To set man free

I’m not sure that I follow your meaning here. What is conditional about this inward seeing? There are no conditions for this seeing (or awareness) other than being alive (I am speaking of an average person’s awareness, not someone who has suffered irreparable brain damage). Freedom is the first step, as Krishnamurti put it.

One is always free to notice that one is lost in autopilot or lost in thought. The awareness of being lost, or of being a prisoner of one’s thoughts, is part of freedom.

Wouldn’t it be pure seeing, total attention, without a cloud of ideation to interfere?

But if this becomes an ideal to be pursued, then it is merely a wish or a want, a getting lost in thought (what ‘should be’). And then can one be aware of that?

This is our desire to be free/have control over reality itself - its the usual “me, I want” - the feeling of injustice of not being God almighty himself, of not at least finding a genie in the lamp.

But yes - we are limited by reality, limited by this universe

nobody,

Witness Will Smith’s reaction to Chris Rock’s “joke”… which tells us a lot about everyone, eh?

If freedom is the absence of limits, being absolutely free would mean being absolutely unlimited, an impossibility for us mortals. So a realistic inquiry into freedom would need to stay focused on relative freedom.

Of course. But not, perhaps, when it comes to feeling/qualia. If I feel something, experience some qualia, can the feeling/experiencing itself be doubted or denied?

To feel free is to be free?

@nobody I’ll just repeat what I asked you in our discussion on the “understanding K’s teachings thread” : aren’t we discussing psychological freedom - rather than the freedom/ability to walk through walls and stuff? In which case absolute freedom may well be a possibility.

Do we need to define what "psychological freedom " means?

Why do you ask? I don’t get it - we can doubt stuff but why would I doubt what someone is telling me about their beliefs/feelings - I need some context. (You have asked this question before, but I still can’t see what for - please make your point if you have one - is it about respecting other peoples freedom of thought?)

Example : I am a believer/follower of some religion. I think I am free. Someone does something that is forbidden by my religion, and this upsets me emotionally (eg. Anger, shock, hatred). Am I actually free?

Example: I and my parents have lived all our lives in the USA, I feel free. Someone mentions the word freedom, and I am immediately assailed by strong emotions and ideas about civil rights, gun rights, LGBTQ issues, etc… In what way am I (psychologically) free?

Psychological freedom is all about our state of mind, but feeling (being?) free right now has no bearing on whether or not we are (mentally) constricted by some belief.

PS. Is it necessary to point out that it may be possible to be imprisoned within a real/physical cage (in jail for example) and be psychologically free? (well, now I have, just in case)

That’s a very unconventional take on what it means to be free. If you asked 1000 people what freedom meant, I doubt pretty much anyone would give that answer, unless they happened to be a student of Krishnamurti or the like.

So could you please go into it a bit, why is this unconditional freedom for you?

I wasn’t dividing freedom into categories, rather looking at it as a whole, all aspects.

So that is probably a disconnect in our conversation, right?

Do you think that by “Set man free” Krishnamurti meant psychologically free, rather than say physically free or creatively free or politically free or morally free? (All of which are related to psychological freedom, but perhaps not reducible to it.) I’d like to know what Krishnamurti meant, since I started this thread to see his offerings in the new light (for me) of “setting man free.”

Could we leave this for now, it would take too long to hash out and be too much of a tangent. I’m happy to get into it with you sometime, maybe in another thread?

If Bartholomew the believer feels free, Jimmy might say: Ah, but Bart may well be fooling himself, he may well not in fact be free. Whereas Sally might say: Bart feels free, therefore he is free, because freedom is not an objectively measurable quality, rather a subjective state of mind, a feeling.

Who’s right? My vote: Each illuminates part of the whole.

If one created a questionnaire about freedom and put it to ordinary people on the high street, then obviously the answers they would likely give would reflect the way the word “freedom” is most commonly used in our collective life.

These uses would include the freedom to do what one wants - aka, the freedom of choice - and also the freedom of speech, democratic or civil freedoms, freedom from political tyranny, freedom to love or marry who one wants to, freedom from coercion in the workplace, freedom from social harm or exploitation based on sex, race, religion, etc. For others freedom might mean material freedom, the freedom that having money brings, to travel, to change jobs, to buy new houses or cars. Or the freedom of athletes to jump, run, or swim (or birds to fly). For people brought up in Christianity, freedom probably means freedom of the will, to choose good rather than evil, or evil over the good. For religious people in India and parts of Asia, freedom might mean moksha, spiritual liberation, nirvana, for which they are willing to accept the authority of the lineage, the rimpoche, the guru, the tradition.

So freedom has many connotations. There is also the freedom of neutrinos to pass through concrete objects without interference, the freedom that infinite space has from any possibility of containment, and various science fictional or occult freedoms to bend space-time or manifest energy at will.

However, we are not free to stop our own physical death. We are not to free make the world conform to our image of how it ‘should be’ (dictators and tyrants try this, but they always fail). Physically, mortally, our freedom is definitely circumscribed. So there is no unconditional freedom for the body. Matter follows strict laws that can only be broken under limited conditions that are themselves subject to supervening (limiting) forces. The energy that underlies matter may be free after a fashion, but as soon as matter takes on form - as it has done for the whole universe, including our brains and bodies - it is subject to limitations that cannot be wished away.

