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Readers are requested to
send us their personal meetings, experiences and inspirations with K.
My First Impression of K
by Pieter Langedijk
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The Quest
When I was a student
studying psychology at the university, I became member of a group who practised
meditation. In that group I met a man, who
used to
talk about
Krishnamurti and
told me that Krishnamurti was giving talks all over the world
and that every
year he was in Switzerland in the last weeks of July and the first
week of August. I
heard there was a camping near the conference tent. I decided to go that place.
The camping was next to a small river with clear water and surrounded by
beautiful mountains full of trees. Near the camping was a small city of wooden
houses with balconies and some small restaurants with nice terraces. There I
met many young and old people who also were there for Krishnamurti.
The tent in which
Krishnamurti was giving his lectures looked like a circus tent and it stood on a
very quiet place outside the town at the bottom of a mountain. The insides of
the tent looked like an amphitheatre. Thousands of people were sitting on chairs
in a semicircle. In front of those chairs was a platform, which was totally
empty. The only thing which was there was a simple wooden chair and a microphone
in front of that chair. The tent held some 2000 or more people. The talks
started exactly at eleven oclock, but many people came there two hours earlier
in order to find the best places. Everyone was talking very softly. In front of
the first rows many young people were sitting on the grass. People entered the
big tent through several entrances of the tent. At about one minute to eleven
all the people stopped talking and it was absolutely quiet. At exactly eleven o’
clock Krishnamurti entered the tent. At that moment he was about 70 years, with
white hair, blue trousers and a light blue shirt. His dress looked as if
everything was new; the shoes looked very polished. He walked over the grass
inside the tent, climbed the stairs with three steps to the podium and walked
over the stage and sat down on the chair.
He had no paper in his
hand. He was sitting on the chair, his hands on his legs
and looked
towards the audience, moving his head from left to the right, and from front to
the back as if he was observing every person separately and with great
attention. Then he started talking, saying something like: ‘I would like to
talk, as with a friend, about ‘thought in relation with the past (or feeling;
intuition, death, communication, relationship, meditation, God, etc)
He talked for
exactly one hour. One minute before the hour was over, he took a watch out of
the pocket in his shirt, looked at it and finished his sentence. After that
people asked him questions for 15-30 minutes.
A totally different
approach
I cannot remember what
he talked about during the first lecture, but I remember that the second time he
talked about ‘really listening’. By this he means that one
must listen
without prejudice, with an empty mind, without saying “I agree”‘ or “I
disagree”, which we normally do. According to him, we must be very sensitive and
try to listen ‘behind’ the words.
I remember that one of
my professors also used to talk about communication. He said that the purpose of
verbal communication is to express in words what one thinks, feels or wants, but
that many people, like politicians or parents, use words and language to ‘hide’
what they really think, feel or want. Was K talking about that?
He was talking about
conditioning that we are brainwashed from the very first moment that we are
born, with thousands and millions of ideas. These ideas include everything
what to believe, what to think, about education, about what is important on this
earth, such as money, power, sex and what is not important, what to eat and what
not to eat, etc. He explained that every culture bas different ideas about all
these different things. Through that screen of ideas we look, listen and
interpret what we see and experience and select what we think is important and
what is not important, and we call this ‘learning’. K calls this accumulation
of second-hand knowledge, which means that most knowledge is based on what
other people say and not on our own experience and unconditioned thinking.
If someone says
something similar to what l think, (even if it is wrong or partly wrong) then I
have the inclination to say yes, I agree that is how I also see it. When it
is different, then I say no, I disagree or even you are crazy,
stupid, etc. The
more we are conditioned, the quicker we agree or disagree or
become angry or
even kill the other. In some authoritarian countries
one can even be
killed when one has a different opinion, for instance about
religious or
political ideas. One sees this conditioning in most families and in almost every
school and workplace.
When one studies the
history of humanity, one hears and reads that millions were killed because they
had different ideas about God, heaven, the political system, etc. Krishnamurti
many times talked about the thousands of wars between the members of different
religions, but he is convinced that one can free oneself from all this
indoctrination and conditioning, but not by following a leader, guru or system.
The first step is to see and to become aware of ones’ own conditioning and see
that in every aspect of life, in the way we talk, eat, listen, think, feel, what
we want, etc.
After the first talk, I
heard two other talks. The years after that first year I
went several
times to Saanen. I bought many books of Krishnamurti and became
more and more
fascinated by his ideas. It was totally different from what I learned in the
university. There I had to read many books by heart, not having my own idea
about what I read. Now K asked me to think for myself, not being a parrot, not
to learn books by heart, but to look around in the world, observe people,
organizations, religions and see for myself and receive what he called first
hand knowledge.
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