The Echo of Voices: On Influence and the Freedom to Listen

Everyone has someone who brings a positive influence to their life. His father, his uncle, and his teacher all gave him motivational words, their voices echoing with ethics. Throughout the story, famous historical figures may appear, inspiring a person with their live motivations for each of their causes. I encountered Jiddu Krishnamurti’s works, though it was only a small selection. In Bali, where I grew up, the early 90s saw bookstores brimming with diverse philosophies, from the intricate Tantra to the basic Purana. Ordos’s works were well printed, ranging from the many Buddhist monks’ manuscripts to the writings of secluded Christian priests. Jiddu Krishnamurti’s works were perhaps the most beautiful works I ever encountered in my high school life.

But what does it mean to be influenced? We speak of influence as if it were always a gift, a benevolent force that shapes us toward some better version of ourselves. Yet there is a paradox at the heart of this word. To be influenced is to be moved by another, to allow their voice to become part of the chorus that speaks within us. And here lies the question that Krishnamurti himself would pose: in collecting these voices, in accumulating these influences, are we discovering truth or merely trading one authority for another?

The young mind is hungry for direction. It seeks fathers and uncles and teachers, not merely for their words but for the certainty those words seem to carry. We want to believe that someone, somewhere, has found the answer to the riddle of existence, and if we listen carefully enough, if we follow diligently enough, we too might arrive at that same shore of understanding. The bookstores of Bali in those years were temples to this hunger, their shelves offering countless paths to enlightenment, each bound in its own vocabulary, each promising its own revelation.

But Krishnamurti’s works stood apart, not because they offered a different path, but because they questioned the very notion of paths. His was a voice that spoke not to accumulate wisdom but to dismantle it, to strip away the accumulated layers of belief and tradition and authority until what remained was not knowledge but awareness itself. “Truth is a pathless land,” he would say, and in saying this, he invited us into a profound loneliness, the loneliness of a mind that must discover everything for itself.

This is the uncomfortable gift of genuine inquiry: it does not comfort, it unsettles. It does not provide answers to carry forward like talismans against uncertainty. Instead, it asks us to look at the very mechanism by which we seek answers, to observe the mind’s desperate need for security, for belonging, for the validation that comes from aligning ourselves with some greater voice than our own.

And yet, here is the deeper paradox: even Krishnamurti’s rejection of authority becomes, for many, a new authority. Even the call to freedom can become a cage if we do not understand that freedom is not found in any teaching, however radical, but in the quality of attention we bring to our own living. The beautiful works we encounter, the voices that echo with ethics, the motivational words of fathers and teachers—these are not wrong or misguided. They are part of the landscape of being human. But they become chains when we substitute them for our own direct perception of what is.

Perhaps influence, then, is not about finding the right voice to follow but about learning to listen in a way that does not create dependency. It is about allowing the words of others to illuminate our own capacity for observation rather than to replace it. The teacher who truly teaches us something lasting is the one who makes us aware that we have always possessed the faculty of seeing, that we have always been capable of understanding, but that we have been trained, perhaps since childhood, to look away from our own immediate experience and toward the mediated experience of others.

In those Bali bookstores of the early nineties, among the Tantras and Puranas, the Buddhist manuscripts and Christian contemplations, what was really being sought? Was it wisdom or was it escape? Was it truth or was it the comfort of certainty? And in finding Krishnamurti’s works beautiful, what was that beauty? Was it the aesthetics of his language, or was it the recognition—perhaps fleeting, perhaps incomplete—that beauty itself lies not in the accumulation of knowledge but in the direct encounter with what is, unmediated by the voices of those who came before?

We cannot escape influence entirely. We are social creatures, formed by language and culture, shaped by the countless interactions that make up a life. But we can, perhaps, hold our influences more lightly. We can learn to distinguish between the voice that awakens something dormant within us and the voice that merely gives us something new to believe. We can notice when we are using the words of others as a shield against our own uncertainty and when we are using them as a mirror to see ourselves more clearly.

The father, the uncle, the teacher—they give us their words not because they possess final truths but because they care enough to share what light they have found. The historical figures who inspire us do so not because they were superhuman but because they were fully human, struggling with the same questions of meaning and purpose that we struggle with. And Krishnamurti, in all his radical questioning, gives us perhaps the most difficult gift of all: the suggestion that no one, not even he, can do our living for us.

To be influenced positively, then, might mean to be influenced toward our own freedom, toward our own capacity for unmediated observation. It might mean learning to receive the voices of others not as commandments but as invitations to look more deeply into our own experience. It might mean understanding that the echo of voices within us is not the problem—the problem is when we mistake those echoes for the original sound of our own being.

In the end, everyone does have someone who brings a positive influence to their life. But perhaps the truest influence is the one that teaches us we need no influence at all, that everything we need to understand is already present in the quality of attention we bring to each moment, that truth is not something to be found in beautiful works or motivational words but in the simple, radical act of seeing what is, as it is, without the filter of what we have been told it should be.