So as macdougdoug writes, we are discussing psychological freedom primarily. This is clear from the dissolution speech Krishnamurti gave in 1929 from which you started this thread.

That is, Krishnamurti gave that speech to dissolve the organisation with which he was associated because it - like all religions and spiritual organisations - had become a psychological limit on the freedom of the mind:

it becomes a crutch, a weakness, a bondage, and must cripple the individual, and prevent him from growing, from establishing his uniqueness, which lies in the discovery for himself of that absolute, unconditioned Truth.

That the freedom with which Krishnamurti is concerned is primarily psychological is clear from the examples he uses:

I desire to free him from all cages, from all fears, and not to found religions, new sects

He says he wants to set people free

from all fears–from the fear of religion, from the fear of salvation, from the fear of spirituality, from the fear of love, from the fear of death, from the fear of life itself.

What Krishnamurti considers imprisoning factors are

Your prejudices, your fears, your authorities, your Churches new and old–all these, I maintain, are a barrier to understanding

And therefore

I have only one purpose: to make man free, to urge him towards freedom, to help him to break away from all limitations, for that alone will give him eternal happiness, will give him the unconditioned realization of the self.

Happiness and realisation have to do with the mind, not material factors primarily. Fundamentally, freedom for Krishnamurti is

the absolute, unconditioned Truth which is life itself

And I wonder how many of those hypothetical 1000 people polled for their opinion would say this? Probably only a few!

So, nobody, are you willing to limit the discussion to a concern for psychological freedom primarily (not that social and political freedoms don’t have their place)? Because, otherwise, there is likely to be endless miscommunication on this topic.

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Despite agreeing with James’ excellent response, I’d like to explore the statement above: Psychological freedom deals with our relationship to the world - thus it does also mean freedom from the bonds of physicality, creativity, ideas abourt morality and politics!!! :exploding_head:
Freedom from our concepts of the world, allows us to move freely with the flow of life.
Is the leaf floating in the summer breeze, or floating downriver, free? What about the drunken poet lost in the woods gazing at the stars?
When standing in the rain we all get wet, freedom means it does not matter.

Each persons opinion illuminates their relationship to the world. Its true that feeling free in this moment, not being subject to some mental angst right now, is psychological freedom - and at the same time does not necessarily mean that our unconscious mental bonds have been understood - in the next instant they may be awakened.

To be free from concepts, what does that mean to you?

Not being dependant upon them - realising that they are just mental models that may or may not be useful.

My goal is to find out what Krishnamurti meant by his main concern being “to set man free” and to allow this in turn to help me reframe my understanding of his worldview.

Rather than limiting the inquiry to ‘psychological freedom’ how about limiting it to anything that sheds light on Krishnamurti’s understanding of freedom? That seems appropriate for the goal.

To that end … :

“… my purpose is to make men unconditionally free, for I maintain that the only spirituality is the incorruptibility of the self which is eternal, is the harmony between reason and love. This is the absolute, unconditioned Truth which is life itself.” – Krishnamurti, from the dissolution speech

  1. Is the freedom he speaks of freedom from psychological conditioning, memory, the past, the known?

  2. “Harmony between reason and love” … nice!

  3. What does “the incorruptibility of the self which is eternal” mean? What is the ‘self’ here?

  4. “This is the absolute, unconditioned Truth which is life itself.” What does he mean by ‘life?’ Not biological life surely? Rather: reality, what-really-is?

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As map symbols may (or not) be useful for helping us interact with the actual territory.

What if anything does this reveal about the kind of freedom Krishnamurti spoke of?

Freedom is not a reaction; freedom is not choice. It is man’s pretence that because he has choice he is free. Freedom is pure observation without direction, without fear of punishment and reward. Freedom is without motive; freedom is not at the end of the evolution of man but lies in the first step of his existence. In observation one begins to discover the lack of freedom. Freedom is found in the choiceless awareness of our daily existence and activity.

– Krishnamurti, from The Core of the Teachings

Freedom is one of the words in the english language that Krishnamurti has co-opted. In his usage, it no longer refers to the personal - or for that matter, the impersonal - as in ‘freedom from’ or ‘freedom for’ or ‘freedom to’. Hence the confusion talking about it. Freedom as it is being used in the Core of the Teachings passage above quoted by @nobody is phenomenological. He equates it with Life itself. Freedom is awareness, in a totally general sense. Of no use to us personally other than tangentially.

Choiceless awareness** is going on all the time. (Even, arguably, in deep sleep.) Would Krishnamurti have said that freedom is always present, but that we don’t realize this?

** By choiceless awareness I mean the ‘pure’ awareness/sensing/noticing that happens before thought barges onto the scene and seeks to assert its dominance.

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I think so, yes …

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In which case the ‘self’ / thought creates an image of something called ‘freedom ‘ similar to the image of a ‘higher self ‘ or ‘God’ and creates a desire to one day realize it?

And thought continues its effort to ‘become’.

Freedom is the non- movement of thought in the mind?

[quote=“nobody, post:51, topic:1431”]

We are prisoners of ourselves.
The self being the one that knows whats what, in order to be how it should