Page 187 - JOURNAL OF THE KRISHNAMURTI SCHOOLS

What is Krishnamurti Saying?

relevant psychological process involved is elusive. The best one
can say is that, overall, something seems to be OK, even at times
great, but don’t rely on that, it may not be tomorrow. A leading
American physician wrote of every medical diagnosis, “You have
to face the stark reality of uncertainty.” Not that uncertainty in
life has always to be ‘stark’—it might turn out sometimes to be
blissful!
An all-encompassing area of interest to me in K is his con-
stant stressing of the limitation—inherent limitation—of thought,
knowledge and experience, and therefore of action based on that.
Except for science and technology, this limitation applies across
the board, to personal, family, professional, and international rela-
tions. Yet our educational systems award their highest praise to
thought and knowledge, placing them firmly on a golden pedestal.
K knocks them firmly off this pedestal. But the strong unspoken
public assumption remains, as the Oxford Dictionary of Philoso-
phy puts it, that ‘the most evident display of our rationality is our
capacity to think.’ We seem to ignore the fact that it is also the most
evident display of our irrationality. This hasn’t been easy for me to
digest. The first one in our family to go to a university, I graduated
as a fully paid up, card-carrying intellectual, convinced that think-
ing was the royal way to go. Part of my further education in the
deep sense has been to unpack much, though not all, of my formal
education.
Has the meeting of K with the theoretical physicist David Bohm
a special significance for us? Perhaps even some kind of allegori-
cal significance? Organized religions tussle with science, are often
decried by it. But K says that the scientific mind is part of the reli-
gious mind. That is perhaps keenly relevant nowadays when neu-
roscience willingly describes the self as an illusion created by the
brain. When in the late 1960s K began to speak of mutation of
the brain cells, at roughly the same time the scientist Fernando

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