Krishnamurti: The Man and his Vision

KRISHNAMURTI

The Man and his Vision

Krishnamurti wanted one to see the map of the world – the political and ideological conflicts, the religious schisms, the poverty of the many, the affluence of the few, the piling up of armaments, etc. Next, he wanted one to see his own inside map – the violence, jealousy, ambition, the urge for accumulation, the whole gamut of drives and emotions. He held that the outer discord in the world is a result of the inner discord of the individual.

The individual is the world. His consciousness is the collective consciousness. If one individual becomes truly free, it can affect the entire consciousness of the human race. So, the responsibility of an individual is immense. He is not a stray unit. He is a part of the whole. There is no way to transform the whole except through the individual.

Krishnamurti held that no system or ideology or ideal or method could bring about a transformation of the individual or the world. An empirical view of the world will bear out that the so-called ideals, cherished over ages, have simply been escape routes and have not brought about much amelioration in the world.

Any action by an ego-centered person creates confusion. Ego is not simply riding the high horse. Ego or self is the past stored and recorded in memory. It is the residue ofthe best experience–both pleasant or unpleasant. Memory of an individual includes the racial evil. All knowledge is a process of accumu­lation and accretion to memory, Intelligence consists in the discrimination between the useful and the useless ful1ctions of memory and knowledge. Scientific or technical knowledge is useful. Other knowledge consisting of psychological past has no utility. On the other hand, it does incalculable harm. It is at the root of prejudice. Prejudice is a sin against Truth–declared Krishnamurti in an early poem.

Memory

The psychological past or memory is a bridge between the past and future. It prevents the perception of the present in its totality. It throws up reactions which are only thoughts. Thoughts, all thoughts, noble or ignoble, of hope or despair, are simply mechanical. They create time. Without thoughts, there is no self or thinker. Without thoughts, there is no time; there is only present which is timeless. Thoughts create time–­psychological time, not chronological time. Time is sorrow; that is, thought is sorrow.

The present throws up challenges. When the psychological past or memory intervenes, the response to the challenge becomes insufficient. An insufficient response leads to friction and failure, whether it be of an individual or a civilization. Only a free mind, a mind rid of the garbage of the psychological past, can meet the challenge wholly.

The way to a free mind is only through self-knowledge. Self-knowledge is not the result of a method or discipline, or pursuit of ideals. It is not a process of addition or accumulation. It comes out of an awareness of the movements of one’s thoughts and emotion from moment to moment. It is up to the individual to be aware of the operations of his own mind. No Guru can help.

Krishnamurti explained what he meant by awareness or attention. He called it choice-less awareness or awareness without condemnation or justification. It is not self-analysis or introspection. It is to observe without the observer. The observer is only a fragment of the mind observing another fragment. Any move­ment by the observer to change the observed creates conflict. Even the observation can mean a desire to be relieved of the observed and such a desire can interfere with the process of observation. Without the observer, the observed cannot last–­without the peg the hat cannot hang. This technique of obser­vation without the observer is a patent right of Krishnamurti in spiritual technology.

Suppose one is jealous or violent. Jealousy and violence–­not the words but the actual twinges–are facts. Freedom from jealousy and non-violence are the ideals. Ideals are fiction or simple mental constructs. One normally tries to get rid of violence and jealousy and tries to become non-violent and non-jealous. This effort to become something else, to reach the so-called ideal state, creates conflict or a cycle of conflicts. Any becoming or achievement is a process of time and pain. Truth is in being.

Krishnamurti wanted one to be simply aware of jealousy or violence or any other content of consciousness (not the verbalised versions. but the actual twinges inside symbolised by such versions), to simply be the actual state without making any effort or exercise of will. One has to perceive that the word is not the thing. The word is only a symbol. Symbols vary from language to language. The actual twinge of an emotion is common to all humanity. It is the actual twinge or thing which one has to be aware of. Choiceless awareness is the door to freedom. If one is choicelessly aware of misery or jealousy or violence or any other perversion, one becomes free of it.

Awareness is not withdrawal from society. Society is relation­ships between individuals and groups. One has to be choicelessly a ware of the relationships. Relationships mirror the self. In the course of transactions, one develops images about others. These images are a barrier to perception. One has to be aware of such images. In the light of awareness, the images drop down like autumnal leaves.

Krishnamurti integrated the world of nature or actuality with the good or spiritual life. Normally, the nature does not figure, except incidentally, in a religious teaching. Krishnamurti pre­scribed the awareness of objects–a tree or a flower or a table or a building – just as much as that of mental states. His own descriptions of nature of an Indian village, of European cities are totally devoid of fancy. But they are immaculate reproductions of “what is”. They are matter-of-fact, yet strangdly pulsating. They are sheer poetry in prose.

For Krishnamurti meditation was awareness, whether of mental states or persons or objects. It was only the shock of attention that can dissolve the ego or self. It was not the ideas about the “thing” but the “thing” itself that bestows freedom. The discovery that attention to the thing or “what is” is the door to joy and freedom is of immense significance.

In this context, the contribution of Krishnamurti in his sphere has been compared to that of Einstein in the domain of physical science. It places man, nature and Truth in an organic synthesis. The joy born of simple attention to the “thing” is entirely different from the thought-ridden pleasure and has the touch of the Divine.

Awareness brings into daylight, the dark corners of the psyche that lie hidden. Once the motivations, the thought processes, the hidden fears and urges are brought into daylight of awareness, the perception has its own action. The mind gets emptied of the past. The mad onrush of thoughts ceases. Efficiency increases. Sensitivity improves. Inner space and silence are created. The hold of the past on the present weakens and disappears. Tranquillity dawns. The ego or shoddy self dissolves. Action that is truly egoless, that is not based upon expectation of results, action of love, takes place.

