Jiddu Krishnamurthy was famously dismissive of transcendental meditation, of vipashyana (vipassna), and of other types of meditative practices and gurus. He rejected and mocked the philosophical frameworks which sustained the practices—Adi Shankara's Advait Vedant in case of transcendental meditation, Nagarjuna's Shunyavad in case of vipashyana—and advocated for an alternate perspective which claimed that the final state of literal thoughtlessness these methods strived towards was a 'pathless land'. He could describe it but refused to tell how to get there. Why? Because he was not a guru but a mere friend having a conversation with you, having rejected the Hindu guru-shishya parampara and the Buddhist sangh trappings alike.
But if you dig deeper into his 'process' and its final outcome, it looks suspiciously like the product he railed against. His famous claim that 'the observer is the observed' is a mere restatement of the dissolution of the atman and brahman in the absence of ahamkara, as espoused in vedantic philosophy, only in cooler lingo. He claimed to be operating under the aegis of 'modern psychology' using terms like 'conditioning', 'radical mutation' etc. to provide a framework for interpreting his claims but to be honest one feels it's merely old wine in a new bottle. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's claims about transcendental meditation being able to access the universal consciousness ('brahman') via the 'unified field'—which he mocked as being pseudoscientific—are no different from his embrace of para-scientific mumbo jumbo he relied on (in collaboration with David Bohm) to provide a foundation for his 'anti-method'.
In his zeal to reconstruct, using first principles, Jiddu Krishnamurthy reinvented the wheel using equally recondite, somewhat silly, modern-sounding-but-not-especially-insightful vocabulary. One is hard pressed to distinguish his final output as anything except a repackaging of either Nagarjuna or Adi Shankara's ancient insights. In Indian philosophy, there is a classic metaphor regarding the spiritual journey: if you want to cross a wild, turbulent river to reach the other shore of liberation, you must build a raft. Once you safely reach the far bank, you can leave the raft behind. Krishnamurti’s radical stance was to look at the raging current and declare: 'The raft is an illusion, there is no other shore, just jump in and instantly be on the other side.'
This is not to criticize Krishnamurthy but to remind ourselves that consciousness remains the ultimate barrier—the 'hard problem' (in the words of David Chalmers)—and our fundamental ignorance about it forces us to resort to the usage of necessarily inexact metaphors. Ultimately, recognizing that Krishnamurti was 'good but not fundamentally different' is not a dismissal of his brilliance; it is simply stripping away his marketing.
If the ultimate goal is the stillness of a quiet mind, choosing a structured path with its attendant systems is not a sign of spiritual weakness but a pragmatic necessity. It is far better to navigate the river with a well-constructed raft—fully intending to drop it when the time comes—than to stand on the shore forever, worshiping a brilliant description what lies beyond.
