A Book You Should Read


"What I say has very little value. You will forget it the moment you shut this book, or you will remember and repeat certain phrases, or you will compare what you have read here with some other book -- but you will not face your own life. And that is all that matters -- your life, yourself, your pettiness, your shallowness, your brutality, your violence, your greed, your ambition, your daily agony and endless sorrow -- that is what you have to understand and nobody on earth or in heaven is going to save you from it but yourself."

- Jiddu Krishnamurti, "Freedom from the Known".








Krishnamurti was adopted as a child by the Theosophical Society to become a messianic figure - a vessel for the mystical "World Teacher" entity and the leading figure of the Order of the Star in the East. However, when he was 34 he resigned from his role and decided to dismantle the Order entirely, returning all the significant assests which had been donated to it, and stated that "truth is a pathless land". He was convinced that following any kind of religion, ideology, doctrine or teacher will not bring anyone closer to discovering any sort of truths about life.


As someone who was brought up to become a fundamentalist Christian, it's fair to say that his book kind of resonates with me.


The author goes way beyond of just explaining why all the different religions and philosophies are wrong. According to him, we as people are just a bunch of fearful little dweebs, forever tangled in our futile pursuits of escaping both life and death at the same time. Our search for pleasure brings only pain, our search of love ends in toxic relationships that are based on fragile illusions of our own creation, we waste our energy by dwelling in the past and worrying about the future, and we fragment our very beings in a confused, violent struggle against ourselves.


While I find it hard to disagree with any of that, it's not what his book is really about. All the while I was reading it, I had this strange feeling that I'm partaking in an exercise. The feeling becomes rather obvious towards the end of the book, which isn't very long by the way - it's almost as if it's meant to be read over and over again.


This book is an exercise to help us free ourselves of our many conditionings, fears and pains, and to discover the passion for living. To find the joy in learning and seeing both the world and ourselves as their truly are. To find out what love really is.


It's not the easiest of books, and I don't know if I'm able to find the freedom he talks about. But I think I'll give it a shot, and perhaps you should too.

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