Thank you for taking the time to put this together, James.
Very helpful to read this concise compilation of the different ways he sought to elaborate on the concept of freedom over the years.
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Wow, this is great, thanks James! Working through …
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Please ask an outrageous question afterwards - I love getting outraged 
Speaking of which - what did you think we were imprisoned by? Clarity?
But seriously folks - the self is a process which actually exists. We call it an illusion because thats what it exists as - it is an existing illusion, and thus causes confusion (and suffering -which is its role)
Just like magical stage illusions actually exist - they are tricks, to fool the brain.
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The question for me is not so much “Does it exist?” as “How does it exist?” What kind of illusion or mirage is it? In what way is it real? Unreal? Where is it? What brings it into being?
I am here to serve:
Was Krishnamurti free?
Bravo! That really got me riled up for at least 10 minutes. 
What kind of answers are we looking for? Considering that a Psychologist, or a Neurologist for example, could specialise in this question for a few years and still not be free of the delusion at the end of their thesis.
Thanks, brother, but my guess is you laughed it off in a few seconds! 
Answers that illuminate?
I read through these twice, slowly, stopping along the way frequently to contemplate and test out
Though they are to an extent “of one piece” for me, some passages are quite a bit different than others, some even contradict others. That suggests to me Krishnamurti was speaking from direct firsthand experience rather than some perfect abstract Theory of Freedom.
This resonates the most for me:
Completely to empty the whole content of the mind—that is real freedom…. a mind that is crowded, that is heavy with its own despairs, fears, joys, pleasures—such a mind is never empty, and therefore there is nothing new for it, nothing new can come. It is only in that emptiness that a new thing, a new mutation, can take place. This emptiness, this space, is freedom….
And this the least:
Thought is never free.
Though true from Krishnamurti’s point of view (as stated in the first quote), my view of the freedom of thought is really different. Not saying either pov is ‘objectively’ right or wrong, but I obviously favor mine … or I wouldn’t have it!
From the Dissolution Speech (| J. Krishnamurti)
I want to do a certain thing in the world and I am going to do it with unwavering concentration. I am concerning myself with only one essential thing: to set man free. I desire to free him from all cages, from all fears, and not to found religions, new sects, nor to establish new theories and new philosophies.
As I have said, 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.
Because I am free, unconditioned, whole–not the part, not the relative, but the whole Truth that is eternal–I desire those, who seek to understand me to be free; not to follow me, not to make out of me a cage which will become a religion, a sect. Rather should they be 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.
As I said before, 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. I want therefore to set man free, rejoicing as the bird in the clear sky, unburdened, independent, ecstatic in that freedom. And I, for whom you have been preparing for eighteen years, now say that you must be free of all these things, free from your complications, your entanglements. For this you need not have an organization based on spiritual belief. Why have an organization for five or ten people in the world who understand, who are struggling, who have put aside all trivial things? And for the weak people, there can be no organization to help them to find the Truth, because Truth is in everyone; it is not far, it is not near; it is eternally there.
Organizations cannot make you free. No man from outside can make you free; nor can organized worship, nor the immolation of yourselves for a cause, make you free; nor can forming yourselves into an organization, nor throwing yourselves into works, make you free. You use a typewriter to write letters, but you do not put it on an altar and worship it. But that is what you are doing when organizations become your chief concern.
From The Core of the Teachings (Core of the Teachings | J. Krishnamurti)
The uniqueness of man does not lie in the superficial but in complete freedom from the content of his consciousness, which is common to all humanity. So he is not an individual.
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.
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Yes, Krishnamurti didn’t use language in the manner of a systematic philosopher - there is a lot of ‘free play’ in the way he used words, which change their meanings in different contexts. But the overall sweep of meaning is clear: freedom for Krishnamurti is the freedom of the mind, as in “to be a light to oneself” (one of the few sayings of the Buddha that K was happy to repeat) - a mind free from fear, free from becoming, free in itself, not dependent on belief, tradition, etc. A mind that is, to all intents and purposes, empty (of psychological thought, as attachment, hurt, identification, etc).
