We began by listening to and meditating on the excellent passage below, by J. Krishnamurti. This provided a segue to an exercise based on the assignment for the week: writing a page or two on answering the question, "Who Am I?" We did not, in fact, share our written work, but rather wrote about and shared our experience of writing the assignment itself. The analysis of what we did in writing the assignment gave us as clear an insight into our own functioning as sharing what we think of ourselves would have.
Our assignment for this week is to continue working on the "Who Am I?" piece and bring it to the next session. Of course, sharing is not obligatory, and it is much better to write something honest and difficult to share than something merely safe.
Please take a few minutes to read the passage below and reflect on it, experiment with its ideas and see if they are true.
Reading:
An Excerpt from Freedom from the Known, by Jiddu Krishnamurti
Chapter 2 - Learning About Ourselves
I have nothing to teach you - no new philosophy, no new system, no new path to reality; there is no path to reality any more than to truth. All authority of any kind, especially in the field of thought and understanding, is the most destructive, evil thing. Leaders destroy the followers and followers destroy the leaders. You have to be your own teacher and your own disciple. You have to question everything that man has accepted as valuable, as necessary. If you do not follow somebody you feel very lonely. Be lonely then. Why are you frightened of being alone? Because you are faced with yourself as you are and you find that you are empty, dull, stupid, ugly, guilty and anxious - a petty, shoddy, secondhand entity. Face the fact; look at it, do not run away from it. The moment you run away fear begins.
In enquiring into ourselves we are not isolating ourselves from the rest of the world. It is not an unhealthy process. Man throughout the world is caught up in the same daily problems as ourselves, so in inquiring into ourselves we are not being in the least neurotic because there is no difference between the individual and the collective. That is an actual fact. I have created the world as I am. So don't let us get lost in this battle between the part and the whole. I must become aware of the total field of my own self, which is the consciousness of the individual and of society. It is only then, when the mind goes beyond this individual and social consciousness, that I can become a light to myself that never goes out.
Now where do we begin to understand ourselves? Here am I, and how am I to study myself, observe myself, see what is actually taking place inside myself? I can observe myself only in relationship because all life is relationship. It is no use sitting in a corner meditating about myself. I cannot exist by myself. I exist only in relationship to people, things and ideas, and in studying my relationship to outward things and people, as well as to inward things, I begin to understand myself. Every other form of understanding is merely an abstraction and I cannot study myself in abstraction; I am not an abstract entity; therefore I have to study myself in actuality - as I am, not as I wish to be.
Understanding is not an intellectual process. Accumulating knowledge about yourself and learning about yourself are two different things, for the knowledge you accumulate about yourself is always of the past and a mind that is burdened with the past is a sorrowful mind. Learning about yourself is not like learning a language or a technology or in the present and knowledge is always in the past, and as most of us live in the past and are satisfied with the past, knowledge becomes extraordinarily important to us. That is why we worship the erudite, the clever, the cunning. But if you are learning all the time, learning every minute, learning by watching and listening, learning by seeing and doing, then you will find that learning is a constant movement without the past.
If you say you will learn gradually about yourself, adding more and more, little by little, you are not studying yourself now as you are but through acquired knowledge. Learning implies a great sensitivity. There is no sensitivity if there is an idea, which is of the past, dominating the present. Then the mind is no longer quick, pliable, alert. Most of us are not sensitive even physically. We overeat, we do not bother about the right diet, we oversmoke and drink so that our bodies become gross and insensitive; the quality of attention in the organism itself is made dull. How can there be a very alert, sensitive, clear mind if the organism itself is dull and heavy? We may be sensitive about certain things that touch us personally but to be completely sensitive to all the implications of life demand that there be no separation between the organism and the psyche. It is a total movement.
To understand anything you must live with it, you must observe it, you must know all its content, its nature, its structure, its movement. Have you ever tried living with yourself? If so, you will begin to see that yourself is not a static state, it is a fresh living thing. And to live with a living thing your mind must also be alive. And it cannot be alive if it is caught in opinions, judgments and values.
