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When Jiddu Krishnamurti was asked for the most important point in his teaching, he replied: “The observer is the observed.”

For 20 years those 5 words haunted me wherever I went; they were a koan stuck in the neurons.

Intuitively, it was easy to grasp; intellectually it was entertaining.
But who or what (I wondered) was understanding and being entertained?

While Krishnamurti was one of the great mindshifters in my life, he failed to explain – in a way that this brain could grasp –  exactly why the observer cannot be anything but the observed, and further, why it is impossible for that observer to self-exist as an entity.

For those clarifications, I bow deeply to Wei Wu Wei, and it is to share that savage wisdom that I write.  Just in case there’s another brain out there that is as stubborn and slow and opaque as mine; a brain with a little slit that this ruthless arrow of truth can fly through.

~