Although the renowned spiritual teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti passed away in 1986, his legacy is alive and well in beautiful, and way too dry, Ojai, California, home of the Krishnamurti Foundation of America. This fall will see them release a new book, “The World Within”, containing never before released material. This is a ‘compilation of Krishnamurti’s hand written notes from his personal diary that explore topics discussed in personal interviews with the people around him.” This excerpt was published in the summer/fall edition of ‘Foundation Focus’, the KFA newsletter. For more on Krishnamurti’s teachings, go to jkrishnamurti on line.
All spiritual teachers encounter the challenge of language. Words can have multiple connotations, and the same word can have radically different meanings to a broad spectrum of readers. Here Krishnamurti uses the word self to mean to “I” sense created by the ahamkara. We might call it the egoic self as it is composed of likes and dislikes, ragas and dveshas, and emerges as thought. Krishnamurti writes a lot about ‘thought’ and the suffering it creates, but also describes how to see through, or beyond thought to wholeness, timelessness, eternity. For those of you studying Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, note his reference to ‘svadhyaya’, self study, and the awakening of viveka, discriminative understanding, by activating the ‘buddhi’, the innate or non-personal intelligence, to realize Purusha, the timeless.
“The creator of time is the self, the consciousness of the ‘me’ and the ‘mine’: my property, 
my son, my power, my success, my experience, my immortality. The concern of the self over its own state creates time. The self is the cause of ignorance and sorrow, and its cause and effect is desire, the craving for power, wealth, fame. This self is unified by the will of desire, with its past memories, present resolutions, and future determinations. The future then becomes a forum of lust, the present a passage to the future, and the past the driving motive. The self is a wheel of pleasure and pain, enjoyment and grief, love and hate, ruthlessness and gentleness. These opposites are created for its own advantage, for its own gain, out of its own uncertainty. It is the cause of my birth, my death. Thought is held by the will of desire, by the will of self, but sorrow and pain begin their work of awakening thought; and if this awakening is not maintained, thought slips into comforting beliefs, into personal fantasies and hopes.
But if the slowly awakening thought begins to gently and patiently study the cause of sorrow and so begins to comprehend it, it will find that there is another will: the will of understanding. This will of understanding is not personal; it is of no country, of no people, of no religion. It is this will that opens the door to the eternal, to the timeless.
The study of the self is the beginning of right thinking – that the self that is held in the will of desire. This self creates continuity by craving for immortality, but with it comes the everlastingness of sorrow, pain, and the conflict of the ‘me’ and the ‘mine’. There is no end to this save in the will of understanding, which alone dissolves the cause of sorrow.”