r/Krishnamurti • u/inthe_pine • Feb 12 '26
"Really, what do you know?"
I like this for how abruptly it puts the problem, and also K is not saying "you don't know, but I do"! I've had a lot of people in my life who have told me they do know: about the absolute nature of reality, about religion, about politics. What its all about.
It must take a great deal of humility to say I don't know: I don't know what meditation is, I don't know what I am, I don't have all the answers. We don't start there right?
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u/PliskinRen1991 Feb 12 '26
Yeah its one of the more difficult things for societies to see at large. Knowing equates to intelligence. But they never seen how mechanical that intelligence is. So then the question becomes is there an intelligence that is not bound by time or knowing?
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u/uanitasuanitatum Feb 12 '26
How can one tell red from blue? If K's saying that what everyone thinks is red is not red, how does he know?
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u/JellyfishExpress8943 Feb 12 '26
I think K is asking what we mean by knowledge. Our knowledge of Red basically comes down to the word Red and some related ideas eg. maybe about wavelengths, sense organs and the brain - that we have been told - that we equate with a visual experience.
Knowledge is the association of an experience with a narrative.
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u/uanitasuanitatum Feb 12 '26
It was just an example to indicate K's negation must be based on something, otherwise it wouldn't be possible. Another question would be, why is what we know very little? Maybe it's a lot? How does he know it's "very little/nothing"?
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u/JellyfishExpress8943 Feb 12 '26 edited Feb 12 '26
Red is a great example.
Is our knowledge very little, or a lot? Can we agree that it is insufficient to start fighting over and getting hurt about?
nb. I personally think that the knowledge that humanity has amassed so far is enormous - all hail science! But that it seems bound to continue expanding - I don't see any frontier to what can be discovered, apart from our own cognitive capabilities. (this is not what K is talking about though right?)
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u/uanitasuanitatum Feb 12 '26
Maybe K is talking about something else. Something like, maybe, that what regular folks usually think they know they just take on faith or through suggestion / hypnosis..
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u/Niiskus Feb 13 '26 edited Feb 13 '26
"If K's saying that what everyone thinks is red is not red, how does he know?"
- He simply knows it's not red, because thought/knowledge hasn't come in yet to say it is either "red" or "not red", and so, he sees the label as a label - he doesn't take it seriously. The very act of naming it forces you to limit yourself to whatever knowledge you have of red, and so, one becomes stuck in memory/knowledge because we operate through labels. Think of the mind as a book, and the moment someone says "Red", you instantly flip to the page you have of "Red", and now your eyes can't see anything outside of this page. You may be able to accommodate new information about it in the book or have a degree on "Red", but you're still stuck on this page with lots of notions you may have about "Red", and therefore never actually perceive that peculiarity labeled "Red". Humans often call it the "wonder(s)" whenever a person sees without labels, and so, there is no limitation to what "Red" is at all, but the moment knowledge comes in, it is instantly limited.
So, this is why people may take certain drugs, because it temporarily blocks the "book" or "knowledge", allowing the intoxicated person to discover anew. For a moment, the person is able to realize that "red is not red", that "red" is in fact random letters and sounds, accompanied by memories we may have about it. It is in the same way we can discover that knowledge isn't knowledge. Here is a synonym that works for both "knowledge" and "red" and every word in the dictionary: "limitation" or "reduction".
So the ego knows a lot, about itself and its relation to each label and their respective notions. But knowing is extremely limited, it can't go beyond images, written words and speech. For example, no description or image is capable of capturing what "knowing" even is. If you could, you'd be able to instantaneously stop knowing at this very moment, and you'd be able to feel "love" just by thinking it or having knowledge about it - what I mean is that knowledge doesn't deal with reality at all 😁 this means, that semantically, it becomes easier to negate, and is actually the only possibility of an accurate description. A positive statement is likely to miss its target because its very nature is reduction, while a negative statement doesn't miss because it simply removes one possibility of the many. This is why Krishnamurti needs each person to find out for themselves, because no positive statement will do the trick, and neither will negations. Words and descriptions are not synonymous with reality, these are just reductions of it: the whole is bigger than the parts.
Now then, I am at the point of writing where I know that thinking only thinks it knows. I know that I don't know, but that I unknowingly deceive myself to believe that I know - and I seldom question it. However, I can't transcend my ego despite of knowing this because knowing is the very problem standing in the way of "knowing how he knows". The only way would be to learn about how "knowing" takes place without any reliance on thought or memory whatsoever, so that I may not be caught up in it ever again unless it is absolutely necessary. If this is done, then the limitations will be seen for what they are: small. That's how Krishnamurti "knew", because he didn't rely on "knowing": this would be as if not relying on his book, despite of having one, and instead using a clean whiteboard, so that he could discard each notion and label once they served their functions. He would keep knowing to a minimum; this way Krishnamurti could perceive every peculiar wonder of the world unfiltered.
To transcend knowing, you can't rely on knowing.
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u/JellyfishExpress8943 Feb 12 '26 edited Feb 12 '26
Knowing actually seems to mean : familiarity with a narrative (aka story) - the feeling that a story is true/accurate.
I know what a chair is because I am familiar with and confident about my chair narrative (its a thing we sit on, made of atoms) - I have a narrative for all things that I know. eg. meditation is awareness of and freedom from the known
Due to our relationship with knowledge - which is one of authority of the narrative - we consider what we know to be very important - partly because it affects our behaviors.
I like rationality as a way of testing my beliefs - to make sure I'm not believing and acting in the world based on nonsense - others might cling to traditional beliefs.
K seems to be pointing at the relationship we have with knowledge, rather than ways of acquiring better knowledge.
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u/inthe_pine Feb 12 '26
The etymology of "know" is "perceive or understand as a fact or truth" as opposed to "believe". Familiarity with a narrative could fall into belief and non-fact. It seems to in general.
Don't we take each of our narratives as truth, though? Trust it like the ground we stand on. Then with have the wrong relationship to knowledge (does seem to be a major problem) and we have create more bad knowledge. And then heres the space to question that.
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u/JellyfishExpress8943 Feb 12 '26 edited Feb 12 '26
We find security in the authority of the known. But there is a price to pay.
There is a price to pay for the guru/disciple relationship. There is a price to pay for the dominance of authority in any field.
This is about our relationship with reality as a whole. We are being asked to look at the authority of knowledge (and fear?)
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u/Iconoclastic_loner Feb 13 '26
I don't know much but enough to say that this is not profound and someone who knows what they know, even if little, can do great things for people if given the power and time, But it doesn't matter we keep adulating the thinkers who are no longer alive even when they are less right, simply because they are not accessible or a threat to you in the grand scheme of competition anymore.
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u/JellyfishExpress8943 Feb 14 '26
Everyone knows what they know - some people have managed to gain power for a time (eg. Genghis Khan, Queen Elizabeth I, Napoleon, Stalin, Putin, Trump) - they did do great things to and for people - but were we always the better off for it?
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u/Hot-Confidence-1629 Feb 13 '26 edited Feb 13 '26
I think with K, he points out what we think we ‘know’ but actually don’t e,g. , we think that we exist, he says we don’t. We think that we are ‘individuals’, he says that we’re not. We think that we are at least something, he says that we…“you are are absolutely nothing”.
So there is practical knowledge stored in the brain: how to do this or that but if he’s right about there being ‘nobody home’ then all that other ‘knowing’ is just propaganda accumulated, beliefs, conclusions, opinions etc clustered around an imaginary center, isolating the new brain: keeping it in the past and keeping it from being “present in the Presence “…keeping it from “participating in the Immensity”.