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the journal of the krishnamurti schools no.25

regarded as the ladder in the cultural ascent of man—as opposed
to his biological descent—is made to include not only the factual
and useful information we need to operate objectively and sanely
in all kinds of fields, but also the whole cultural tradition with its
inherited patterns of conditioning. In this sense knowledge is also
ignorance, for it includes prejudice, superstition and all manner
of bias. Not only is such content problematic but, as the result of
past experience, it is inherently limited, which naturally reduces
its domain of applicability. The past is memory and memory, how-
ever vast or ancient, does not encompass and can never encom-
pass the present. It has its place in the management of recurrent
features, without which knowledge, which is recognition, would
not be possible, but its outlook must of necessity miss out the new,
without which we can hardly be said to be alive and, therefore, in
relationship.
This memory, experience and knowledge constitute the content
of consciousness and thought is its response. From there K infers
the inherent limitation and danger of thought as the dominant
factor that it has become in human existence. Not only is thought,
with its emotional component, seen to be reduced to a mechanical
reflex process but the very notion of self, which traditionally has
stood for the spiritual in us—the soul, the atman—is perceived
as a projection from that very same material psychological back-
ground, for its essence is the identification with the content of
consciousness, however vulgar or refined. Without such content,
the self has no substance, which means that it has no independent
existence, for the self, the thinker, is the product of thought. This
denial of the independent existence of the self is perhaps an even
deeper insight, as it concerns the most fundamental and pervasive
duality at the heart of the psychopathology of our everyday life.
The encompassing nature of the teachings is amazing. K con-
sidered that they covered the whole of life. They move seamlessly

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