The Ending of Time was published by Harper & Row in 1985, presenting thirteen dialogues between Krishnamurti and David Bohm recorded at Brockwood Park in 1980. These conversations represent the culmination of a relationship that began in 1961 and continued until Krishnamurti’s death in 1986 — a dialogue between two radically different modes of inquiry that proved to be profoundly complementary.
Bohm brought to the conversation a physicist’s understanding of thought as a process — as something that operates with its own momentum, creating the very problems it then tries to solve. His concept of “thought as a system” (developed independently of Krishnamurti) paralleled Krishnamurti’s observation that thought creates the thinker, that the observer is the observed, that psychological time is the product of thought’s movement. The convergence was genuine: two minds arriving at similar perceptions from opposite directions.
The central question of the dialogues is whether thought can end — not through suppression or discipline, but through the direct perception of its own nature. And if thought ends, what remains? Krishnamurti speaks of “the ground” — an intelligence that is not personal, not the product of experience, not accumulated through time. Bohm finds resonance with his concept of the implicate order — a deeper level of reality from which the explicate order of space, time, and matter unfolds.
The dialogues do not reach conclusions in any conventional sense. They are the record of two minds exploring together, without hierarchy, without the fixed positions of teacher and student — a quality of relationship that Krishnamurti had advocated his entire life and that found its fullest expression here.
Collecting The Ending of Time
First edition (Harper & Row, New York, 1985): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $20–$50
- Without jacket: $8–$15
- UK first (Gollancz): $20–$45