Meeting K

Readers are requested to send us their personal meetings, experiences and inspirations with K.

My First Impression of K     by Pieter Langedijk Ó The Quest

When I was a student studying psychology at the university, I became member of  a group who practised meditation. In that group I met a man, who used to talk about Krishnamurti and told me that Krishnamurti was giving talks all over the world and that every year he was in Switzerland in the last weeks of July and the first week of August. I heard there was a camping near the conference tent. I decided to go that place. The camping was next to a small river with clear water and surrounded by beautiful mountains full of trees. Near the camping was a small city of wooden houses with balconies and some small restaurants with nice terraces.  There I met many young and old people who also were there for Krishnamurti.

The tent in which Krishnamurti was giving his lectures looked like a circus tent and it stood on a very quiet place outside the town at the bottom of a mountain. The insides of the tent looked like an amphitheatre. Thousands of people were sitting on chairs in a semicircle.  In front of those chairs was a platform, which was totally empty. The only thing which was there was a simple wooden chair and a microphone in front of that chair. The tent held some 2000 or more people. The talks started exactly at eleven o’clock, but many people came there two hours earlier in order to find the best places. Everyone was talking very softly. In front of the first rows many young people were sitting on the grass. People entered the big tent through several entrances of the tent. At about one minute to eleven all the people stopped talking and it was absolutely quiet. At exactly eleven o' clock Krishnamurti entered the tent. At that moment he was about 70 years, with white hair, blue trousers and a  light blue shirt. His dress looked as if everything was new; the shoes looked very polished. He walked over the grass inside the tent, climbed the stairs with three steps to the podium and walked over the stage and sat down on the chair.

He had no paper in his hand. He was sitting on the chair, his hands on his legs and looked towards the audience, moving his head from left to the right, and from front to the back as if he was observing every person separately and with great attention. Then he started talking, saying something like: 'I would like to talk, as with a friend, about 'thought’ in relation with the past (or feeling; intuition, death, communication, relationship, meditation, God, etc) He talked for exactly one hour. One minute before the hour was over, he took a watch out of the pocket in his shirt, looked at it and finished his sentence. After that people asked him questions for 15-30 minutes.

A totally different approach

I cannot remember what he talked about during the first lecture, but I remember that the second time he talked about 'really listening'. By this he means that one must listen without prejudice, with an empty mind, without saying  "I agree"' or "I disagree", which we normally do. According to him, we must be very sensitive and try to listen 'behind' the words.

I remember that one of my professors also used to talk about communication. He said that the purpose of verbal communication is to express in words what one thinks, feels or wants, but that many people, like politicians or parents, use words and language to 'hide' what they really think, feel or want. Was K talking about that?

He was talking about conditioning – that we are brainwashed from the very first moment that we are born, with thousands and millions of ideas. These ideas include everything – what to believe, what to think, about education, about what is important on this earth, such as money, power, sex and what is not important, what to eat and what not to eat, etc. He explained that every culture bas different ideas about all these different things. Through that screen of ideas we look, listen and interpret what we see and experience and select what we think is important and what is not important, and we call this 'learning'. K calls this ‘accumulation of second-hand knowledge’, which means that most knowledge is based on what other people say and not on our own experience and unconditioned thinking.

If someone says something similar to what l think, (even if it is wrong or partly wrong) then I have the inclination to say “yes, I agree – that is how I also see it”. When it is different, then I say “no, I disagree” or even “you are crazy, stupid, etc”. The more we are conditioned, the quicker we agree or disagree or become angry or even kill the other. In some authoritarian countries one can even be killed when one has a different opinion, for instance about religious or political ideas. One sees this conditioning in most families and in almost every school and workplace.

When one studies the history of humanity, one hears and reads that millions were killed because they had different ideas about God, heaven, the political system, etc. Krishnamurti many times talked about the thousands of wars between the members of different religions, but he is convinced that one can free oneself from all this indoctrination and conditioning, but not by following a leader, guru or system. The first step is to see and to become aware of ones' own conditioning and see that in every aspect of life, in the way we talk, eat, listen, think, feel, what we want, etc.

After the first talk, I heard two other talks. The years after that first year I went several times to Saanen. I bought many books of Krishnamurti and became more and more fascinated by his ideas. It was totally different from what I learned in the university. There I had to read many books by heart, not having my own idea about what I read. Now K asked me to think for myself, not being a parrot, not to learn books by heart, but to look around in the world, observe people, organizations, religions and see for myself and receive what he called ‘first hand knowledge’.