Krishnamurti was asked the following question: "I gather definitely from you that learning and knowledge are impediments.  To what are they impediments?"

Here is how he answered:

-------

"Obviously knowledge and learning are an impediment to the understanding of the new, the timeless, the eternal.  Developing a perfect technique does not make you creative.  You may know how to paint marvelously, you may have the technique; but you may not be a creative painter.

You may know how to write poems, technically most perfect; but you may not be a poet.  To be a poet implies, does it not?, being capable of receiving the new; to be sensitive enough to respond to something new, fresh.  With most of us knowledge or learning has become an addiction and we think that through "knowing" we shall be creative.

Take, for example, a very ordinary thing that happens to most of us: those who are religious--whatever that word may mean for the moment--try to imagine what God is or try to think about what God is.

They have read innumerable books, they have read about the experiences of the various saints, the Masters, the Mahatmas and all the rest, and they try to imagine or try to feel what the experience of another is; that is with the known you try to approach the unknown.  

Can you do it?  Can you think of something that is not knowable?

-------

To be aware of something that is not the projection of the known, there must be the elimination, through the understanding, of the process of the known.

Why is it that the mind clings always to the known?  Is it not because the mind is constantly seeking certainty, security?  Its very nature is fixed in the known, in time; how can such a mind, whose very foundation is based on the past, on time, experience the timeless?

======

Suppose you had never read a book, religious or psychological, and you had to find the meaning, the significance of life.  How would you set about it?  Suppose there were no Masters, no religious organizations, no Buddha, no Christ, and you had to begin from the beginning.  How would set about it?

First, you would have to understand your process of thinking, would you not?--and not project yourself, your thoughts, into the future and create a God which pleases you; that would be too childish.  So first you would have to understand the process of your thinking.  That is the only way to discover anything new, is it not?

When we say that learning or knowledge is an impediment, a hindrance, we are not including technical knowledge--how to drive a car, how to run machinery--or the efficiency which such knowledge brings.

We have in mind quite a different thing: that sense of creative happiness which no amount of knowledge or learning will bring.  To be creative in the truest sense of that word is to be free of the past from moment to moment, because it is the past that is continually shadowing the present.

Merely to cling to information, to the experiences of others, to what someone has said, however great, and try to approximate your action to that--all that is knowledge, is it not? 

But to discover anything new you must start on your own; you must start on a journey completely denuded, especially of knowledge, because it is very easy, through knowledge and belief, to have experiences; but those experiences are merely the products of self-projection and therefore utterly unreal, false.

If you are to discover for yourself what is the new, it is no good carrying the burden of the old, especially knowlege--the knowledge of another, however great.  

You use knowledge as a means of self-protection, security, and you want to be quite sure that you have the same experiences as the Buddha or the Christ or X.  But a man who is protecting himself constantly through knowledge is obviously not a truth-seeker.

-------

For the discover of truth there is no path.  You must enter the uncharted se--which is not depressing, which is not being adventurous.

When you want to find something new, when you are experimenting with anything, your mind has to be very quiet, has it not?  If your mind is crowded, filled with facts, knowledge, they act as an "impediment to the new"; the difficulty is for most of us is the fact that the mind has become so important, so predominantly significant, that it interferes constantly with anything that may be new, with anything that may exist simultaneously with the known.

Thus knowledge and learning are impediments for those who would seek, for those would try to understand that which is timeless.

-------

ps.  Although i think i still need a pretty 24 or 25 year-old, pretty, smart, "live-in innocence" female to work as my full time assistant, house keeper, cook, research assistant, etc. (room and board, but not fancy), i am trying to make my life work better without one.  I transcribed the above from my downstairs computer whose "typewriter" keys actually work the way my fingers tell them to do.  And that saved me quite a bit of my "very precious" time to do nothing.

ps.  I am kind of liking this series.  I looked at the next topic, Discipline, and Krishnamurti's about three times the length of his response to Knowledge.  There is no way that i am going to write that much shit on Discipline, so i really need to go in and work at honing down Krishnamurti's opinion to about a third of its size, while trying to keep the flow and all of his major points intact.  I am not sure how that is going to take.  It might be a half-hour, it might be four-hours, but until i do that, i don't really want to start writing my own different perspective on Discipline.

ps2.  You must remember that i know a little about discipline.  I ordered "battlestations missile, battlestations missile" one time (and i didn't even know for sure whether it was a test or not).  So, go figure.