Simon Griffee

What: Jiddu Krishnamurti

• Space Invaders in the Brazilian Cerrado, Cerrado, Brazil

  Summary: Living in the natural world and experiencing some of first and recent videogames. By Rio Arrojado, Bahia, Brazil, c. 1982. Photograph by my father, Peter Griffee. I was 5 years old, running around with shorts, often knee-high boots and a stick deep in the Brazilian Cerrado. At first we lived in tents, with a makeshift kitchen whose fire also heated water pumped in from the river. There were plant nurseries, big snakes and spiders, a cleared field for futebol and another that served as a runway for a sturdy aeroplane that was the only other way to arrive other than a two-day hike through wild savannah. …continue

• Violence and Identity #

  The National Identity Is Made Up piece in the New York Times reminded me of Jiddu Krishnamurti’s words in Freedom From the Known, Chapter 6: When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. …continue

• Chade-Meng Tan on Neuroplasticity #

  More Krishnamurti-like thinking at Google, this time from Chade-Meng Tan:

  What we think, do, and pay attention to changes the structure and function of our brains.

• Violence

  When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind. …continue

• Education and World Peace #

  Beliefs, ideologies and organized religions are setting us against our neighbours; there is conflict, not only among different societies, but among groups within the same society. We must realize that as long as we identify ourselves with a country, as long as we cling to security, as long as we are conditioned by dogmas, there will be strife and misery both within ourselves and in the world. Then there is the whole question of patriotism. …continue

• What Is It That Comes When Nationalism Goes? #

  Krishnamurti: Obviously, intelligence. But I am afraid that is not the implication in this question. The implication is, what can be substituted for nationalism? Any substitution is an act which does not bring intelligence. If I leave one religion and join another, or leave one political party and later on join something else, this constant substitution indicates a state in which there is no intelligence. How does nationalism go? Only by our understanding its full implications, by examining it, by being aware of its significance in outward and inward action. …continue

• Salary Rights

  So long as you have a frontier, whether national, economic, religious or social, it is an obvious fact that there cannot be peace.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti, The First and Last Freedom, Relationship and Isolation, pp. 105–106 Would, say, 100 Euros per month for every person on the planet, regardless of whether they work or not, not help the world become a better place? This question came to mind when I watched the images of destroyed Indonesian rainforest in Years of Living Dangerously. …continue

• Krishnamurti at the United Nations in 1985 #

  Here’s a transcript.

• The Library Genesis Project #

  Find most any book you want, I think. Here’s some Jiddu Krishnamurti.

• The Function of Education #

  First chapter from Think on These Things (aka This Matter of Culture), by Jiddu Krishnamurti: I WONDER IF we have ever asked ourselves what education means. Why do we go to school, why do we learn various subjects, why do we pass examinations and compete with each other for better grades? What does this so-called education mean, and what is it all about? This is really a very important question, not only for the students, but also for the parents, for the teachers, and for everyone who loves this earth. …continue

• What Do You Think of Indians? #

  Questioner: What do you think of Indians? Krishnamurti: That is really an innocent question, is it not? To see facts without opinion is one thing, but to have opinions about facts is totally another. It is one thing just to see the fact that a whole people are caught in superstition, but quite another to see that fact and condemn it. Opinions are not important, because I will have one opinion, you will have another, and a third person will have still another. …continue

• I Am Nothing #

  Paul Buchheit, Jiddu Krishnamurti-like: On a scale of one to ten, how good of a cog are you? How well do you function in your assigned role? How much of a man or woman are you? How do you rate yourself as a son or daughter, father or mother, wife or husband, heterosexual or homosexual, liberal or conservative, black or white, winner or loser, shark or sheep, introvert or extrovert, Christian, Muslim, atheist? …continue

• The First and Last Freedom

  Jiddu Krishnamurti’s The First and Last Freedom is a book that has affected me deeply.

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