11. Knowledge

“Knowledge is not comparable with intelligence, knowledge is not wisdom.”

J. Krishnamurti

Philosophy in the West, at least since the time of Plato, has been all about knowledge and the static, inflexible world where knowledge works. Plato believed that true knowledge could only be about things that did not change (and therefore could not be of this world). In this regard, Plato’s shadow has been cast over Western philosophy down to the present. Alfred North Whitehead was correct in his observation that all Western philosophy is but a footnote to Plato. The philosophy of Plato and the West is about knowledge and therefore does not allow for change.

Each perspective on knowledge in the West branches into its own “school” of rigid believers willing to commit themselves to conflict and wars for the “rightness” of their truths. Philosophy in the West is the wisdom of knowledge about eternal truths, and, since wisdom and intelligence are of the moment and not eternal, Western philosophy fails to give us wisdom and intelligence. Instead, the knowledge of Western philosophy causes conflict and suffering between the knower and his world.

Knowledge is all about “becoming,” the making of war on the “being” of the present. Absolute knowledge, like all absolutes, is an authority that we must follow and conform to.

6. Systems and Experience

Systems, philosophical or political, are all about the denial of being. Systems are the rules to which a ‘becoming’ person must conform in order to achieve the wisdom that the system promises. It is the achievement of the adherent’s future, an ideal that he can attain by mastering the system’s directives.

‘Being,’ on the other hand, cannot be systemized; it has no form or structure. In order to experience being, man must face time stripped of things from the past, including the recipes and algorithms that make up a system of thought.

Systems, like all things that enclose, are barriers to which things are confined – boxes within which we must confine our thinking. Philosophical systems that we create in our minds are barriers for our minds, confining that great organ of adaptation that needs openness to exercise its full potential. Systems are replaced in time by new systems because all systems are barriers that put the mind in conflict with its experience. See p. 168, Being and the End of History.

“We think that we will be able to live happily, creatively, if we learn a method, a technique, a style, but creative happiness comes only when there is inward richness, it can never be attained through any system.”

J. Krishnamurti

3. Therefore I Am

I think, therefore I am.
Rene Descartes

Modern philosophy was born with the human ego being advanced as the true judge of all things. Rene Descartes, with his famous deification of the mind, became known as the “father of modern philosophy.” The absolute truth that was once the possession of the gods of Plato was replaced by the absolute truth that was the possession of the thinking man. The goal of philosophy remained absolute knowledge, but the primary issue of philosophy became epistemology, the study of what absolute truths were knowable by man. Descartes introduced the modern era by making the mind of man, the invisible component behind the human brain, the center of the world.

Thought is a process and is more than something about change – thought is change. The organism wherein a thought is centered is changed by thought, regardless of whether it is identified as the same organism after the thought has finished. A thought may be conceptualized as a series of pictures that are interrelated or as a series of connected sub-thoughts, but regardless of the conceptualization, it is a flow that is ordered through space and time rather than a static thing that is possessed and controlled by an unchanging ego.

Thought occurs in nature and man gives his ego credit for being the thinker. See p. 195, Being and the End of History.

We think that we will be able to live happily, creatively, if we learn a method, a technique, a style, but creative happiness comes only when there is inward richness, it can never be attained through any system.
J. Krishnamurti