When the ego dissolves, there is space in the mind. God, or what Krishnamurti preferred to call, the Immeasurable or the Unknown or Truth, descends into the space. Search for God is futile and worse. It is ego-building. The Unknown is beyond experience and recognition. What can be experienced or recognised is only silence-silence in the mind and of the universe. An egoless mind becomes one with the cosmos. When ego is not, love is.

Bertrand Russell wrote in his autobiography that three passions dominated his life:

(i) search for the foundations of knowledge;
(ii) unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind; and
(iii) longing for love, a love that can relieve the terrible loneliness in which one shimmering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss.

In a sense, all noble souls are fired by these three passions. In Krishnamurti these passions find a peculiar integration.

In Russell, search for the foundations of knowledge leads to more knowledge. Krishnamurti negated and transcended knowledge. He appreciated the utility of scientific or technical knowledge but he maintained that all thinking is only a mechanical process. He transcended knowledge and ended up with the Divine. For him, Universe is a cosmos, not a chaos or an unfathomable abyss.

Krishnamurti shared the other two passions of Russell, i.e., pity or compassion and love, in an abundant measure. When his brother, Nityananda, died, Krishnamurti suffered agony of epic dimensions out of that suffering rose, like a Phoenix from ashes, his resolve to mitigate the suffering of man. It is this resolve that kept Krishnamurti kicking and alive pouring his heart out to audiences all over the world that talk of his mesmerism, place him on par with Buddha and Christ, but continue to cling to and suffer, like obstinate children, the falsity, the petty ambitions and the misery of their ego-ridden lives. It is obviously a case of spiritual energy overcoming physical constraints. Krishnamurti held that a liberated soul keeps on working out of compassion.

In his famous Sydney speech, delivered when he dissolved the Order of the Star because he held that enquiry for Truth is a solo flight and not a collective affair, Krishnamurti declared his resolve to make man “unconditionally free.” The saga of the philosopher’s long life–the poor lanky Brahmin boy undergoing the rigours of the Theosophical Society with its rituals and Masters, throwing overboard all shackles, isms, beliefs, spiritual hierarchies and other mumbo-jumbo, and then growing into the freest and most responsible of all teachers –bears ample testimony to the fact that he had more than lived up to his declaration. In a world full of broken promises, it is touching authenticity!

Krishnamurti was against all clans, cliques, tribal and even national affiliations. Like Russell, Einstein and Bernard Shaw he was a staunch pacifist. He can be dubbed utopian, but that is the inevitable result of seeing beyond one’s nose, of being one with the cosmos, of being a spring of love mentioned by Russell.

Love–not the emotion full of jealousy and possessiveness popularly signified by this term – is the essence of the teaching of Krishnamurti. Awareness is alpha and Love the omega in the alphabet of Krishnamurti.

Surprisingly, but happily, Krishnamurti held that learning the alphabet is not a time-bound process. Given earnestness, it can happen instantaneously. No wonder, a perceptive admirer compared Krishnamurti to Ashtavakra.

The teachings of Krishnamurti touche many branches of modern knowledge besides ancient religion. His reference to images touches transactional analysis, a branch of management. His probe into the inner urges and drives, though he took up cudgels with Freud on the unconscious, borders on psycho-analysis.

His insistence on the “thing” behind the verbal veil touches linguistics or semantics. His immaculate descriptions of nature can be the envy of an artist or a poet. His denunciation of the accumulative urge has the ring of Marx. His impatience with the ideological and other chains reminds one of a Rousseau. His approval of science and technology gladdens the heart of any technocrat. His enunciation of love and compassion and counsel to look at the people without judgement and conclusion are in the Christian tradition. His stress on austerity and effacement of self are in the true Hindu tradition. With all that, his impatience with tradition is that of an iconoclast.

All the above facets are only mental constructs and artificial fragmentations. His view was simply total and integrated. Because it was total he was able to comprehend and reconcile the apparently irreconcilable and to remove, once for all, the artificial distinctions between East and West, science and religion, the ascetic and the aesthetic, the secular and spiritual. He was an integrationist of the first order.

Modern man is a bundle of contradictions. He is torn between science and religion, doubt and orthodoxy, the demands of an economy where he is a cog, may be an efficient cog in a giant machine and the nagging urge that life cannot merely be a round of earning, spending and investing, repeated ad inflnitum.

The mechanical and repetitive occupation with the tradition in the East has resulted in stultification and stagnation. The Spirit of enquiry has, of course, been kept alive in the West largely because of science, but the spirit of egocentric and com­petitive aggrandisement, thought-ridden psycho-analysis and voluble theorising have resulted in a mad pursuit of pleasure, social discord and piling up of armaments and the existential sense of futility, absurdity and loneliness. The teachings of Krishnamurti show a way out of both the stagnation of the East and the discord and futility of the West without hampering the development of either art or science.

Actually, both art and science gain from him because, with the annihilation of the self which he aimed at, there is a release of the creative spirit. The deeply earnest, yet superbly delicate touch of Krishnamurti chalks out a path for man which can result in a full and complete enjoyment of life, here and now, a life packed with truly meaningful action, with inner integra­tion and outer harmony. His impatience with yesterday was because of his concern for today, his negations of ideals was because he was the most authentic idealist bent upon seeing an end to the inhumanity of man to man and to nature, his invi­tation to death was a call for the celebration of life, reducing misery to the irreducible minimum. His teaching is a coffin to self-centered thought-processes and activities but a cradle to the Divine in man.

Krishnamurti hardly talked of the Divine. For a man with mystical experiences galore, this reticence is rather strange. This is because Krishnamurti was more interested in the cleansing operation. Once the rubbish is removed, what a lot there is! The spring will sprout automatically. After all, the spring is near!