Krishnamurti and His Statement: “The Observer is the Observed”
“The observer is the observed”, is one of the most profound sentences that Jiddu Krishnamurti ever made, and a human maybe ever spoke, and is likely the most important sentence for humanity. An understanding of it is essential for raising human consciousness to another level.
David Moody is a former teacher, educational director, and he was once a director at one of Krishnamurti’s schools. He wrote three volumes about Krishnamurti and called this his signature epigrammatic statement, and he said that it is a pivotal, overarching insight at the core of his philosophy.
“The observer is the observed” sounds like a sentence that can be easily
shrugged off because it sounds impenetrable, and well, we know, all of us have something more important to do, than to ponder upon some cryptic remarks of some philosophers, of whom we haven’t heard much.
But there are other people, people like David Bohm, a physicist, whose work life was occupied with theoretical physics and in special with quantum physics. This renowned physicist was drawn to Krishnamurti because of this sentence and what he felt, his relation to quantum physics.
From this evolved a long-standing friendship and over the years they had
innumerable meetings where they discussed topics of time and space.
These discussions were so deep and so valuable that they were eventually published as books.
This is an interesting example, how sentences can change lives. Krishnamurti was good at that because he was observing life and society, outside from, what one can call an all-time ongoing conditioning matrix that is imprinting almost every second our brains and that again and again.
His mental capacity leaves a lot of us speechless and baffled about how one can notice, think and express such observations, and we regard that as almost a mystery.
He had this capacity because he was not fragmented, there was no separation between the observer and the observed in him.
Of course, most of us are all the time confronted with mysteries which we
don’t understand, and we got used to living with these mysteries because life nevertheless goes on. But the mysteries of our lives are not impressed by our ignorance neither, they go on too.
As our mental problems go on. That is because we don’t understand that the observer is the observed and its impact on the mind. To understand this statement, we have to discover another area or dimension in our minds.
In this dimension, this statement is living together with an animal that is called simplicity, which is a big, fat old cat. This cat has all the time in the world to look at us through its half-opened eyes, with unwavering attention. It is so attentive that its attention, if humans were observative enough, to notice, fathom them that it is an absolute mystery.
If we asked this animal, what is its access to its consciousness? It would just blink with its eyes, and we would know, in its consciousness there is not something, which has access, and there is not something that it can have access to.
It is. It is just total, non-selective attention!
While we humans live on an entirely different plane than this animal, it is a
eminent topic to us to have or to find the proper access to our consciousness or our mental issues and, of course, to our problems and that, by the way, was one of the main topics of Krishnamurti.
How can one get access to Krishnamurti’s teaching?
Of course, it was a topic for this philosopher too, how one can get access to his teaching. Krishnamurti, from now on called just K, was focused on helping humans to understand their mental issues and problems and to let them find the proper access to their minds. Finding access to our minds is not much different from finding access to K’s eminent, important philosophy.
Having access to Krishnamurti’s teaching, is like having access to oneself!
How else could it be? To understand K’s teaching is to understand oneself. There is no difference in it. It is related in the same way, for example, as to his: “The inner is the outer.”
“The inner is the outer”, is a sentence he often used to describe the state
of our personal consciousness, related to the mental state of humanity and to something that we perceive as our outer world, in contrast to what, we think, is our inner world.
While K never came up with something like a shortlist of instructions on how to understand him and what is necessary for it.
Walter Bernotat, who wrote the preface to the German edition of “A Wholly
Different Way of Living” tried to express it. It is the book where K had his 18 extraordinary discussions with Alan W. Anderson about life, death, and the things of the consciousness between life and death, and Bernotat, was able to break it down into one sentence.
“Though there could be no method offered to Krishnamurti’s teaching,
because every transition is an individual one, there are nevertheless
preconditions, so to speak a basement, namely great sensitivity, high
intensity and a non-selective presence.”
Without this great sensitivity, high intensity, and a non-selective presence, our afford to understand K is mostly more or less fruitless, or even in vain.
That means in this case only an intellectual understanding is possible and where many Krishnamurtians, who tried to explore his teachings, got stuck.
How Did K Explained His Statement “The Observer Is the Observed”
Normally, K didn’t felt the need to explain to people that he doesn’t mean with this statement, that when one looks at a tree, he is becoming the tree. That would be, of course, stupid.
It is understood that a lot of what we perceive or not perceive in others is based on our own mental settings, and here we are back to his statement “The inner is the outer”. Our inner mental settings dictate what we notice in the outer world.
But there is another point to this statement. We are our consciousness, we are not separate from it. Our consciousness is the core of our being, to what almost everybody could agree.
