Page 137 - JOURNAL OF THE KRISHNAMURTI SCHOOLS

s it possible to live without relying psychologically on author-
ity—either on external authority or even on the authority of
one’s own past experience? For Jiddu Krishnamurti that, suit-
I ably qualified, is the key question. His answer is that it is pos-
sible and that only in this way can one connect fully with what
is real.
Krishnamurti was not a philosopher in the classical sense. He
wasn’t interested in presenting theories or in arguing for his views.
Still what he was up to is continuous with philosophy. Like Socra-
tes, who through his example and questioning encourages his audi-
ences to examine critically the assumptions on which their beliefs
depend, Krishnamurti, through his example and questioning,
encourages his audiences to examine critically the assumptions on
which their very experience of themselves and the world depends.
In other words, whereas Socrates encourages what today we would
call critical thinking (or, simply, philosophy), Krishnamurti encour-
ages what we might call critical looking (and what he sometimes
called choiceless awareness).
What Socrates asked the Athenians to do is by now common-
place, at least to philosophers and to students of philosophy. We
have learned the lesson he was trying to teach. But to his original
audience—the Athenians—what he was asking them to do often
must have seemed strange and even pointless. What good could
possibly come, many of them must have wondered, from giving
the axe to conventional wisdom? Why, they must have asked,
should we start freshly when we have accumulated so much? But
the distorting weight of what you have accumulated, Socrates tried
to point out, is precisely the problem.
At the time Socrates proposed critical thinking there was not
much reason for the Athenians to suppose it would bear fruit. But

*This article is an excerpt from the Introduction to the book, Reflections on the Self
edited by Raymond Martin, published by Krishnamurti Foundation India.

119