Out of the many great intellectuals that emerged throughout the 20th Century, the Indian philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti is perhaps, in my modest opinion, one of the greatest. The book Total Freedom: The Essential Krishnamurti is a sober and concise introduction to the core teachings of Krishnamurti, which aim to introduce us to the dimension of personal freedom, in a holistic sense, unscathed from external inputs in the form of dogma, thoughts, and desires.
Krishnamurti unhesitatingly calls from the breaking up of the chains that bind our social constructions together, and a full detachment from what he calls a "self-constructed fence of security", powered by religious, political and personal beliefs. With tremendous audacity and a sharp intelligence, Krishnamurti correctly depicts the antagonisms embedded in the different power structures upon which our civilization is constructed, and how these antagonisms have invariably led societies into chaos, despair, anxiety, conflict, violence, and destruction. "Freedom", so he claims, "is pure observation without direction, without fear of punishment and reward. Freedom is without motive; freedom is not at the end of the evolution of man but lies in the first step of his existence."
Kirshnamurti, indeed, disarms the self from its secure values and established norms, leaving it without any sense of being or belonging but just with the liberating feeling of constructive destruction. Delving into Krishnamurti therefore unveils the intrinsic value of unconditioned freedom, the beauty of observation, the pure state of ideological anarchy.
The following is an extract of a text written by Krishnamurti in 1980 at the request of his biographer:
“Truth is a pathless land. Man cannot come to it through any organization, through any creed, through any dogma, priest or ritual, not through any philosophical knowledge or psychological technique. He has to find it through the mirror of relationship, through the understanding of the contents of his own mind, through observation and not through intellectual analysis or introspective dissection...Total negation is the essence of the positive. When there is negation of all those things that thought has brought about psychologically, only then is there love, which is compassion and intelligence."
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