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Jiddu Krishnamurti

Regret, Guilt and changing your life

In Eat Pray Love (book and movie) by Elizabeth Gilbert we meet Richard, a western devotee of an Indian guru who chastises Elizabeth for every attitude she has, or so it seems – helping her deal with the issues of living in an ashram and learning to meditate. The main lesson Richard teaches Elizabeth is [...]

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Jiddu Krishnamurti as a man of his time

Let met start this by saying that as I’ve had more experience meditating, I have gained in respect for Jiddu Krishnamurti, because he describes the experience so well. However, it’s not thanks to Krishnamurti that I did start meditating, nor is he any help in doing so. And that is precisely the limit to his [...]

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Using spirituality and psychology as a defence

1) Someone asking me to become a lecturer on an event asked me about karma: I hear people saying, about someone else, that their ill health or poverty is ‘bad karma’. Tell that to the starving child in Africa. She was right of course. 2) I heard a longtime Krishnamurti student saying: Your whole work [...]

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10 simple mindfulness exercises

I was eating at an Ethiopian restaurant yesterday. For those not familiar with that cuisine, the food is served on thin pancakes and one is supposed to eat one’s dinner with the right hand. For me it was a painful exercise in overcoming my conditionings. The table went quiet: a measure of the concentration we [...]

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What’s normal – about conditioning

Religion and social pressure are two sides of the same coin. Religion gives meaning to our lives, shapes our actions – which means that people who let their lives be shaped by other pressures than our own, are by definition strange. Hard to deal with. This comes out, in the USA, in people pretending they’re [...]

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Intelligence and wisdom: not the same thing

I have grown up around smart people. You know – the kind of people that can pick and choose what to do with their lives, because they’re so talented. I’m here to tell you: some smart people are wise, some aren’t. I’m saying this because of someone’s comment on Facebook. I had put up a [...]

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If you see the Buddha, Kill Him – an old Zen koan

Perhaps that’s how I can best explain my ultimate rejection of Jiddu Krishnamurti’s teachings. I’ve studied his work, learned a lot from it, and have since moved on. I’m saying this because yesterday someone approached me on facebook because I had written negatively about Jiddu Krishnamurti. She sent me some video’s that I thought, honestly, [...]

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About being observant of life… poverty and riches

I’d like to start this off with a story one of our Dutch theosophical teacher sometimes tells. Ronald Engelse was frequently at Saanen to hear Jiddu Krishnamurti talk. Krishnamurti would say, in his talks, that one should observe everything, the sky, the mountains, the grass… After a lecture like that, what did Ronald see people [...]

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Levels of meditation: relaxation, concentration, contemplation, awareness…

Richard asked on my last post: How do you usually distinguish contemplation from meditation? I’d say contemplation is a type of meditation: a type with more thought than most. To explain the matter as well as I understand it (can’t do better than that after all), I think I have to categorize all types of [...]

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Follow your own path – spiritual virtue no.4

Following ‘the path’ was once such an important spiritual ideal in the Theosophical Society that Jiddu Krishnamurti took it upon himself to break it down. (After first having written a whole prose poem about it ‘The Path‘) I’m not sure though whether the path itself was the issue, but the here and now. I’m sure [...]

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