Catch ’em Young?


I applied for a teaching positionAt The Valley School, BengaluruA J. Krishnamurti schoolAsking for an anything-goes positionOf a Philosopher-in-ResidenceBut now … More

The Quarrel with the Present: Human Love, Pleasure, and the Flight from Being Merely Human


Does human love — the love one person feels for another, sometimes unreturned — help or hinder liberation? This dialogue begins there and refuses the usual escape routes: no sublimating the beloved into the Beloved, no dissolving the particular person into metaphysics. It stays with the scandalously particular: this laugh, this handwriting, this way of falling silent mid-sentence. Along the way it separates the two strands entangled in every love — the ego-dismantling that cracks our solipsism, and the pleasure-seeking that certifies our lack — and examines the precise mechanics by which seeking rains on the parade to liberation: the misattributed ananda, the rented ego-death of sex, the anxiety of separateness managed rather than investigated. Krishnamurti’s “understanding is the action” and Ramana’s summa iru frame the inquiry, but the conversation turns its own weapon on itself at the end: isn’t liberation-seeking the final quarrel with the present? Why flee the human that Brahman itself created? Zorba the Greek enters, dancing on the beach after the mine collapses — and the dialogue discovers that the end-state looks embarrassingly like ordinary life fully inhabited, with one difference: no proprietor left behind experience, filing claims against it.

J. Krishnamurti on Liberation from the Cycle of Samsara


J. Krishnamurti’s answer to the ancient Hindu aspiration for moksha — liberation from the endless cycle of birth and death — is as radical as it is simple: the very self that seeks liberation is the obstacle. For Krishnamurti, the samsaric wheel turns not because we lack the right method or guru, but because thought, operating as time, continuously reconstructs the “me” — the psychological self built from memory, fear, and desire. Every spiritual practice, every path, every system only strengthens the seeker, and the seeker is precisely what must end. Liberation, he insists, is not a future achievement but a present perception — the choiceless awareness of “what is,” without the observer coloring it. When the self falls silent, what remains is not emptiness but something impersonal: intelligence, love, the sacred. This insight echoes across traditions — in Advaita’s witness-consciousness, Zen’s pathless seeing, Eckhart’s Abgeschiedenheit, and Taoism’s wu wei. The traveler was always the only obstacle. There was never a path because there was never anywhere to go.