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What is Truth ... According to Krishnamurti

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#1

Truth is generally not understood.According to Krishnamurti when he refers to Truth

He calls Truth the vision of Eternity / God,

In the first case of Eternity, it is revealed to man as a vision.

““What then is this Vision? It is Truth. Truth is permanent, everlasting. It has no beginning and no end, it is changeless and immortal. And when you ask: “Where does it abide, where can I find it?” -I say: “You will find it only in that Kingdom of Happiness.” If you would find it, you must apply your mind and your heart to know, to seek, and to search out that Pool of Heaven which is Wisdom, which is Truth.””

THE POOL OF WISDOM OMMEN CAMP FIRE TALK, 1926

He also calls Truth the Intelligence/ Wisdom .

In the second case of Intelligence, man himself must examine the whole structure of thought in order to awaken it.

““Truth cannot be brought down, rather the individual must make the effort to ascend to it. You cannot bring the mountain-top to the valley. If you would attain to the mountain-top you must pass through the valley, climb the steeps, unafraid of the dangerous precipices.””

Dissolution Speech

#2

Hello Conjure,

The first quote from 1926 might well be couched in language very much influenced by Theosophical dogma.
Both quotes are from his early days when the Teaching had only just arrived on the scene.
You find his early stuff attractive?
I would agree with the second idea, in the sense that we can only really understand stuff that we have some sort of experience of - listening to stories from skydivers, if I’ve never jumped out of a plane myself, may be exciting, but remains ultimately in the realm of personal imagination.

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#3

What is truth? The moment we talk of the truth according to someone else, however esteemed, we have lost it already, haven’t we? Then we are merely indulging in ideas.

The truth is that I am here and so are you. We are meeting one another for the first or for the fifty-first time. So what is the truth in this meeting, in this relationship? For this is the truth that really matters, is it not?

#4

Krishnamurti said ‘the word is not the thing, the description is not the described’ probably a few thousand times. It is immaterial whether he used traditional words or more common words to which he attributed profound meaning.

  1. God
  2. Truth
  3. Eternity
  4. Kingdom of Heaven
  5. Freedom
  6. Timelessness
  7. Immortality
  8. Intelligence
  9. Benediction
  10. Nameless
  11. Otherness
  12. Sacred
  13. Wisdom
  14. Emptiness
  15. Nothingness
  16. Love
  17. Beauty
  18. Joy/Ecstasy
  19. Attention/Awareness
  20. Ground

A few dozen more words can be added but it is necessary to understand beyond the words.

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#5

Well, if it is to be according to K, we can read all that he said about it and watch videos, and get lots of information. But this is the wrong approach, as you will hear him say. We have to find it for ourselves. And this too he talks about a lot. The truth is what is true, straight, straight forward. Meaning I have to look for myself, and see all this what we call brain, mind, and then see all the conditioning, the restless mind, and look very carefully, seriously, to negate thought. This serious looking where the mind is clear, not working away with all its mechanisms, then looking straight forward, there is what is true. Not something fixed, not an idea, not some concept, but the ongoing looking and discovering

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#6

I would eliminate this one from your list of words K used because it’s a phrase - not a word, and because, if he did use it, the context is necessary.

#7

If an arrow is crafted sufficiently well that it will reach its target it is said to be ‘true.’ That is the way I use the word truth. If you place a capital ‘T’ on it then it becomes an absolute. The human mind is rather keen to invent absolutes as they give it a sense of security. This is why we are so attracted to those who say they will present us with ‘Truth.’

The world, the universe, the all and everything, that is the actual. Everything is interconnected in some form. The whole thing moves together, grows together (the meaning of the word ‘concrete’). But the human mind is not designed to either perceive or experience that whole movement. It can never attain a ‘true’ image of it. What the mind does is to abstract. It takes one small or discrete part of this overall movement and establishes that small part as a ‘fact.’

K observed the temptation to organise the part and call it Truth.

What are we doing when we recognise something as true? A cow in a field . . . is that cow true? Of course not, it is a cow. But if someone states there is a cow in the field we can check to see if that statement is ‘true.’ In other words, does the statement (or the thought) accurately reflect a discrete and abstracted element of reality? To the extent that a thought is an accurate reflection of the reality it purports to describe, to that extent it is true (true to the reality as the arrow is true to its target). But even so, the very fact that anything that can be thought or said is already the result of the mental process of abstraction means that truth can never fully describe anything. Truth is ever and only functionality. To give it a capital ‘T’ is hubris.

#8

He did use it, in the Dissolution of the Order of the Star speech. You cannot eliminate history, just the telling of it. The dedicated follower, however, is left with a choice, either to dismiss the dissolution speech as a juvenile aberration (as some do) or to attempt some convoluted reinterpretation of what K really meant in order to set his or her mind to rest.

#9

So one should never swear to tell “the whole truth and nothing but the truth” because all we can honestly speak of are truths that “never fully describe anything”.

#10

The phrase should certainly be taken with a large pinch of salt. And the example you give of a trial is illustrative of the problem because we must ask, what is the trial about, as a social phenomenon, and what can a trial specifically end up telling us but a very small slice of the contextual reality. Guilt and innocence are, at best, established by weight of evidence and at worst by prejudice.