Urgency of Change • The Krishnamurti Podcast

Keith Berwick is a four-time Emmy Award winning television broadcaster, and senior fellow of the Aspen Institute. His career also includes historian, educator, newspaper publisher and editor. He lives in Santa Barbara, California. This second interview was recorded in Los Angeles in 1983, two years after the first. Themes include: What is a human being? What is an individual? Clarity can only come into being when there is no confusion. One must have physical security, but it is being denied because we think in terms of tribalism. Disorder creates authority. Ambition, jealousy, desire and pleasure are not love. What is intelligence? What is thinking? Conscious meditation is determination, not meditation. To meditate you must understand relationship. What is the root of desire? Is there another instrument than thought? If thought has its right place, then you can look. Find us online at kfoundation.org and on social media as Krishnamurti Foundation Trust

Keith Berwick is a four-time Emmy Award winning television broadcaster, and senior fellow of the Aspen Institute. His career also includes historian, educator, newspaper publisher and editor. He lives in Santa Barbara, California. This first interview was recorded in Los Angeles in 1981. Berwick begins by asking: Why, in 1929, Krishnamurti gave up being the head of The Order of the Star. Other themes include: What is the major theme of the teachings? The fundamental issue is whether the human condition, with all its misery, anxiety and sorrow can be changed. We don’t realise that our consciousness is the common ground on which we all stand; we thinks we are separate. There is nothing sacred in what thought has created. How does one achieve right action, right relationship? If you have no image you can never be hurt. Freedom is to be free from the image-building machinery, which is thought. Find us online at kfoundation.org and on social media as Krishnamurti Foundation Trust

Jacob Needleman is Professor of Philosophy at San Francisco State University and former Director of the Center for the Study of New Religions at Berkeley. He is the author of many books, including The Heart of Philosophy, Money and the Meaning of Life, Time and the Soul, and I Am Not I. This second conversation with Krishnamurti was recorded in Malibu, California in 1971. Questions that come up in the conversation include: Is it possible to be free of the centre, so that the centre doesn’t create space around itself and build a wall? Can the centre be still? Can consciousness empty itself of its content? Is love within the field of consciousness? Are there environments which are conducive to liberation? Find us online at kfoundation.org and on social media as Krishnamurti Foundation Trust

Jacob Needleman is Professor of Philosophy at San Francisco State University and former Director of the Center for the Study of New Religions at Berkeley. He is the author of many books, including The Wisdom of Love, Time and the Soul, Why Can't We Be Good?, and Necessary Wisdom. He popularised the term 'new religious movements' and was honoured by the New York Open Center in 2006. This first conversation with Krishnamurti was recorded in Malibu, California in 1971. It forms the opening chapter of the classic book, The Awakening of Intelligence. Subjects discussed include: the spiritual revolution among young people, hope of a new flowering for civilisation, and whether one can go into oneself at tremendous depths and find out everything, without asking for help. If there were no books or gurus, what we do? Is effort needed to reach God, enlightenment or truth? Why do we divide energy? The observer comes into being in wanting to change ‘what is’. The state of not-knowing is intelligence. Find us online at kfoundation.org and on social media as Krishnamurti Foundation Trust

Alain Naude was Krishnamurti’s private secretary in the 1960s. He met Krishnamurti in 1963 whilst a music lecturer at Pretoria University and a professional concert pianist. He gave up his teaching and performing in 1964 to work with Krishnamurti. Fluent in several languages, he was very helpful at international gatherings and in attracting younger audiences to Krishnamurti’s talks at a time of cultural change in the West.  This second conversation between Naude and Krishnamurti opens with the question: Do good and evil really exist or are they simply conditioned points of view? The inquiry looks at goodness as total order, not only outwardly but inwardly especially. Is virtue the outcome of planning? You cannot will to do good. Either you are good or not good. Will is the concentration of thought as resistance. Are poisonous snakes, sharks and the cruel things in nature evil? The moment we assert that there is absolute evil, that assertion is the denial of the good. Goodness implies total abnegation of the self, because ‘the me’ is always separative. Order means behaviour in freedom. Freedom means love. When one sees all this very clearly there is a marvellous sense of absolute order.  Find us online at kfoundation.org and on social media as Krishnamurti Foundation Trust

