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

- Link: https://legawa.com/something-else/the-echo-of-voices-on-influence-and-the-freedom-to-listen/
- Published: 2025-12-18T09:51:11+07:00
- Author: Cahya

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.