In order to observe the movement of your own mind and heart, of your whole being, you must have a free mind, not a mind that agrees and disagrees, taking sides in an argument, disputing over mere words, but rather following with an intention to understand - a very difficult thing to do because most of us don't know how to look at, or listen to, our own being any more than we know how to look at the beauty of a river or listen to the breeze among the trees.
When we condemn or justify we cannot see clearly, nor can we when our minds are endlessly chattering; then we do not observe what is we look only at the projections we have made of ourselves. Each of us has an image of what we think we are or what we should be, and that image, that picture, entirely prevents us from seeing ourselves as we actually are.
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2 comments:
There is so much in this passage that is amazing. A few of the things that really jump out and strike me over the head: the mind cannot be alert if it is constantly justifying or condemning; that all of this is about developing a sensitivity to all of life, not just our own personal interests; that sensitivity of the mind is connected to the body, because the process of learning about ourselves is a whole moment. Not just something that we can section off to the appropriate times of the day. Anytime there is a group around something like self-knowledge, it is easy to think that there are certain times you are "on duty" with learning about yourself and other times that you are "off duty." But that's not the case. The group is there as a support to be over more "on duty" to actively learning about yourself, actively trying to be as sensitive to life as you can be.
Thinking about the line where he says "face the fact that you are a shoddy, second rate entity." That feels so counterintuitive. I don't know about other cultures, but so much of the American culture seems to be geared around telling yourself "I'm good, I'm great, I'm wonderful" that it almost seems anti-American to acknowledge how we really are. Perhaps this goes without saying, but it is just dawning on me that doing that takes an enormous amount of courage.
Speaking of Krishnamurti......
I was reminded this weekend of why the Self Knowledge Symposium was founded and who it was founded for. It was founded for my grandfather, even though my grandfather hardly knows anything about it.
My grandfather was raised in a congregational church in New England. It wasn't called Southern Baptist, but it was essentially the same. As a young boy he would look around the church and see all of these men with white hair that were all telling him that this and that were true, that if you believed in Jesus you would be saved, and that everyone else was going to hell. He looked around and figured, if all of these old men believe this is true, it must be true.
Then came World War II. My grandfather entered the merchant marines when he was seventeen and became a clerk of a ship. He didn't see much combat, and frankly, he did not see much work. All he had to do was take care of inventory when the ships docked, so when they were out to sea, he had a lot of time to think to himself. And to lay on the deck and read. Not too long ago I stole one of his journals from that time. This is something he said: "I have now read in the Bible up to the book of Joshua. Each night before reading I exercise and get fresh air out on the dock. For 15-20 minutes I devote time to looking at the sea and sky and using my mind to think. I try to explain life to myself. I ask God to help me understand all that is his will for me to know. There is much about this reasoning of existence that has not been solved in my mind."
A few pages later he wrote about reading something in the Bhagavad Gita, and for all he could tell it could have come out of the Bible.
A few months later he picked up a book by Paul Brunton at the library in Norfolk about the Bhagavad Gita and Hinduism. The book still needs to be returned to the Norfolk Library.
After that, the story leaves off for several years. He came back from the war, got married, and by all accounts got very very busy. But his desire to understand life never left him, and when he was fifty five, it hit him again with a vengeance, and he spent hours in the library in Greensboro reading all of the German philosophers and trying to figure something out. It was during that time that he ran across Krishnamurti and read every book that was ever written of his sayings and several of his biographies.
He mentioned that the biographers say that there was something about being around Krishnamurti that will never be conveyed in his writings, and that maybe in 1,000 years people will understand more of what he is talking about.
To me, my grandfather seems like someone whose heart remained open to be sensitive towards life, to want to learn about life, and that had a yearning (not a duty) to do so. I doubt he ever met or was close to anyone that cared about what he did as much as he did and the way he did. But though he doesn't know anything about it, the Self Knowledge Symposium was founded for him.
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