"What is learning? What is criticism?" Krishnamurti

Kinfonet Discussion
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What is learning? What is criticism ? Through criticism one can learn. I criticise you and through that very act of criticising, I am criticising myself. In that, there is partial learning. I see I must learn to function in the technological field. There, I must have experience. That is absolute law – otherwise I cannot do anything. Then I ask myself: do I learn anything through experience, psychologically? Or do I only learn when I am aware, watching, watching that I am acting from an idea, which is already the old, and conforming to that pattern? So I watch that. I am afraid, and my conditioning says resist it, run away from it, suppress it, control it, develop courage. When I act that way, I am strengthening my conditioning, therefore I am not learning. I can only learn about fear when I watch it in myself. Can I watch it without the conditioning, neither suppressing it, running away from it or controlling it? Then what takes place? There is a learning in the very watching. There I am very critical, saying: who is watching? Is the watcher different from fear? I see they are both the same. So is there a watching without the watcher? If the watcher is there, he is conditioned. Is there a watching without the watcher, without being conditioned, without wanting to escape, suppress or control?"

from Students Discussion 3 in Amsterdam, 13 May 1969

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All we do is criticize , might as well learn from K what we do .

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I think the key thing I learned from decades of reading and discussing Krishnamurti is that no one can ‘teach’ you to see your self and its relationship with others and the world. Analysis and knowledge can be shared. But the seeing is up to you.

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What is the instrument that sees?

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Been asking myself that for many a year!

The best I have to offer:

Q: What is the instrument that sees?
A: ME!

Which leads to pretty much the same question: What is this ME thing?

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Have you read the k paragraph above? If you did haven’t you learned how to watch yourself. Why say Krishnamurti can’t teach you how to see! He was doing it for over seventy years teaching people how to see without the observer.

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I am not being personal but a lot of people in here want to tell you that Krishnamurti hasn’t taught anybody how to observer! They say there is no teaching because they are lazy and want to go back to sleep. They don’t want to work their problems out.

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Yes, I see your point.

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I think the less we say the better it is going to be.

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He was not “teaching people how to see without the observer”. He was trying to awaken us to what we are actually doing by thinking we know what we’re doing.