and even dietary prescriptions! Ultimate authority is vested in Him: He is the final arbiter of all we do – He sends us to Heaven or to Hell – and He rings down the curtain on the Last Day. “Who shall escape His wrath?” asks the Koran. Who, indeed?

The movement of an absolute within our own psyche, which itself is a creation of that psyche, has enormous potential for destruction. Seemingly, “with God on our side”, almost anything is permitted, as is evidenced in the bloody history of all three Western monotheistic cultures. Belief in the One God justifies any outrage, even if God is, by definition, One. Could this be because the One God is oneself? In other words, we are not created in God’s image; rather, as Krishnamurti puts it, “We have created God in our image.” That is to say, it is the power of the image that is really controlling the way we live. This image has its roots in the illusion of an observer – a psychological, not a physical, observer – outside and distinct from the content of consciousness. Since the observer is himself part of consciousness, we re-enact at the micro-level – in our daily self-centered activity – the same theater we have mounted at the macro-level, where God reigns supreme and looks down on our performance. In other words, whether we speak of God or self, we are speaking, essentially, about the same thing: the capacity of thought to create not just inventions, but deeply held opinions, convictions, and beliefs.

Thought separates – that’s what it does – and, once having separated, creates separate realities apart and distinct from its own process. But, whatever it creates, the process is the same and, this being so, our task changes: it is no longer to consider what thought comes up with as a fixed and final reality, but to examine the very process of thinking itself, which is the stuff of dialogue and, of course, meditation.

The projections of thought take on the “odor of the absolute”, and it is a sobering experience to realize that these projections – rich, lush, and varied though they may be – are nothing but a “material process”. Yet, that’s what they are, if we pursue in earnest what Krishnamurti and David Bohm worked out. Far from being the portals of eternity, they will not lead us anywhere; they are not a beginning but an imaginary essay, going no further than thought’s frontier. It is only with the dawning perception that whatever thought does is within this frontier – even its most spectacular flights – that a different factor can come in. This Krishnamurti refers to as insight. Not generated in time or by thought, it has more to do with seeing in K’s sense, that is, with immediate, direct perception of things as they are, not as one would wish them to be. In this regard, insight is quite impersonal; in this regard, also, it is part of meditation.

If, as Krishnamurti says, “you are nothing,” then what is involved in the approach to that no-thing – in the crossing of the threshold, so to speak – is the total dismantling not just of thought’s content, but also of the process of thinking itself. What appears as a solid wall of substance or an endless stream of chattering water has to be witnessed at the moment it arises, witnessed and allowed to die to itself, so that the age-old charge it has always had no longer seeks an external referent but can fall back now to the place from which it came. This is not a willed, deliberate act, rather a silent return to source through the deepening waters of the stream.

In examining the process of our thinking, we allow ourselves the moment of arrest; we are – for the time being, at least – no longer borne along without pause or awareness. On the contrary, it is the action of awareness itself that brings about the arrest and the return to silence. We don’t have to go outside all the time: we can dwell within the house of ourselves, once that house has been put in order. Putting the house in order is vital and this involves, axially and centrally, not ascribing to thought properties it does not have, especially the “odor of the absolute”. This is an arduous process, since the mind is drenched in the ongoing persuasion that what it thinks is independently real, in the way that physical objects are independently real. It cannot, without inquiry, turn in upon itself and see itself as it actually is: finite, limited, self-referential. It has no power to heal itself, nor can it heal itself by evasion. What it can and must do is work itself out; it must come to the realization of what it is and what it does.

Krishnamurti often spoke of two friends, walking down a lane or sitting on a bench and discussing the many problems of life. It is not a movement away from life and its many quirks and entanglements; on the contrary, it involves an engagement with life and in this sense, again, it is existential. Nothing is predicated outside the field of existence to which one tends or which gives meaning to life. No, it is in the ever-deepening awareness of what life is that meaning lies. To see this as fact, one needs to move swiftly – not in terms of logic and ratiocination, but in terms of seeing, alluded to above. We need to transcend the time-worn mode of moving grossly among gross objects; we need to touch what K and Bohm called the Ground. This is not some ultimate destination, to be reached in time with the tools of time: it is actually what is, it is what is now. And we – and only we – can find it for ourselves.