Krishnamurti and meditation
I enjoyed reading Krishnamurti’s book many years ago, along with those of Soren Kierkegaard and Arnold Toynbee on long distance treks around the western United States of America. Krishnamurti like Allan Watts was a teacher with an alternate point of view of life, and each were influenced by Buddhism. I think K Krishnamurti’s intellectual paradigm led toward a more plain, direct Buddhism such as Sakyamuni practiced in which apparent reality is sort of transcended by the direct peace of immanent nothingness without even space. The goal of true Buddhism is nothing after all.
Arthur Schopenhauer’s ‘The World as Will and Ideal’ is a tip of the iceberg of his earlier and deeper work ‘The Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason’ in which he develops metaphysical ideas consistent with a universe/phenomenality issued by The One of which the neo-Platonist philosopher Plotinus wrote. Krishnamurti’s technique of abnegation of perception and idea of reality may be a sort of meditation, yet it is a meditation through Sakyamuni’s means of a Nirvana comparable to the Meditations of Descartes upon a method. Getting to the cognitive core of immediate existence through its negation is a simple enough and somewhat pragmatic plan, and I think the core of Krishnamurti’s ‘meditation’ is something a little deeper than transcendental meditation. I do not practice TM incidentally, although I enjoy prayer. Prayer is a way the Creator provided to allow a human brain to overcome its meathead tendencies or being stunned by the wonder of it all or the pathos of it perhaps. Because prayer is a powerful way of bringing intentional inward, silent thinking into being it is in some ways a little different than is Krishnamurti’s method of calming the inward cognitive self.
One summer evening in Fairbanks Alaska in a moderately twilight environment decades past, outdoors in a field by the forest I sat and contemplated something like Krishnamurti’s method of experiencing nothingness and had my own insight into what is meant by Buddhism’s negation of the apparent reality of the Universe. An alternative nothingness paradigm does exist collaterally with the phenomenal world of vision and being perhaps yet it is a transitory point of view, experienced in temporality itself and perhaps no more than a way of looking at the criterion in which the Universe happens. Human beings cannot really get out of the Universe too far after all since they are a part of it.
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