K says that the content of our consciousness is our consciousness, with
everything good or bad, life has put into it.
He proceeded in saying that the thinker is the content of our consciousness and that the thinker is made out of this content, as are his thoughts. Furthermore, he says that we can only think about what we know, what we already have in some way encountered, or experienced, and it should be clear to everybody, that nobody can think about anything he doesn’t know of.
So, if the thinker and the thought exist out of the same material, they must be the same or at least similar, but what are the consequences of this conclusion, and why is it so important?
What is the problem with not understanding, “The observer is the observed”.
It is essentially significant to understand that because our mind plays here a trick on us. After all, out of this separation between the thinker and the thought, the mind gets the conclusion, that he has material on which he can work.
He can suppress this material, run away or analyze it. And to analyze could mean that a neurotic mind looks onto his neuroses and is pretending that he can analyze this neurotic material, as a neutral observer with the option to get rid of it. While he, the observer, is of the same quality as the neurotic material observed and this means he is caught in a process, where he can never free himself.
K often describes it with greed or similar adjectives. The greed in us which we perceive lays not there where we think it lays. Greed is part of the center from where we look, it is part of the inner core of us and not outside on which we can look upon.
But what else can one do? If we are not separated from the material, if we are the material, then it means we can’t do anything about it. It means we can just look at it, into it and that is all we can do, our hands are bound, we are at the mercy of this situation.
But then nothing disturbs us anymore in our watching because we gave up doing anything about it. That means, further, as we watch it, we can see that the process we got stuck in, makes no real sense. Then we can let go of it because if something makes no sense, there is no need to hold on to it.
That means, too, the duality of the observer and the observed ends and therefore the conflict between them.
When we can end this conflict, we just remain with the fact or whatever the observed was. We are not anymore dissipating energy, and we free ourselves this way from these problems.
How to apply this statement or what to do with it?
While K often made remarks that for normal ears sound cryptic, there is often or even always an understanding of them.
The statement “The observer is the observed” is not one of K’s most cryptic statements. It is relatively easy to understand, what hard is, is to understand it truly and not just intellectually.
It must be said that it is only necessary to understand this statement properly, there is no need to apply it. Having understood this statement will always dissolve this sort of conflict where it arises.
The difficulty with this, is to have such a raised consciousness, a consciousness that is so aware, that it can look at every thought that arises. Attentive like a hawk, and only with this attention one can appropriate solve the conflicts of the mind.
K was not always explaining his thoughts or his statements to their very depths. He separated the jewels and the gravel from the dirt, but left it to the people to discover the jewels for themselves.
And he did that because we have to make our own discoveries, we have to do the work by ourselves, we have to learn that in order to be the experts in our own heads.
K never wanted to feed the people with revelations that are ready to digest.
He wanted — and it is understood that he had no expectations at all whatsoever, at least that is something that he claimed — that people learn to look at things by themselves. To learn to investigate, to have the capacity to dissect between dirt, gravel, and jewels, and to be able to polish their jewels, what then would be light in their own consciousness.
The understanding of “The observer is the observed”, enables humans to have a fundamentally different view into one’s psyche. With this different view, it will end a drama we are acting out of our mental ignorance, which results in one of the greatest conflicts we strangely used to live with.
The Cat Simplicity and The Animal Authority
K said that truth is a pathless land, and I say that is where the cat named Simplicity lives.
But we are light-years away from this land and the cat Simplicity. To most of us, it makes sense to suppress, analyze, or flee our thoughts, that is the way we got conditioned by society and that is again how we are conditioning our kids. So, they will end having the same problems as we have, and the reason is that we didn’t find the right answers to our problems.
That is another vicious circle that humans perform for ages. It would be even a paradigm or a milestone, if we explained to kids, that we have no real clue about how to live properly on earth. Notwithstanding mentioning to them that the observer is the observed.
When it is true that the observer is the observed, then it leads us to the question, where and what in God’s name is our ego or our I?
And that is a question, that will raise, probably for most of us, our fears, to which K most likely would have said, fear, of course, must be understood before.
But who I am, to explain Krishnamurti to others. I can’t guarantee anybody that I have caught the subtleties of his language or grasped totally the meaning of his words, and I happily refer interested people to himself, to his videos on YouTube or his books.
Krishnamurti refused to be called an authority, he had too much of Simplicity in himself. The cat which lives in the pathless land of truth. But Authority, one of the common animals in our world, is trying like hell to break into this pathless land because when Authority has truth it is almighty.
However, it can do what it wants, it can’t go there, not even if it has all the time in the universe.
There is a follow-up to this article. Because this topic has connections to psychology.
