The Last Talks

When Krishnamurti came to India in November 1985, he was in his ninety-first year. He had returned, in the words of a friend, to ‘say goodbye’. Despite his terminal illness, he visited Rajghat School in Varanasi, the Rishi Valley School in Andhra Pradesh, and Vasanta Vihar in Madras (now Chennai) to give public talks and participate in the discussions with all the vigour and passionate concern of the previous sixty years of his working life. In his last talk, at Vasanta Vihar, he inquired into the origin of life and said: ‘Creation is something that is most holy, that is the most scared thing in life, and if you gave made a mess of your life, change it. Change it today, not tomorrow.’

Publisher: Krishnamurti Foundation India

Current publication: 2018

ISBN: 978-81-87326-23-6

Pages count: 100

Format: paperback

First published: 1988

What Are You Looking For?

What is love?
Who am I without my relationships?
What is the relationship between myself and society?

One of the world's greatest philosophical teachers, Krishnamurti, offers his inspiring wisdom on a core feature of life: our relationships. From parents to partners and colleagues to friends, Krishnamurti answers our deepest defining questions and reveals a path to truly loving yourself, others and the world around you.

Publisher: Rider

Current publication: 2021

Pages count: 208

Format: Paperback

First published: 2021

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Can the Mind be Quiet?: Living, Learning, and Meditation

One of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century describes a series of his encounters around the world with a wide variety of spiritual seekers. Their questions and his answers explore the nature of the lived experience, the details of profound self-inquiry and how to live a fulfilled life.

These 60 chapters, with titles like "Solitude Means Freedom", "All Seeking is from Emptiness and Fear", and "Life is an Extraordinarily Beautiful Movement", carry the essence of Krishnamurti's teaching style and profoundest wisdom.

Each one reflects an encounter K had at different times during the sixties and seventies. It opens with a poetic account of the location where the encounter took place, plus occasionally a description of the seeker that K has met. The chapter then moves back and forth between the seeker and the teacher, giving the reader plenty to reflect upon.

This is previously unpublished material. Readers will be captivated by the luminous prose and the piercing insight. The style is enigmatic and poetical but each chapter contains more than enough for the reader to consider, perhaps as a daily practice. In the style of Paulo Coelho they have the quality of fables, but the teaching is far more profound and challenging.

Genres:

Learning, Meditation

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Unconditioning & Education Vol. 2

The Need for a Radical Approach

This book is the second and last volume in a series that presents a collection of dialogues in which renowned educator and religious teacher J. Krishnamurti explores with parents and teachers the need for a radical approach to schooling and their intention to establish such a school in the Ojai valley in California. They discuss the conditioning effects on children and educators of teaching and environments in schools based on traditional methods of education. They look at the stultifying effects of knowledge-based approaches which, instead of broadening the minds of children in a setting that encourages observation and creativity, conditions them to conform to society. To free the mind’s broader potential and to educate the whole human being they see that there must be right relationship between students and teachers in an atmosphere of attention, care and trust.

ISBN: 9780692966174
Pages: 296
Publisher: Krishnamurti Foundation of America

Published: December 20, 2017
Publisher: Krishnamurti Foundation of America
Editors:

J. Krishnamurti

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Insights into Education

Bringing About a Totally New Mind

Editions:Paperback

ISBN: 978-1539500445
Size: 5.50 x 8.50 in
Pages: 200

Kindle

Insights into Education presents the educational philosophy of J. Krishnamurti in an easy to use, topic-based format. It is a practical handbook that comes alive when used as an introduction to group investigation and dialogue. What it offers to teachers everywhere is an inroad into the many matters of concern with which they are faced on a daily basis. That we cannot continue as we have been doing, with rote-learning, fact-finding, and a modicum of analysis as the building blocks of education, is obvious to anyone who is at all concerned with teaching and learning in a world with accelerating technological advancement, alienation, and despair. It is these very issues that are tackled here, sometimes implicitly but always at depth.

What Krishnamurti proposes, and here discloses, is a different approach to learning altogether, one that distinguishes itself radically from what we normally understand by that term: the accumulation of knowledge, with its application and testing. By narrowing down our understanding to the pragmatic and the measurable, we forfeit the opportunity to probe deeply and to awaken intelligence in our students and in ourselves. What is meant by intelligence in this context is not the capacity to memorize and measure, but that subtler ability to see the whole which comes alive in a human being when he/she sees the limits of the measurable. To awaken this intelligence is the goal of education.

Published: December 20, 2016
Publisher: Krishnamurti Foundation of America
Genres:

Education, Learning, Meditation

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Excerpt:

Discover the Immeasurable

Editions:Paperback

Pages: 88

Kindle

Pages: 88

This series of six lectures given by J. Krishnamurti in Hamburg, Germany in 1956, are based on the need for radical change in relationship to our minds. He explains: 'To understand the immeasurable, which is to enter into a different world altogether, we must understand this world in which we live, this world which we have created and of which we are a part-the world of ambition, greed, envy, hatred, the world of separation, fear and lust. That means we must understand ourselves, the unconscious as well as the conscious, and this is not very difficult if you set your mind to it.'

Publisher: Hohm Press
88 pages

Publisher: Hohm Press
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Excerpt:

"Meditation is the process of understanding oneself. Self-knowledge brings wisdom. And as the mind begins to understand the whole process of itself, it becomes very quiet, completely still, without any sense of movement or demand. Then, perhaps, that which is not measurable comes into being."

Reviews:G. R. Christie on Amazon.com wrote:

I've been a Krishnamurti fan for years. This book is filled with brutally honest insite into the nature of personal reality. I highly recommend it.

