Phenomenology
Krishnamurti's Consciousness Is Its Content
Consciousness as Its Conditioned Content; the Observer Is the Observed
Jiddu Krishnamurti held that ordinary consciousness is identical with its content, the conditioned deposit of memory, belief, fear, and self-image, and that the observer who seems to stand apart from experience is itself a product of thought. He proposed that choiceless awareness, observation without selecting, naming, or judging, can expose this division and end the inner conflict it sustains. In late dialogues with physicist David Bohm he also spoke of an unconditioned, universal mind, not produced by the brain, that can act through a quiet brain.
Jiddu Krishnamurti, David Bohm
What consciousness is
Ordinary consciousness is nothing over and above its content: beliefs, memories, fears, pleasures, and images laid down by thought. It is not a container, light, or witness in which contents appear.
Mind and body
Thought is the response of memory stored in brain cells, so Krishnamurti called thought matter and placed consciousness, in his sense, within matter. In the Bohm dialogues he separates this conditioned brain from a mind that is unconditioned and acts on the brain when it is quiet, though he posits no second substance.
Mechanism
Choiceless awareness: observation without an observer, in which the whole content of consciousness is seen at once and insight arises as immediate perception, not as a conclusion reached over time.
Core claims
- The content of consciousness is consciousness, and the two are not separate.
- The observer is a fragment of the observed that has taken itself to be separate, so effort to control oneself sustains inner conflict.
- Thought, as the response of memory stored in the brain, is material and creates psychological time and the self's continuity.
- Choiceless awareness and insight can end conditioning and, Krishnamurti claimed, renew brain cells.
- In late dialogues with Bohm, the conditioned brain is distinguished from an unconditioned, universal mind that acts through a quiet brain.
Criticisms
Iddo Landau challenges Krishnamurti's rejection of all spiritual methods, questioning the inference from an unconditioned goal to the uselessness of preparatory practice. His earlier description of brain, mind, and consciousness as one movement sits uneasily with the later talk of a mind separate from the brain. Similarity of human experiences does not establish that all people share one conscious subject.
Implications
- Survival beyond death: Unlikely
- Since the personal self is assembled by thought from memory stored in the brain, nothing personal carries on. The universal mind of the late dialogues is impersonal.
- Meaning and purpose: Cosmic/Ultimate
- In the Bohm dialogues Krishnamurti tentatively assents that the universe is like the body of an absolute mind and that cosmic order is itself in meditation, with intelligence and compassion beyond memory.
Related theories
- Bohm's Implicate-Explicate Order (Overlap)
- Buddhism's Empty, Illusory Phenomenal Consciousness (Overlap)
- Hume’s Bundle Theory of Perceptions (Overlap)
- Spira's Non-Duality (Compatible)
Sources
- The First and Last Freedom, Jiddu Krishnamurti (1954)
- The Awakening of Intelligence, Jiddu Krishnamurti (1973)
- The Wholeness of Life, Jiddu Krishnamurti (1978)
- The Ending of Time, Jiddu Krishnamurti and David Bohm (1985)
- The Future of Humanity: A Conversation, Jiddu Krishnamurti and David Bohm (1986)
- Thought as a System, David Bohm (1994)
- The phenomenological psychology of J. Krishnamurti, P. Butcher (1986)
- Krishnamurti’s insistence on pathless enlightenment: A critique, Iddo Landau (2019)
- Krishnamurti's Consciousness Is Its Content, Landscape of Consciousness (Closer To Truth)