Alain Naude was Krishnamurti’s private secretary in the 1960s. He met Krishnamurti in 1963 whilst a music lecturer at Pretoria University and a professional concert pianist. He gave up his teaching and performing in 1964 to work with Krishnamurti. Fluent in several languages, he was very helpful at international gatherings and in attracting younger audiences to Krishnamurti’s talks at a time of cultural change in the West. This conversation with Krishnamurti was recorded in Malibu, California in 1972 and begins by asking: Why do we divide the world as the human being and the divine? When I realise that my consciousness is the consciousness of the world, and the consciousness of the world is me, whatever change takes place in me affects the whole of consciousness. Can human consciousness undergo a radical change? To find out if there is something beyond this consciousness I must understand the content of consciousness. The mind must go beyond itself. Do we realise that the observer is the content itself? If there is no thought, there is no thinker. If the observer is the observed, what is the nature of change in consciousness? Will is not the factor of change. Radical revolution in consciousness takes place when there is no conflict at all. Find us online at kfoundation.org and on social media as Krishnamurti Foundation Trust

Daniel O’Hanlon was a Jesuit priest and respected theologian. He taught at Marymount University in Los Angeles and for more than 30 years at the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley. He had many contacts in other religions, particularly of Asia, and included aspects of these religions in his teaching. Interested in integration of religions, in 1984 he published Integration of Christian Practices: A Western Christian Looks East.  This conversation with Krishnamurti, recorded in Malibu, California in 1972, asks whether organised religion brings about real depth of understanding. Does the past have any value in coming upon something new? Can the mind empty itself of the pettiness of what man has put together? Thought can be used legitimately and illegitimately. Krishnamurti urges us to find out if there is something beyond tradition and myth.  Find us online at kfoundation.org and on social media as Krishnamurti Foundation Trust

David Bohm has been described as one of the most significant theoretical physicists of the 20th century and was a fellow of the royal society. He worked with Einstein at the Institute for Advanced Study, and on the Manhattan Project with Oppenheimer. Later he pioneered research into quantum physics and models of the brain, being increasingly interested in consciousness, order and thought. Bohm’s books include Wholeness and the Implicate Order, Science, Order and Creativity, and Causation and Chance in Modern Physics.  This relatively early conversation between Bohm and Krishnamurti centres around the relationship between thought and intelligence. Thought is mechanical, measurable, a movement in time. Is intelligence mechanical and of time? Does intelligence use thought? Thought is a pointer; without intelligence the pointer has no value. Politically, religiously and psychologically thought has created a world of tremendous contradiction and fragmentation. Can life be guided by intelligence and lived in harmony? The desire for intelligence has created the image of God. Thought must be completely still for the awakening of intelligence. You come upon it when you see the whole. The quality of a mind that sees the whole is not touched by thought. Therefore there is perception and insight.  Find us online at kfoundation.org and on social media as Krishnamurti Foundation Trust 

Chogyam Trungpa Rimpoche was a Buddhist meditation master and a major figure in the dissemination of Buddhism to the West. He founded more than one hundred meditation centres throughout the world, including Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, where Pema Chodron, Allen Gingberg and Ken Wilber were among his many students. He wished to present the path of meditation in secular terms, developing a programme called Shambhala Training. This conversation with Krishnamurti was recorded in San Diego, California in 1972. In it, the pair ask: what is the quality of the mind that is no longer held in the matrix of experience? What is meditation and why should one meditate? They inquire into seeing without the 'me', and the possibility of a total observation without time and memory. Find us online at kfoundation.org and on social media as Krishnamurti Foundation Trust

Oliver Hunkin was head of religious programmes at the BBC, where he revolutionised the format. He was also an author and cartoonist. In his memoirs he wrote: ‘We have to admit there is an air of antique unreality about organised religion. The majority of people do not see the point of it. Have we lost track of the fact that religion is a specific experience rather than a system of dogma?’ Indeed, he had a revelatory spiritual experience one evening whilst driving, later saying: ‘I felt totally at one with the landscape, and with myself, and with all creation. The memory of it has affected my attitude to life ever since’. This interview with Krishnamurti was recorded at Brockwood Park in 1970. In the conversation, Krishnamurti states that authority has crippled the mind, religiously and inwardly. The authority of belief, imposed by religions, destroys the discovery of reality. One relies on authority because one is afraid to stand alone. To understand fear one must also understand pleasure, as they are two sides of the same coin. Are we seeing each other with an image? There is love only when I have understood myself and so in myself there is no fragmentation, anger, ambition or greed. Effort is a contradiction of energies. A meditative mind is a very silent mind. Find us online at kfoundation.org and on social media as Krishnamurti Foundation Trust