Questioning Krishnamurti- J Krishnamurti in Dialogue with Leading Twentieth Century Thinkers

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Both the life and teaching of Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895-1986) have aroused considerable controversy, ranging from adulation as a 'World Teacher, a twentieth-century Maitreya or Messiah, to the view that he was a fallible, if extraordinary, human being. Many who knew him felt overwhelmed, deeply awed even, by a sense of sacredness and unconditional love flowing from him. Others felt something of this, and a few also felt badly wronged or slighted, and have responded with a pained ambivalence. Even for those close to him for years, his personality has remained in some ways an enigma. But whatever the perhaps inevitable mystery of the person, the books, videos and tapes are there to show how for more than half a century Krishnamurti argued passionately that the problems facing us demand a radical transformation of human consciousness.

Was he asking the impossible? Did Krishnamurti undergo such a transformation himself? And if he did, what relevance does this have for the rest of us?

This book consists of fourteen conversations, in the last two decades of his life, in which these questions were debated. Those taking part include scientists, a Buddhist scholar, philosophers, artists and a Jesuit priest. None of them could be called 'devotees, but were people who came to question, clarify and challenge. This was something that Krishnamurti had in his lifetime always urged his listeners and readers to do-not perhaps always successfully.

A question that throbs like a pulse in this book is: can human beings live without conflict? Throughout these dialogues, Krishnamurti maintains that this can happen only when outer conflict, be it with another person or collectively in war, is seen to Questioning Krishnamurti arise from inner conflict within the individual. The root of such conflict is a mistaken but powerful focus on what should be re than on what is, whether in ourselves or others or, to put it way, ideals and objectives are insidiously found more attractive the looking at and understanding facts. Usually, if the fact that what happens-is displeasing, our tendency is to resist, escape from, and suppress it. But this running away from the fact, as Krishnamu calls it, is dangerous. By reacting in this way he argues, we spill of fictitious but strong sense of self from what we e e experience, the 'observer from the observed This reparative self-which is a figment of thought based on inevitably limited experience, a kind of mental marionette-is for him the heart of violence, whether been two people or two nations. This is not, he contends, a problem the just a few unbalanced people have the whole of humanity is caught in it.

**Contents and Sample Pages**