Jiddu Krishnamurti 1895 – 1986

Jiddu Krishnamurti was an Indian-born philosopher and spiritual teacher whose lectures, dialogues, and writings challenged organized religion and the very category of the guru. Discovered as a boy by leaders of the Theosophical Society and groomed to be the World Teacher, he dissolved the order founded around him in 1929 and devoted the remainder of a long life to teaching that truth is a pathless land. He held public dialogues with David Bohm and the Dalai Lama, founded schools in India, England, and the United States, and articulated a non-doctrinal practice of self-inquiry.

Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986) was an Indian philosopher and teacher whose work occupies an unusual position between Western philosophical psychology and the Indian contemplative traditions. Born in a small village in what is now Andhra Pradesh, he was discovered as a child by Theosophists who believed he would be the World Teacher prophesied to lead humanity into a new spiritual age. He was raised and educated for this role by Annie Besant and the Theosophical Society in England and India.

In 1929 Krishnamurti dramatically dissolved the international Order of the Star, the organization founded to support him, declaring that truth is a pathless land and that no organization or teacher should mediate the individual's confrontation with it. He spent the rest of his life giving public talks, holding dialogues with scientists, scholars, and religious figures, and writing — mostly transcribed talks and dialogues rather than systematic books.

Krishnamurti's distinctive philosophical method is the careful examination of what he called the structure of consciousness: the way thought, conditioning, identification with images and concepts, and the search for security produce the suffering they purport to alleviate. His dialogues with the physicist David Bohm in the 1970s and 1980s remain among the most rigorous twentieth-century exchanges between philosophical psychology and natural science. He died in Ojai, California in 1986.