Maybe you could elaborate? On another thread you mention that the content of thought can be taken from “the specious present” - but even so that content is already an image of the near present, right? and so is already the past.
Sense perception (we might agree) is more or less immediate, and then thought makes an image of that perception (to take it over into the next moment). The image is a simulacrum of the percept, an abstraction of it (like the after-image we see with our eyes, whether open or closed, after looking at a bright object) - which is entirely mechanical.
This image is then contextualised with reference to all the other images (contents) of thought - which are likewise themselves mechanical representations of stored memory.
The process of contextualisation is intelligent after a fashion - like finding a jigsaw piece that fits into a missing part of the puzzle - but the content itself, the image (the jigsaw piece), is purely mechanical and always already refers to the past, comes from the past. This is why computers - which are programmed - are so good at tasks like facial recognition, etc, matching up one unit of memory with another.
So are the contents of thought ever ‘free’? And is there any such thing as a thought without content? So, in your view, in what manner can thought be free?
So what kind of answers illuminate? Can anyone say any words that will do such a thing? Anyone, including Buddha, Krishnamurti, and your own brain.
The ground,
When the ground is fallow - like a desert, no words can “illuminate”, no matter who says these words. Words only pass like grains of more sand blowing in the wind, and they just blow over the desert.
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Or a plot of land so overgrown with weeds that no new seeds can take hold.
Of course, space for new ideas is not the whole story - there is also the issue of motive, what can illuminate the heart? (or illuminate the whole process of living and dying)
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This presents the reader/listener who wants to understand exactly what Krishnamurti meant with a real challenge! No wonder Krishnamurti discussion groups are filled with haggling over what was meant by this or that word or passage. But, If handled with intelligence = openness, curiosity, humility, this would be imo a source of strength in discussions.
Would be interesting to compare Krishnamurti’s notion of ‘emptiness’ and the Buddha’s. Krishnamurti seems to focus on the psychological and Buddha on the ontological. But my guess is they’re pointing at the same (non-)thing. What do you think, James?
One challenge is to see that the context includes me and my yearning.
Understanding our psychological experience is to understand our relation to the nature of being.
All kinds of!
I should have said “shed light” rather than using the loaded spiritual term ‘illuminate.’
All the responses to a question shed light on it.
Surely they only shed light on me and my opinions? Which can be quite illuminating.
Yes. This is of course complicated by the fact that there are many different views of what ‘empty’ (sunya) and ‘emptiness’ (sunyata) mean in Buddhist philosophy!
Early Buddhist texts use the concept to refer to actions that are ethically worthless and vain (such as sensual pleasure); but the term is also used to refer to the constructed nature of the self, the ‘I’, by the so-called 5 aggregates of the mind (i.e., the self is merely constructed and so ‘empty’).
Later Buddhists - like Nagarjuna - extrapolated this notion of ‘emptiness-as-construction’ to cover the whole material world (which is empty because it is wholly dependent on causes and conditions which are themselves incapable of being grounded in any anterior permanent structures).
A separate group of later Buddhists, called Yogacarins, used the term emptiness to mean the non-duality of the flow of consciousness; while another later group of Buddhists, influenced by so-called ‘buddha-nature’ (tathagatagarbha) literature, used the word emptiness to mean the mind that is ‘empty of defilements’ (but not empty of its own inherent luminosity or ‘buddha-nature’).
The concept of emptiness in canonical Buddhism is also associated with certain idealised states of meditation (called ‘formless’ or arupa meditations), and the related meditative state of mental ‘cessation’ (called nirodha-samapatti). Meanwhile, in Chan/Zen Buddhism this emptiness was sometimes conflated not with tranquil meditation but with states of sudden insight (satori).
The understanding of emptiness has become a major source of contention in Tibetan Buddhism, with some believing that it refers to the emptiness of all conceptual views (which leaves ultimate reality unknown and ineffable, beyond the concepts ‘empty’ or ‘non-empty’); and others contending that it refers solely to the dependent-origination of the material world, which though conventionally real is ontologically empty.
