Living truth

Truth has no path, and that is the beauty of truth, it is living. A dead thing has a path to it because it is static, but when you see that truth is something living, moving, which has no resting place, which is in no temple, mosque or church, which no religion, no teacher, no philosopher, nobody can lead you to--then you will also see that this living thing is what you actually are--your anger, your brutality, your violence, your despair, the agony and sorrow you live in. In the understanding of all of this is the truth, and you can understand it only if you know to look at those things in your life.

--Jiddu Krishnamurti, Freedom From the Known (1969)

For the past few years, I have been aware of Jiddu Krishnamurti, but I never felt that it was time to dive into his works. It seems that it is finally time, so I am proceeding slowly and gladly. He is challenging and refreshing, and requires time to really flesh out what he is saying. What strikes me most about him is how little he refers to traditional religious or philosophical systems, sages, or saints, and the importance he places on one's own individual approach to truth.

The above passage reminded me of the viewpoint offered by the "new physics" in the first decades of the twentieth century. The traditional scientific attitude of an objective subject observing, objectively, processes in nature, gave way to the discovery that, at deeper levels of physics, the foundation of objective truth in our culture, what is being observed is affected by the observer (summarized in mathematical terms as the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle). Ken Wilber summarizes (from The Spectrum of Consciousness (1977)):

The quantum revolution was so cataclysmic because it attacked not one or two conclusions of classical physics but its very cornerstone, the foundation upon which the whole edifice was erected, and that was the subject-object dualism. That which was Real was supposed to be that which could be objectively observed and measured, yet these "ultimate realities" could not themselves be totally observed or measured under any circumstances, and that is, to say the least, a sloppy form of Reality. . . . As Sullivan put it, "We cannot observe the course of nature without disturbing it" . . . It was abundantly clear to these physicists that objective measurement and verification could no longer be the mark of absolute reality, because the measured object could never be completely separated from the measuring subject--the measured and the measurer, the verified and the verifier, at this level, are one and the same.

 The assumption that underlay the Cartesian and Newtonian scientific models, that objective nature was waiting to be analyzed, discovered, and "figured out" by human subjects is akin to the assumption Krishnamurti is exposing above, that truth is somehow stable or static, and is able to be discovered or sought, as if it were separate from the one discovering and the one seeking.