Lecture 8 of 14: Listening to Jiddu Krishnamurti
I’ve taken a long pause, but now I’m back. I finished listening to Lecture 8: Ideas and Ambition.
My Reflection:
Ideas. The more the mind clings to ideas, ideals, or ambitions (i.e., what one should be), the less it sees reality plainly. These mental structures filter and corrupt what is.
Ambition. Freedom comes when ambition ends through insight, not suppression. True freedom, he says, is not attained by fighting ambition, but by understanding its roots, seeing its movement without distortion.
I want to delve a bit deeper into how freedom comes when ambition ends through insight rather than suppression. Let’s take a look at suppression: When we notice ambition in ourselves and we try to fight it, we say things like, “I mustn’t be ambitious; it’s selfish, it’s spiritual immaturity,” that’s suppression. We are pushing the impulse down, disguising it, forcing ourselves into the opposite. But suppressed ambition doesn’t vanish. It festers, reappears in subtler forms (like spiritual ambition, moral superiority, even the ambition to “not be ambitious”).
Now let’s take a look at freedom from ambition through Krishnamurti’s lens: insight. He says ambition ends only through insight—by seeing it fully. This means watching ambition as it arises, without judgment or justification. When we see the whole of it, not just the surface, ambition drops away—not by force, but because it is understood.
I consider myself a fairly driven person, so I’d like to spend a bit more time on this topic, focusing on career ambition. To illustrate, in saying “I shouldn’t care about titles or status. I’ll do my work quietly,” I am suppressing ambition. Outwardly, I may be calm, but inwardly, I may still be measuring myself against colleagues, still stung when overlooked. Suppression only hides the fire. Instead of fighting the ambition, I watch it:
Where does it come from? (fear of being ordinary, desire for approval)
How does it move? (comparison, striving, competitiveness)
What does it do? (restlessness, conflict, self-doubt)
When I unpack ambition like this, the whole thing loses its grip. I still work hard, but not out of an itch to outshine or secure an identity. Energy flows into the work itself, not into chasing “becoming someone.” That release is freedom. I still have ambition, but it doesn’t own me—it slips through my hands like water, leaving me clean.
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From today until the end of September October, I plan to listen to a series of lectures given by Jiddu Krishnamurti in 1949 to an audience in Ojai, California. These lectures—14 of them—are digitally remastered recordings available in an audiobook collection from NLB.
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