School Without Fear

Editions:Paperback

Pages: 222

The dialogues in this book School Without Fear are being published sixty years after Krishnamurti held them at Rajghat Besant School, which he had founded on the banks of the Ganges in the early 1930s. From December 1954 to February 1955, he stayed on the campus and talked to teachers and parents.

Ranging from articulating his most sublime vision of life to thrashing out the practicalities of running a boarding school, he covers every conceivable aspect of education. The result is these twenty-six dialogues, which perhaps form the longest series of dialogues on education in the entire Krishnamurti repertoire.

Publisher: Krishnamurti Foundation India
Genres:

Education

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Excerpt:

Can we discuss the question of the competitive spirit, how to eradicate it, because that may be one of the fundamental reasons why society is crumbling. Culture is crumbling because of this terrible spirit of competitiveness, with its ambition, comparison, and condemnation, and can we eradicate it totally in this school? Giving various reasons, will that really bring about a dynamic activity to create something new? Merely examining the hindrances, will that produce any result? By discussing thoroughly the problem, the competitive spirit in students and in us, we will come to the fact that it exists. Perhaps if we can go deeply into whether it is true and whether we should encourage it, whether we should discourage it, and why we should discourage it, then we shall be able to deal with the other problems.

Unconditioning and Education Vol.1

The need for a radical approach

Part of the Education series:

Unconditioning and Education Vol.1

Editions:Paperback - Volume I

Pages: 156

This book presents a series of dialogues in which renowned educator and religious teacher J. Krishnamurti explores with parents and teachers the need for a radical approach to schooling and their intention to establish such a school in the Ojai valley in California. They discuss the conditioning effects on children and educators of teaching and environments in schools based on traditional methods of education. They look at the stultifying effects of knowledge-based approaches which, instead of broadening the minds of children in a setting that encourages observation and creativity, conditions them to conform to society. To free the mind’s broader potential and to educate the whole human being they see that there must be right relationship between students and teachers in an atmosphere of attention, care and trust.

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Excerpt:

What does it mean to be educated? Is it to conform to the pattern of society, acquiring enough knowledge to act skilfully in that society? Does to be educated mean adjusting oneself to society and following the dictates of that society? Is education merely to cultivate one segment of the mind to use knowledge skilfully?

Is it possible to educate the totality of man, instead of cultivating memory as we do, and depending on that memory to act skilfully? The cultivation of memory and dependence on that is part of the degeneration of humanity, because then man becomes merely mechanical, always acting in the field of the known. When we are acting in the field of knowledge, we are acting according to a past pattern; so then the brain must be conditioned, it has no flexibility.

Commentaries On Living, First Series

Editions:Paperback

Pages: 254

An unusual mixture of descriptions of nature and the psychological problems which constitute the essence of the human condition, in brief two- or three-page chapters. The three-book series is among the easiest of Krishnamurti's books to read. A few of the many subjects discussed include: ambition, the nature of wisdom, fear, and what is true action.

Publisher: Quest Books
Author/Editor: J. Krishnamurti
254 pp

Publisher: Quest Books
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Excerpt:

From the book:

Gossip is the very antithesis of intensity and earnestness. To talk about another, pleasantly or viciously, is an escape from oneself, and escape is the cause of restlessness. Escape in its very nature is restless. Concern over the affairs of others seems to occupy most people, and this concern shows itself in the reading of innumerable magazines and newspapers with their gossip columns, their accounts of murders, divorces and so on.

As we are concerned with what others think of us, so we are anxious to know all about them; and from this arise the crude and subtle forms of snobbishness and the worship of authority. Thus we become more and more externalized and inwardly empty. The more externalized we are, the more sensations and distractions there must be, and this gives rise to a mind that is never quiet, that is not capable of deep search and discovery.

Commentaries on Living, Second Series

Editions:Paperback

Pages: 242

An unusual mixture of descriptions of nature and the psychological problems which constitute the essence of the human condition, in brief two- or three-page chapters. The three-book series is among the easiest of Krishnamurti's books to read. A few of the many subjects discussed include: ambition, the nature of wisdom, fear, and what is true action.

Publisher: Quest Books
Author/Editor: J. Krishnamurti
242 pp - Paper

Publisher: Quest Books
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Reviews:Stephen Dedalus on Amazon.com wrote:

★★★★★
When I first got this book I had absolutely no idea who the man Krishnamurti was or what his life was like. I was simply intrigued by the title of the book. After reading the first two commentaries I began to realize that this wouldn't be like anything I've ever read before. I was reading it through the haze of my own conditioning and I would have dropped the book right there, as nothing was making sense. But something made me want to just read on - I don't know if it is the sheer lyrical beauty of the descriptions in his book or the lure of something that is really true. Whatever the reason, I just could not keep my hands off it after I went on.

It can really be a tumultous experience to suddenly realize that the basis of everything that you have believed in and taken support or refuge in is all false. But once you are over that, you then start looking at life very differently. You just stop running with the mad crowd and you stand aside and ask yourself "What have I been doing with my life so far?" Thats the kind of effect that this book had on me and I cannot imagine that a serious reader will go through this book without wanting to change his life after that.

Customer on Amazon.com wrote:

★★★★★
Krishnamurti writes simpler, more descriptive prose than Hemingway; he dispenses more nondual wisdom in more depth than a score of Zen masters combined; he dissects the armour of the personality more quickly, more gently, more accurately than any psychologist ever has. These are not exaggerations. These Commentaries are, along with his journals and notebook, the only major works in print (at least that I am aware of, and I am aware of most) that he actually wrote himself; the rest of his books are, of course, compilations of talks and conversations. Only a man of such surpassing conscious mastery could write so perfectly with so little effort; if there is any justice in the universe these books will stay in print for a thousand years. If you like Krishnamurti you need these.