Also, Paul, haven't you studied philosophy?
i've only taken a single class in it formally, but if by that you mean have i read it and understood it, sure. as far as 'classical' philosophy goes, i've read all the major surviving works of: plato, aristotle, descartes, hobbes, spinoza, locke, montesquieu, voltaire, hume, rousseau, adam smith, kant, max stirner, nietzsche, camus, charles sanders peirce, william james, emerson, thoreau, ayn rand. i've also read the partial works of: cicero, seneca, marcus aurelius, augustine, aquinas, abelard, bacon, hegel, kierkegaard, sartre, bertrand russell, wittgenstein, foucault. (and probably others, this is just derived from looking at my books to remember which i'd read; a lot of the time i'd read a book but not keep it.)
and of course u.g. krishnamurti, who an "anti-philosopher" rather than a philosopher but i believe he's essential to understanding all of philosophy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U._G._Krishnamurti -- i believe he is so important that i'm going to quote his collection of quotes on wikipedia here in the hopes that even one person will benefit from reading them. hopefully my background in reading all of the philosophers above will mean something regarding this recommendation (although of course it may be necessary to go through the process of all of philosophy before reaching u.g.'s particular conclusion about it.)
"I have no teaching. There is nothing to preserve. Teaching implies something that can be used to bring about change. Sorry, there is no teaching here, just disjointed, disconnected sentences. What is there is only your interpretation, nothing else. For this reason there is not now nor will there ever be any kind of copyright for whatever I am saying. I have no claims"
"I am forced by the nature of your listening to always negate the first statement with another statement. Then the second statement is negated by a third and so on. My aim is not some comfy dialectical thesis but the total negation of everything that can be expressed."
thought
"The living organism and thought are two different things. Thought cannot conceive of the possibility of anything happening outside the field of time. I don't want to discuss time in a metaphysical sense. By time I mean yesterday, tomorrow and the day after. The instrument which has produced tremendous results in this area is unable to solve problems in the area of living. We use this instrument to achieve material results. We also apply the same thing to achieve our so-called spiritual goals."
"This instrument thought which we have been using to understand has not helped us to understand anything except that every time we are using it we are sharpening it. Someone asked me, 'What is Philosophy? How does it help me in my day-to-day existence?' It doesn't help you in any way except that it sharpens the intellect. It doesn't in any way help you to understand life. If that thought is not the instrument and if there is no other instrument then is there anything to understand?"
"We don't seem to realize that it is thought that is separating us from the totality of things."
"The only way for anyone who is interested in finding out what this is all about is to watch how this separation is occurring, how you are separating yourself from the things that are happening around you and inside you. Actually there is no difference between the outside and the inside. It is thought that creates the frontiers and tells us that this is the inside and something else is the outside. If you tell yourself that you are happy, miserable, or bored, you have already separated yourself from that particular sensation that is there inside you." "The only way it can maintain its continuity is through the constant demand to know. If you don't know what you are looking at, the 'you' as you know yourself, the 'you' as you experience yourself, is going to come to an end. That is death. That is the only death and there is no other death."
" (Questioner:) So we keep coming back to this point that thought itself seems to be the enemy, the interloper... " (UG:) "It is our enemy. Thought is a protective mechanism. It is interested in protecting itself at the expense of the living organism."
" (Q:) You are saying that thought is the thing that causes people's worries... " (UG:)"It's thought that is creating all our problems and it is not the instrument to help us solve the problems created by itself."
"Unfortunately, the servant, which is the thought structure that is there, has taken possession of the house. But he can no longer control and run the household. So he must be dislodged. It is in this sense that I use the term 'natural state', without any connotation of spirituality or enlightenment."
morality
"When once you areI don't like to use the word, freed from, or are not trapped inthis duality of right and wrong, good and bad, you can never do anything bad. As long as you are caught up in wanting to do only good, you will always do bad. Because the good you seek is only in the future. You will be good some other time and until then you remain a bad person. So, the so-called insane have given up and we are doing them the greatest harm and disservice by pushing them to fit themselves into this framework of ours which is rotten. I don't just say it is rotten but it is."
"I don't fight society. I am not even interested in changing it. The demand to bring about a change in myself isn't there any more. So, the demand to change this framework or the world at large isn't there. It is not that I am indifferent to the suffering man. I suffer with the suffering man and am happy with the happy man."
"I will never break the laws, no matter how ridiculous the laws are."
"There is no need to change this world at all; and there is no need to change yourself either."
"There is no meaning in and no purpose to suffering."
modern medicine
"If at any time I accept anything, it is not what the religious people have told me about the way the body functions, but what the medical doctors have found. Yet, what they do not know is immense; and they will never know how this body functions."
"I have never taken any medicine nor have I ever seen a doctor. All the doctors who have advised me not to live the kind of life I had been living are now dead and gone."
nature
"I don't think I have any special insight into the laws of nature. But if there is any such thing as an end product of human evolution (I don't know if there is such a thing as evolution but we take for granted that there is) what nature is trying to produce is not a perfect being."
"The fundamental mistake that humanity made somewhere along the line, was to experience this separateness from the totality of life. At that time there occurred in man, this self-consciousness which separated him from the life around. He was so isolated that it frightened him. The demand to be part of the totality of life around him created this tremendous demand for the ultimate. He thought that the spiritual goals of God, truth, or reality, would help him to become part of the 'whole' again.
"But the very attempt on his part to become one with or become integrated with the totality of life has kept him only more separate. Isolated functioning is not part of nature. This isolation has created a demand for finding out ways and means of becoming a part of nature. But thought in its very nature can only create problems and cannot help us solve them."
"Nature does not imitate anything. It does not use anything as a model."
sex
"Sex is only for reproduction, but you have turned that into a pleasure movement. What else is sex for than reproduction?"
