These dialogues extend over a wide range of subjects. For over 30 years, a group of people from various disciplines, backgrounds and pursuits, deeply concerned with the enormity of the challenge facing humanity and with one central interest, the unfoldment of the self through the perceptive field of self-knowledge, have gathered around J. Krishnamurti to undertake together, through dialogue, the investigation of the structure and nature of man's mind and consciousness and the energy resources that lie dormant within man's being. The concern in these dialogues is the freedom of the mind from the bondages of memory and time, a mutation in consciousness and the arising of insight that gives deep roots of steadiness to the mind.
     In the world today, scientific and technological revolution has unharnessed undreamt-of resources of power and knowledge. However, man has failed to discover in himself the sources of wisdom and compassion. What is needed is an inner revolution in the psyche of man. The insight that man lacks is the apprehension that he is the maker of his problems and that the root of this problem-making machinery is his mind. It is in this area of perception that the ultimate freedom of man lies.
     Starting tentatively, there is in these dialogues a relentless questioning, probing and inquiry, a `listening' and a `seeing' in which depths of the self with its vast subtleties and hidden escapes are exposed. This exploration to Krishnamurti is `a journey into time, into the past, into the limitless'.
     Man caught in the paradox of living, rarely questions. He escapes from his anguish, his loneliness, his sorrow. In a world sated with sensations, man turns to the guru, to the religious experience, or extrasensory powers that arise from various forms of concentration, as a further stimulus to his jaded appetites. Krishnamurti's teaching negates the guru and the psychic experience as a way to liberation. He demands a `life of correctness', a daily life free from all self-centred activity. All psychic experiences as they arise have to be put aside for they can become obstacles and traps to insight, which alone frees man from duality and the bondage of time as the past.
     Krishnamurti's role in these dialogues is of great interest. The dialogues are not questions and answers. Krishnamurti's mind is tentative, pliable, learning, seeking, probing; it is questioned, it pauses, observes, withdraws, to move forward again. There is no exchange of opinion, no spilling out of the verbal, no operation of memory as past experience, blocking the new. There is a listening with the total flowering of the senses'. In that intensity of enquiry, insight arises. Speaking of the nature of this state, Krishnamurti says `there is only perception and nothing else. Everything else is movement in time. Perception is without time. There is a momentum which is timeless.'
     The Krishnamurti Foundation India is offering these dialogues to those who seek fundamental answers to the problems of life.
     Pupul Jayakar Sunanda Patwardhan