Krishnamurti on the observer and the observed

When you watch your own anger, who exactly is watching? This is the question Krishnamurti kept returning to across fifty years of speaking. It is the question that dissolves the self — and leaves you wondering what was there all along.

I came to Krishnamurti looking for answers and found someone who was militantly uninterested in providing them. He refused to be a guru. He dissolved the organisation built around him. He said, repeatedly and with increasing intensity, that the authority you give to another person — any person, including him — is the very thing that prevents you from seeing clearly.

The observer is the observed

His central insight is that the separation between the one who watches and the thing being watched is itself the illusion. When you say "I am angry," you imply a self that stands apart from the anger, observing it. But Krishnamurti asks: is that true? Or is the anger and the observer of the anger the same movement?

The moment you have a conclusion, you stop observing.

— J. Krishnamurti

This is not a comfortable idea. It means that the self you think is watching your thoughts is itself a thought. The one who meditates is itself what needs to be seen through. There is no safe position outside experience from which to examine experience.

What this does to practice

Krishnamurti was suspicious of all spiritual practice for this reason. Meditation as technique, he argued, only strengthens the meditator — the very self you are trying to see beyond. True attention is not practised. It is what happens when the practitioner steps out of the way.

I hold this lightly, because I do not fully understand it. But I return to it regularly, because it is one of the few ideas I have encountered that does not offer comfort — only clarity, and only if you can stand to look without flinching at what you see.