Beyond Krishnamurti’s Choiceless Awareness

When the language of transformation gives way to ordinary experience.

Dear Robert,
I discovered your work through Joan Tollifson. I have just read Depending On No-thing and The 21^st Century Self. You write with remarkable lucidity. I have also read your essays on Substack about loops and the sense of self as an artifact of recursion. That is an idea I have never encountered before, and quite refreshing.

Here is my question. You discuss Krishnamurti as an early influence, and have recommended choiceless awareness, a term Krishnamurti used, as an approach to awakening. But your recent writing, particularly “The Myth of Awakening,” seems to suggest that there is no approach to awakening, and even that there is no such state or condition as “awake.” I’d be grateful if you could clarify your view on this.

Dear Carol—
Thank you for the thoughtful note and the probing question. Krishnamurti was an early influence with whom I still feel a close affinity. His definition of meditation cuts right to the bone. No technique. No authority.

For a time, I used the phrase “choiceless awareness” because it seemed to point to simple, unforced observation. But as my own understanding clarified, I saw that his use of the phrase carried implications I no longer accept.

Krishnamurti held that the self is the root of psychological conflict. “The observer,” “the me,” “the center,” were, for him, a kind of fundamental mistake, a division created by thought that could end through a special kind of seeing. That ending, he said, brought about a mutation of consciousness, a new quality of mind. Even though he rejected methods, the language of “insight,” “ending,” and “choiceless awareness” functioned as one. It implied that a person could assume a certain posture of perception and induce a decisive break with conditioning.

My view is different now. I don’t see the self as a mistake, but an inevitable product of the organism’s need to map and manage experience. I don’t regard insight as a breakthrough, and I don’t see any method for escape from conditioning. Whatever operates, operates. What appears, appears. No one stands outside the movement, shaping or transcending it.

What I call the loop is only a description of how experience stabilizes. Sensation, affect, memory, and language feed one another until a provisional self-model appears. That appearance is unavoidable. There is nothing to reject or transcend, and nothing hidden behind it. Just the organism doing what organisms do.

What fell away for me years ago was not a “center” in Krishnamurti’s sense, but a tension—the lifelong strain of maintaining an imagined curator behind experience. With that strain absent, ordinary life feels more fluid and less effortful, but nothing else has changed. Thought continues. Feeling continues. Preferences, moods, irritation, pleasure—all intact. The difference is that there is no longer a “someone” trying to regulate or correct any of it.

This is why I no longer speak of approaches to awakening. From here, awake is not a condition. Nothing in my experience corresponds to a special state. No transformation, no mutation, no “freedom” in Krishnamurti’s sense. Just the absence of an extra layer of effort that had been added to the flow of life.

As for choiceless awareness, the term can mislead when taken as an approach or method, as many of Krishnamurti’s followers did, whether he intended it or not. Awareness has always been choiceless. Noticing happens on its own. Attention shifts because conditions shift. No one chooses to be aware or unaware. In that sense, the phrase doesn’t prescribe anything; it only names what experience is already doing. The confusion enters when the phrase is taken to mean something one can do or a state one can attain. Nothing in my experience suggests either is possible.

So my distance from Krishnamurti is not a rejection of his critique of the self; it’s a rejection of the transformative framework altogether. When the narrative of mutation and breakthrough fell away, what remained was just the movement of life—thought, feeling, sensation—minus the imagined manager behind it. No controller. No path. No state called “awake.” Only the ordinary unfolding that had been here all along.

Books By Robert:
The Ten Thousand Things
Depending On No-Thing
Understanding Claude
The 21st Century Self