Freedom from the Known

He patterned his particular art form after the philosophy of the great Indian philosopher, Jiddu Krishnamurti.

Freedom from the Known was one of his, I think that's his seminal book.

The Awakening of Intelligence.

Krishnamurti, his whole mission was to set men unconditionally free And Bruce Lee loved this unconditional freedom and he wanted to apply it to a martial art.

Jiddu Krishnamurti.

Krishnamurti has a book called Freedom from the Known.

That's his seminal work.

Everybody knows that work, Freedom from the Known.

And he had a very powerful speech in the 30s called Truth is a Pathless Land.

And I think that

And you, for some reason, it's, it's not as fun to drive, and you can't go as fast as you wanna go, and you feel like you're always being pulled back toward the past.

And so what The Big Leap does, the book does, is just show you where the handbrake is on, and how to let go of it and, and take it, and what's holding it in place, and shows you how to basically soar free after that.

And so there's an old, uh, proverb that says, "If a bald man finds a cure, he will use it first on himself." Well, I was my first customer of the upper limits problem way back 60 years ago, and, you know, then figured out, uh, when I wrote The Big Leap, how to explain it to people so that they could move through it.

To what the real issue is, though, is what I call your zone of genius.

Yeah.

Because day after day after day, people...

You know, like I'll get a letter from somebody that I didn't even know they sold my book there.

You know, like-

Uh, then, uh, another very, uh, uh, very interesting small point I want to mention, how the, uh, your teaching and the Buddha's teaching go together without any conflict.

I think in one place, in one Freedom from the Known, in that book, you say, "Control and outward discipline are not the way, nor has undisciplined life any value." When I read this, I wrote there also on the margin, Buddha told a Brahmin.

A Brahmin asked the Buddha, "How did you attain to these heights of spiritual and intellectual height? By what precepts, by what discipline, by, uh, uh, what, uh, uh, knowledge did you attain?" Buddha said, "Not by knowledge, not by discipline, not by precepts, not by works, nor without them." That is the important thing.

He said not by these things, but not without them also.

But we really haven't made contact.

Krishnamurti's seminal book is Freedom from the Known.

For Krishnamurti, the psychological memory of whatever brokenness raised you is a type of prison.

And then you take that and you mirror it in your ad- adult relationships.

Then you take that into your adult relationships.

Krishnamurti is saying you're mirroring what you modeled and you're attracted to the image of what you modeled in another.

Images, his central investigation, right? He says, what if the greatest obstacle to intimate love comes from the psychological knowledge, the memory we carry into relationships, including everything we believe we know about ourselves, our parents, and what love should look like? Krishnamurti's seminal work, Freedom from the Known, and his teachings on the mirror of relationship converge on an extraordinary, demanding proposition.

Human beings frequently encounter each other through psychological structures assembled from memory, experience, fear, desire, judgment, pain, pleasure, and cultural conditioning.

Okay, I think I will tell you a little bit more when we go through the text.

The text that I've chosen is a chapter in the book Freedom from the Known.

Krishnamurti himself has written very little in comparison to the entirety of texts that are available.

By the way, you don't have to buy books.

And this is something that was unfortunately quite rare for Krishnamurti because he was held in such a high esteem on the one hand, and on the other hand, Krishnamurti himself deemed many other interlocutors that he had in not so much of a high esteem that he let them interrupt him so much in his conversations.

So I will leave that in the description and I hope you will find interest in listening to that and get inspired by that.

So what I have here is a chapter, chapter 14 from the book Freedom from the Known, and I will give you selections and comment on them to hopefully make it more understandable to you what he meant with some of his core ideas.

So the chapter starts off with the following sentences.