Urgency of Change • The Krishnamurti Podcast

Pupul Jayakar, who died in 1997, was an Indian cultural activist and writer, best known for her work on the revival of traditional and village arts, handlooms, and handicrafts. She was a close friend of prime minister Indira Gandhi, and was her cultural advisor and biographer. Having been to a school established by Annie Basant, Pupul became involved with Krishnamurti’s work in the 1940s, becoming...

Keith Berwick is a four-time Emmy Award winning television broadcaster, and senior fellow of the Aspen Institute. His career also includes historian, educator, newspaper publisher and editor. He lives in Santa Barbara, California. This second interview was recorded in Los Angeles in 1983, two years after the first. Themes include: What is a human being? What is an individual? Clarity can only come...

Keith Berwick is a four-time Emmy Award winning television broadcaster, and senior fellow of the Aspen Institute. His career also includes historian, educator, newspaper publisher and editor. He lives in Santa Barbara, California. This first interview was recorded in Los Angeles in 1981. Berwick begins by asking: Why, in 1929, Krishnamurti gave up being the head of The Order of the Star. Other the...

Jacob Needleman is Professor of Philosophy at San Francisco State University and former Director of the Center for the Study of New Religions at Berkeley. He is the author of many books, including The Heart of Philosophy, Money and the Meaning of Life, Time and the Soul, and I Am Not I. This second conversation with Krishnamurti was recorded in Malibu, California in 1971. Questions that come up in...

Jacob Needleman is Professor of Philosophy at San Francisco State University and former Director of the Center for the Study of New Religions at Berkeley. He is the author of many books, including The Wisdom of Love, Time and the Soul, Why Can't We Be Good?, and Necessary Wisdom. He popularised the term 'new religious movements' and was honoured by the New York Open Center in 2006. This first conv...

Alain Naude was Krishnamurti’s private secretary in the 1960s. He met Krishnamurti in 1963 whilst a music lecturer at Pretoria University and a professional concert pianist. He gave up his teaching and performing in 1964 to work with Krishnamurti. Fluent in several languages, he was very helpful at international gatherings and in attracting younger audiences to Krishnamurti’s talks at a time of cu...

Alain Naude was Krishnamurti’s private secretary in the 1960s. He met Krishnamurti in 1963 whilst a music lecturer at Pretoria University and a professional concert pianist. He gave up his teaching and performing in 1964 to work with Krishnamurti. Fluent in several languages, he was very helpful at international gatherings and in attracting younger audiences to Krishnamurti’s talks at a time of cu...

Daniel O’Hanlon was a Jesuit priest and respected theologian. He taught at Marymount University in Los Angeles and for more than 30 years at the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley. He had many contacts in other religions, particularly of Asia, and included aspects of these religions in his teaching. Interested in integration of religions, in 1984 he published Integration of Christian Practices:...

David Bohm has been described as one of the most significant theoretical physicists of the 20th century and was a fellow of the royal society. He worked with Einstein at the Institute for Advanced Study, and on the Manhattan Project with Oppenheimer. Later he pioneered research into quantum physics and models of the brain, being increasingly interested in consciousness, order and thought. Bohm’s b...

Chogyam Trungpa Rimpoche was a Buddhist meditation master and a major figure in the dissemination of Buddhism to the West. He founded more than one hundred meditation centres throughout the world, including Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, where Pema Chodron, Allen Gingberg and Ken Wilber were among his many students. He wished to present the path of meditation in secular terms, developing...

Oliver Hunkin was head of religious programmes at the BBC, where he revolutionised the format. He was also an author and cartoonist. In his memoirs he wrote: ‘We have to admit there is an air of antique unreality about organised religion. The majority of people do not see the point of it. Have we lost track of the fact that religion is a specific experience rather than a system of dogma?’ Indeed,...

In her early working life, Mary Zimbalist was a model and actress. She first heard Krishnamurti speak in the 1940s and in the 1960s began helping Krishnamurti, becoming his assistant and friend. Her memoirs chronicling her time with Krishnamurti are online free of charge, and form the book In the Presence of Krishnamurti, which is available at our online bookstore.  This second conversation with K...

Mary Zimbalist was Krishnamurti’s assistant from the 1960s until his death in 1986. Her unfinished memoirs chronicling her time with Krishnamurti are online free of charge, and in the book In the Presence of Krishnamurti, which is available on our website kfoundation.org.  This conversation with Krishnamurti was recorded in 1984. Topics covered include: Can the brain be free from all the programmi...

Authority is Destructive.  Huston Smith is widely regarded as one of the world’s most influential figures in religious studies. He was professor of philosophy at MIT and later professor of religious studies at Berkeley, where he met with Krishnamurti in 1968. Smith’s works include: The Worlds Religions, which has sold more than three million copies, Tales of Wonder, and the PBS television series T...

Memory, thought and the illusion of continuity. Shainberg trained at the American Institute for Psychoanalysis and worked in New York. He was a leading force behind the integration of eastern and western philosophies in the understanding of consciousness and experience. Shainberg was the first to bring psychoanalysts and eastern spiritual leaders together. He retired from practice in 1981 in order...

Second conversation with Iris Murdoch 2: What do we mean by conditioning?  Iris Murdoch was a Booker prize winning novelist and philosopher. Her many books include The Bell, The Black Prince, and The Sea, The Sea.  In this second conversation, Krishnamurti and Iris Murdoch look at why we are fragmented, how our way of thinking and acting is comparatively like the rest of mankind, and that we are t...

First conversation with Iris Murdoch: There is no love where there is self-interest. Iris Murdoch was a well-known novelist and philosopher. Her books explore themes such as good and evil, morality, and the power of the unconscious. They emphasise the inner lives of individuals, in the tradition of Dostoyevski and Tolstoy, whilst her philosophical works reinterpret Aristotle and Plato. In this fir...

Krishnamurti Interviewed by Ross Saunders. This interview was recorded for the Australian television show ‘This Day Tonight’. The programme is half an hour long and was recorded in 1970. Describing the interview in her diary, Mary Zimbalist, Krishnamurti’s assistant, said that Krishnamurti ‘demolished belief and religion then went on with such fresh clarity until the end of the half hour, covering...

The second and final part of The Future Of Humanity explores whether there is evolution of consciousness. Can the consciousness of mankind be changed through time? Is psychological conditioning centred in the self? Can our conditioned brain cells change? The pair then inquire into the relationship between the mind and the brain, suggesting that as long as the brain is conditioned, its relationship...

Part 1 of The Future of Humanity asks: what is the future of mankind? The pair discuss how our psychological problems are the result of thought, since thought breeds conflict. We think that thought can solve our problems but is this true? They look at how the self is put together by thought and whether our consciousness is individual to each of us, or inseparable, a consciousness of humanity. It i...

Commentaries on Living is one of Krishnamurti’s most well-known and best loved books. In it, he recalls many of the private conversations with those who came to see him. With encouragement from Aldous Huxley these meetings were written down by Krishnamurti and published in 1956. Terence Stamp is an Oscar-nominated actor. It was through working with Fellini that he met and became friends with Krish...

Commentaries on Living is one of Krishnamurti’s most well-known and best loved books. In it, he recalls many of the private conversations with those who came to see him. With encouragement from Aldous Huxley these meetings were written down by Krishnamurti and published in 1956. Terence Stamp is an Oscar-nominated actor. It was through working with Fellini that he met and became friends with Krish...