Yes, I think that’s fair up to a point. Although Krishnamurti does use the word empty and emptiness in different ways too, and in ways that often blend the ontological and the psychological. While psychological emptiness is more immediately emphasised in his teachings, the ontological implications of this emptiness are never far from the surface (as you can see from the following quotations):
Truth can come to you only when your mind and heart are simple, clear…. Then you are a simply a human being without a label, without a country. This means that you must strip yourself of all those things and allow truth to come into being; and it can come only when the mind is empty…. The heart must be full and the mind empty. (Book of Life, August 1)
You know, the cup is useful only when it is empty. With most of us, the mind is clouded, cluttered up with so many things…. It is never empty. And creation can take place only in the mind that is totally empty (Public Talk 10 Saanen, Switzerland, 1st August 1965)
Has it ever happened to you, naturally, to find yourself in a state where thought is totally absent?.. If there is no thought and no word, isn’t the mind in a different dimension altogether? (The Second Krishnamurti Reader, 32-34)
If you take a journey into yourself, empty all the content that you have collected and go very, very deeply, then there is that vast space, that so-called emptiness, that is full of energy. And in that state alone there is that which is most sacred, most holy. (Total Freedom, Section: The Ending of Sorrow)
Scientists say in this emptiness there is energy…. And in that emptiness there is not a thing. There is nothing. Nothing means not a thing. Thing means thought. Thought is a material process. So in that emptiness thought does not exist at all… Then you have energy which alone can discover that which is eternal, which has no beginning and no ending. (Total Freedom, Section: A Relationship with the World)
The brain was completely empty, all reaction had stopped; during all those hours, one was not aware of this emptiness but only in writing it is the thing known…. That the brain could empty itself is an odd phenomenon. As the eyes were closed, the body, the brain seemed to plunge into unfathomable depths, into states of incredible sensitivity and beauty. (Krishnamurti’s Notebook: 1961, July 9th)
[Meditation] is something that comes naturally, when all positive and negative assertions and accomplishments have been understood and drop away easily. It is the total emptiness of the brain. It’s the emptiness that is essential not what’s in the emptiness; there is seeing only from emptiness.… It’s out of this emptiness love comes, otherwise it’s not love.… It’s the end and beginning of all things. (Krishnamurti’s Notebook: 1961, August 25th)
There is an absoluteness about it, not a finality; it is absolute energy; it is self-existent without cause… There must be total emptiness and only then that otherness, the timeless, comes. (Krishnamurti’s Notebook: 1961, November 4th)
Without love, there is no essence; without it there are only ashes on which is based our existence. Out of emptiness love is. (Krishnamurti’s Notebook: 1961, November 6th)
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Yes! But the ‘only’ seems off. Some answers shed light on the nature of the thing in question.
Yes. There is a lag time in everything we perceive, sense, experience. Even in the most direct ‘direct awareness.’ Electrical signals take time to propagate, neurons take time to do their thing. The specious present is as close as human perception/sensation can come to ‘now.’
Not sure what you mean by mechanical, and it’s a key point I think. Please explain.
What, if anything, doesn’t come from the past? When else would it come from?
Ditto for referring to the past, when else would it refer to?
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What do you mean by the content of a thought being free?
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Thought aisi is a three-parter: thinker/subject, thought/object, thinking/process. If ‘content’ and ‘object’ are the same, thought without content doesn’t make sense.
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Thinking and its flip-side feeling feel unlimited to me. It’s more a “Freedom is in the eye of the beholder” freedom than a literal absence of limits.
I think what you’re saying is that some of our beliefs may contain something accurate.
1)Can we tell which ones (without setting up some time consuming experiment, by which time both the belief and the moment it points to are long dead)?
2)Say the belief that the colour Pink is really/actually 356mghZ is true/correct. Or that the key to psycho freedom is located in the 890th neuron from the left is true. What has been gained? What has been lost?