Alice Teh Larsson

Lecture 6 of 14: Listening to Jiddu Krishnamurti

Here’s another one I finished listening to today: Lecture 6: True Religion and Meditation, and here’s my reflection (I’m trying a slightly different format again).

ON RELIGION

Religion as sensation
Krishnamurti says most of us live by sensation, i.e., moving from one thrill to another. Rituals, prayers, ceremonies, and organised dogma become another kind of sensation: they soothe, stimulate, or make us feel good. But repetition inevitably leads to boredom, and that cycle of seeking sensation and tiring of it and then seeking another prevents us from reality.

Religion as direct experiencing
For Krishnamurti, true religion is not in churches, temples, or inherited formulas. It is the direct capacity to meet life as it is, without escape. Escapes (whether through ritual, belief, or tradition) are forms of sensation and distraction. When one ceases to seek sensation, the emptiness we fear is revealed, and in facing that emptiness, something genuinely new can unfold.

Self-knowledge as the root
Krishnamurti ties religion to freedom and self-knowledge: to be free, one must understand oneself, not through borrowed values but by examining how the mind actually functions. This self-knowledge is the beginning of wisdom, the living ground of religion.

ON MEDITATION

NOT discipline, NOT concentration, NOT prayer. Krishnamurti rejects conventional forms of meditation:

Discipline: If you “practice” kindness or focus on becoming something, it’s still ego-centred.

Concentration: Fixing the mind on an image, word, or point is exclusion and suppression. It is not true quietness.

Prayer: Repetition may calm the mind, but the “answers” that arise are shaped by desire and gratification; therefore, self-deception.

Devotion: Pouring love to a God you don’t know is still projection.

Examination of distraction. Instead of pushing distractions away, Krishnamurti says: examine each one. By understanding distraction itself, the mind naturally grows incapable of being distracted; therefore, it’s no longer suppression, but comprehension.

Meditation as self-knowledge. Real meditation begins with clarity in thought and seeing what is, without justification or condemnation. Meditation and self-knowledge are inseparable: without one, the other cannot exist. A quiet mind emerges not through compulsion but through awareness of desire, escape, and the whole movement of thought. This leads to transformation, a freshness no authority or ritual can grant.

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From today until the end of September, I plan to listen to a series of lectures by Jiddu Krishnamurti in 1949 to an audience in Ojai, California. These lectures—14 of them—are digitally remastered recordings available as part of an audiobook collection from NLB.

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