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__NOTOC__ Jiddu Krishnamurti ( May 11 1895 - February 17 1986) was "discovered" as a young boy by C.W. Leadbeater in India on the beach at Adyar in Chennai. He was subsequently brought up by Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbetter within the world-wide organization of the Theosophical Society, who believed him to be a vehicle for a prophecied World Teacher,(see Second Coming; Maitreya Buddha).
Krishnamurti disbanded the Order of the Star of the East in 1929, of which he had been made the leader, and which was founded to support his role - as envisioned by the Theosophical Society - as the World Teacher. After disbanding the Order of the Star and disassociating himself from the Theosophical Society and its belief system, he spent the rest of his life expressing observations about the nature of human sorrow and freedom. Krishnamurti did not accept followers, as he saw the relation between a "guru" and a "disciple" as essentially exploitative and not part of a true religious inquiry. He asked people to explore together with him and "walk as two friends."
A brief summary of his teachings is contained in "The Core of the Teachings", a 5 paragraph text which says in part:
Thought is time. Thought is born of experience and knowledge, which are inseparable from time and the past. Time is the psychological enemy of man. Our action is based on knowledge and therefore time, so man is always a slave to the past. Thought is ever-limited and so we live in constant conflict and struggle. There is no psychological evolution.
When man becomes aware of the movement of his own thoughts, he will see the division between the thinker and thought, the observer and the observed, the experiencer and the experience. He will discover that this division is an illusion. Then only is there pure observation which is insight without any shadow of the past or of time. This timeless insight brings about a deep, radical mutation in the mind.
A tremendous volume of material exists documenting the philosophical investigations of Krishnamurti (or simply "K" as he is sometimes referred to) mostly in the form of recorded conversations and talks, although K also wrote several series of short essays and kept a personal journal at least twice in his life. He had dialogues and personal meetings with a wide variety of people from all kinds of backgrounds. An example of the far-ranging and probing dialogues he had is a series of conversations recorded in 1980 with theoretical physicist David Bohm that resulted in the publication of The Ending of Time and The Future of Humanity. These conversations are also available on audio tape and a subset of them on video and DVD as well.