"An enlightened man can never have sex because he cannot reproduce another one like him."
body
"When I use the term 'natural state' it is not a synonym for 'enlightenment', 'freedom', or 'God-realization' and so forth. Not at all. When the totality of mankind's knowledge and experience loses its stranglehold on the body, the physical organism, then the body is allowed to function in its own harmonious way. Your natural state is a biological, neurological and physical state."
"When once it throws out everything that has been put in there by your filthy culture, this body will function in an extraordinarily intelligent way. It can take care of everything." "The native intelligence of the human body is amazing. That is all it needs to survive in any dangerous situation in life." "The native intelligence is what you are born with; the intellect is acquired from what they teach you."
"Fear makes your body stiff and then you will certainly break your limbs. My body is never stiff."
"Once this body is freed from the stranglehold of whatever is put in there either by spiritual teachers or secular teachers, or by those scientists and medical technology, it functions in a very efficient way."
"If a body is lucky enough to stumble into its natural way of functioning, it happens not through your effort, not through your volition; it just happens, but not by what you do or do not do. It is not even a happening within the field of cause and effect. Acausal is the most appropriate word for it, because a happening can never be outside the field of cause and effect."
"If it stumbles into this of and by itself, such a body will be so unique that it will be unparalleled in this world and will function in an extraordinary way. Such a body has never existed before on this planet."
death
"The next question he (a questioner) asked me was, 'I have lived ninety-five years and I am going to die one of these days. I want to know what will happen after my death.' I said, 'You may not live long enough to know anything about death. You have to die now. Are you ready to die?' As long as you are asking the questions, 'What is death?' or 'What is there after death?' you are already dead. These are all dead questions. A living man would never ask those questions."
"(Q:) Are you afraid of death?" "There is nothing to die here. The body cannot be afraid of death."
"There is no such thing as death. What you have are ideas about death, ideas which arise when you sense the absence of another person. Your own death, or the death of your near and dear ones, is not something you can experience. What you actually experience is the void created by the disappearance of another individual and the unsatisfied demand to maintain the continuity of your relationship with that person for a non-existent eternity."
suffering
"What I am emphasizing is that the demand to bring about a change in ourselves is the cause of our suffering. I may say that there is nothing to be changed. But the revolutionary teachers come and tell us that there is something there in which you have to bring about a radical revolution. Then we assume there is such a thing as soul, spirit, or the 'I'. What I assert all the time is that I haven't found anything like the self or soul there."
self realization
"Enlightenment (if there is any such thing as enlightenment) is not an experience at all. So, this dawns on you- this realization (if you want to put it that way) that there is nothing to realize. Self-knowledge or self-realization is to realize for yourself and by yourself that there is no self to realize. That is going to be a shattering blow."
"This question haunted me all my life and suddenly it hit me: 'There is no self to realize. What the hell have I been doing all this time?' You see, that hits you like lightning. Once that hits you, the whole mechanism of the body that is controlled by this thought is shattered. What is left is the tremendous living organism with an intelligence of its own. What you are left with is the pulse, the beat and the throb of life."
"It is not something that you can do through any effort, will or volition of yours. It has to be a miracle. Whatever has happened to me has happened despite everything I did. In fact, everything I did only blocked it. It prevented the possibility of whatever was there to express itself. Not that I have gained anything. Only what is there is able to express itself without any hindrance, without any constraints or restraints imposed on it by society for its own reasons, for its own continuity and stability."
"The search is inevitable and is an integral part of it. That is why it has turned us all into neurotics and has created this duality for us. You see, ambition is a reality, competition is a reality. But you have superimposed on that reality the idea that you should not be ambitious. It has turned us all into neurotic individuals. We want two things at the same time." "It dawned on me, 'There is nothing to understand.' When this happened, it hit me like a shaft of lightning. From then on, the very demand to understand anything was over. That understanding is the one that is expressing itself now. And it cannot be used as an instrument to guide, direct or help me, you or anybody."
"And what you are trying to get you can never get, because there is nothing to get." "There is no need for me to say you're not going to get what you want from anyone else either. That you will find out by yourself. But that you can't do either by your own effort or by your volition or by anything you do or do not do. That is not something that happens in the field of cause and effect."
reality
"We have invented reality. Otherwise you have no way of experiencing the reality of anythingthe reality of that person sitting there, for instance, or even your own physical body. You have no way of experiencing that at all except through the help of the knowledge that has been put in you. So, there may not be any such thing as reality at all, let alone the ultimate reality. I do have to accept the fact that you are a man, that she is a woman. That is all. There it stops. But what is the reality you are talking about?"
" (Q:) What is the relationship between words and reality? " "None. There is nothing beyond words."
"There is nothing to permanence."
fear
"That is terrifyingthe fear of losing what you know. So actually, you don't want to be free from fear. You do not want the fear to come to an end. All that you are doingall the therapies and techniques that you are using to free yourself from fear, for whatever reason you want to be free from fearis the thing that is maintaining the fear and giving continuity to it. So you do not want the fear to come to an end. If the fear comes to an end, the fear of what you know comes to an end. You will physically drop dead. Clinical death will take place."
"You want to be free from fear. But there is no way you free yourself from it. If the fear comes to an end, you as you know yourself, you as you experience yourself, are going to come to an end, and you are not ready for that sort of thing."
belief
"You replace one belief with another. You can't be without a belief. What you call 'you' is only a belief. If the belief goes, you go with it. That is the reason why, when you are not satisfied with one belief-structure, you replace it with another."
the individual
" (Q:) You say that there is no individual... " "Where is the individual?"
God
"To me the question of God is irrelevant and immaterial"
"That messy thing called mind has created many destructive things. By far the most destructive of them all is God."
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