Truth is a Pathless Land

I had a dream that I was dining at a large table with Krishnamurti and his followers, and had the opportunity to ask him a couple questions. Krishnamurti was a spiritual leader who renounced his position with a quotable speech:

I maintain that truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. That is my point of view, and I adhere to that absolutely and unconditionally. Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organization be formed to lead or coerce people along a particular path.

Everyone at the table was encouraged to ask, and since I had two questions in mind, I meant to ask them both during my turn. I asked the first, but I don’t remember what, in my dream, the second was. Even so, I remember raising my hand to ask additional questions, although after the first two he had told me to slow down and give other people a chance.

My first question had to do with the difference between his style of meditation and the Buddhist/Zen style. I had just wanted him to compare them. The answer he gave: His style “achieved union with the godhead,” he said, which he called by a word: it was something like “mu-mind” but not that. I understood him to mean that within this state of consciousness, one comes to know the shallow and illusory nature of the world we think is real. On the other hand, I’ve come to understand (abstractly) that Zen meditation is about achieving an understanding of reality which does not seek to withdraw focus from sensory input and into an internal mental landscape, but rather the opposite: it seeks to amplify and stabilize focus so as to achieve “raw” knowledge of the perceived world and its reality minus a “layer” of everyday interpretation by the mind in terms of “personal relevance” of what is perceived (the “ego layer”). These two methods, (a) fully withdrawing consciousness from perception, and (b) amplifying consciousness on perception, seem to have opposite characteristics.

What was this about? I had read about Krishnamurti in Confession of a Buddhist Atheist, which I finished recently. I then read the full text of his speech, and was left with the impression that he was quite a strange individual, perhaps a product of his (sheltered, atypical) upbringing combined a powerful meditative experience of awakening combined with the rather strange (it seems) nature of the group he was being groomed to lead. But I find myself drawn to unusual people, because they are the ones who most often seem to have something to teach, either through their ideas or by observation. Yet, strangeness makes it harder to relate– the teaching becomes more symbolic.

Truth is a pathless land? It seems to me that truth is a land crisscrossed by paths, all leading somewhere, but where? The well-trod paths have eroded the truth they wind through. Walk on one and you will likely focus on the path itself more than any truth to which it leads or through which it leads. Walk your paths mindfully, and switch among them freely, according to your own will. Wander off of them frequently to see what lies where few have gone. Perhaps all such paths traverse but a tiny corner of truth, and in its mathematical infinity, truth reduces such paths to zero. But this is becoming overly abstract.