Krishnamurti: truth is a pathless land — yet I still draw a map

If my philosophy has a close relative rather than a mere acquaintance, it is Jiddu Krishnamurti. All his life he said one thing that makes most people uneasy: truth is a pathless land. You cannot reach it by someone else’s road, through someone else’s method, through someone else’s teacher.

I say almost the same: truth is what is happening now; everything else is an image laid over it. Krishnamurti and I look at the same point. And that is precisely why it matters to me to say honestly where his model ends for me.

What he saw

Krishnamurti noticed that a person almost never sees what is. He sees his past laid over the present: labels, expectations, fears, yesterday’s conclusions. We look at a person and see the memory of them. We look at a sunset and see the word «sunset», not the light itself.

He called freedom the ability to see without this weight — not «to become better by a method», but simply to stop dragging the dead into the living. No gurus, no systems, no promises of enlightenment in ten steps; all of that, he said, is new cages, only gilded. From here later grew the whole popular «power of now» — but in Krishnamurti it came without consolation.

Here I stand shoulder to shoulder with him. A belief is, most often, the past pretending to be sight.

Where his model is not complete for me

Krishnamurti refused everything: not only gurus, but images, symbols, any form. For him any form handed over by another is already a road, and there are no roads to truth. He would leave a person alone, without a single map, and say: go like that.

That is an utterly honest model. But there is no ideal model, and this one would not become mine even if I agreed with every word. Because I see that an image differs from an image. One adds thoughts to you — it says «think this way»; that is a cage, and here Krishnamurti is right. Another takes thoughts away — it returns you to what is, and falls silent. That is a window. I strive to paint windows.

A painting does not lead you along a road. It sets you before what is happening right now — before colour, before a state, before your own attention — and takes its hands away. Krishnamurti removed every crutch and left the person alone. I leave the person alone too — but before a window. And what to see through that window he still decides for himself. In this Krishnamurti and I do not diverge.

What this means for you

Plainly, with no promises: a painting will not make you free. Freedom cannot be bought in a frame, and I do not sell it. Krishnamurti is right — no one will walk your path for you.

But sometimes a person needs not a road but a point at which he stops and finally sees without yesterday’s weight. A good painting is such a point. Not an answer. A pause in which you stop lying to yourself.

And still

Krishnamurti took all the maps away from people and said: go without them. That was an enormous, almost severe honesty.

I am gentler, and perhaps craftier. I do not give you a map of the road — there really are no roads. I give you a window and one request: stand before it and set down yesterday. Everything you see afterwards will be without intermediaries. Including without me.

The work in question — «Truth» →

— Evgeny Fleysher