PREFACE
These dialogues, the majority of which are on ancient Indian philosophical
themes, were first published in 1972 and have subsequently been reprinted
several times. In offering a second edition, we hope to introduce new readers to
the characteristic style of spiritual inquiry that Krishnamurti was able to nourish.
The participants in these dialogues were not professional philosophers but people
who were trying to rediscover the Indian philosophical past and, in some
important sense which cannot be identified with scholarship, renew that past. In
their attitude to the past, they were more like poets rediscovering a familiar
language rather than like literary scholars anxious to get at the historical truth.
The preface to the first edition of the book provides the clue to what the
participants were seeking.
PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION
Since 1947 J. Krishnamurti, while in India, has been regularly meeting and
holding dialogues with a group of people drawn from a variety of cultural
backgrounds and disciplines—intellectuals, artists, sannyāsis. During these years,
the methodology of investigation has richened and taken shape. What is revealed
in these dialogues, as if through a microscope, is the extraordinary fluid, vast and
subtle mind of Krishnamurti and the operational process of perception. These
dialogues are not, however, questions and answers. They are an investigation into
the structure and nature of consciousness, an exploration of the mind, its
movement, its frontiers and that which lies beyond. It is also an approach to the
way of mutation.
There has been in these dialogues a coming together of several totally varied
and conditioned minds. There has been a deep challenging of the mind of
Krishnamurti, a relentless questioning that has opened up the depths of the
human psyche. One is witness not only to the expanding and deepening of the
‘limitless’, but also to the impact on the limited mind. This very inquiry leaves
the mind flexible, freeing it from the immediate past and from the grooves of
centuries of conditioning.
In these dialogues, Krishnamurti starts his questioning from a totally tentative
position, from a state of ‘not-knowing’, and, therefore, in a sense, he starts at the
same level as the participants. During the discussion, various analytical inquiries
are made which are tentative and exploratory. There is a questioning without
seeking immediate solutions: a step by step observation of the processes of
thought and its unfoldment—a movement of penetration and withdrawal, every
movement plunging attention deeper and deeper into the recesses of the mind. A
delicate wordless communication takes place; an exposure of the movement of
negation as it meets the positive movement of thought. There is the ‘seeing’ of
fact, of ‘what is’, and the mutation of ‘what is’. This is again perceived from
various directions to examine its validity.
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