The Book of Yourself Newsletter
Issue 41: April 2025
|
|
The world is what it is because thinking makes it so. This awareness of the world being the play, display and interplay of thought makes all these seemingly catastrophic and often bloody events taking place seem literally like something staged. The actors are puppets whose thoughts, emotions and actions are dictated by the puppeteer, which is the age-old universal conditioning of thought. The actors don’t act but re-enact an ancient script. Action requires the immediacy of freedom, but these thespians have no real freedom or independence because their being is dictated by the general lineaments and specific flaws of their characters. Character comes with its own strings attached and these determine our fate. But while the character is defined by his personal qualities, behind that idiosyncratic identity lies the universal consciousness of humanity. The actor thinks he is himself, but in every character there is a decisive factor of unconsciousness which makes him a stranger to himself. The layers of consciousness enter into contradiction with each other. The particular consciousness is at odds with its own collective unconscious and the latter is an expression of the fragmented consciousness of humanity. So where is the meaning of the play? The characters are caught in a network of conflictive relationships which sweeps them along to their fateful end. They do not comprehend the forces at work and so the meaning of their existence is unclear. Does any level of consciousness comprehend its own meaning? Is meaning the province of consciousness or the meaning of consciousness is to be found in a deeper dimension? Is it in the sound and the fury or in the silence that follows? And would there be so much misery and struggle if we lived with a deeper sense of space and silence? The opening to this dimension is what K calls meditation.
|
|
“All things need space. If rats are enclosed in a restricted space, they destroy each other; the small birds sitting on a telegraph wire, of an evening, have the needed space between each other. Human beings living in crowded cities are becoming violent. Where there is no space, outwardly or inwardly, every form of mischief and degeneration is inevitable. The conditioning of the mind through so-called education, religion, tradition, culture, gives little space to the flowering of the mind and heart. The belief, the experience according to that belief, the opinion, the concepts, the word is the ‘me’, the ego, the centre which creates the limited space within whose border is consciousness. The ‘me’ has its being and its activity within the small space it has created for itself. All its problems and sorrows, its hopes and despairs are within its own frontiers, and there is no space. The known occupies all its consciousness. Consciousness is the known. Within this frontier there is no solution to all the problems human beings have put together. And yet they won’t let go; they cling to the known or invent the unknown, hoping it will solve their problems. The space which the ‘me’ has built for itself is its sorrow and the pain of pleasure. The gods don’t give you space, for theirs is yours. This vast, measureless space lies outside the measure of thought, and thought is the known. Meditation is the emptying of consciousness of its content, the known, the ‘me’.”
|
Krishnamurti’s Journal, pg. 98
|
We take space for granted. It is a given of existence and indispensable to it. Where else could we be but in space? But living things need it in the right proportion. The lack of adequate space, leads to violence among rats and humans. As K points out, this is not only so physically but inwardly. The inward clutter has the same consequences as the outward overcrowding, leading to mischief and degeneration. The conditioned inner content leaves little room for the flowering of the heart and mind. This content, as knowledge and belief, constitutes the self-referential movement of experience which builds up the ego as the limiting radial centre of consciousness. The self, K says, lives in this little space it has created for itself. In it are all its troubles, sorrows, hopes, despairs and the pain of pleasure, the constant occupation with which takes up all the space. Consciousness is completely occupied by and with the known so that the known and consciousness mean the same thing. K states that within the frontiers of this consciousness there is no solution to the problems we human beings have created for ourselves. But instead of letting go of it we cling to the known or invent the unknown, which is a projection and therefore still within the sphere of the known. That’s why the gods don’t give us space, because they are our inventions and have their existence within the same limited domain of the mind. Dissolving the content of consciousness is what K calls meditation, in whose emptiness there is the vast, measureless space that lies outside the frontiers of thought, self and the known.
|
This perspective places the question of space at the heart of our problematic human condition. Our fundamental struggle would seem to be between these two realms of the limited and the unlimited space. The very limitation of space to the self-referential movement of consciousness would seem to be at the source of our mischief and violence. The key factor limiting the inner space of consciousness, however, would seem to be time.
|
|
|
|
“The space that thought creates is measurable and so is limited; cultures and religions are its product. But the mind is filled with thought and is made up of thought; its consciousness is the structure of thought, having little space within it. But this space is the movement of time, from here to there, from its centre towards its outer lines of consciousness, narrow or expanding. The space which the centre makes for itself is its own prison. Its relationships are from this narrow space but there must be space to live; that of the mind denies living. Living within the narrow confines of the centre is strife, pain and sorrow and that is not living. The space, the distance between you and the tree, is the word, knowledge which is time. Time is the observer who makes the distance between himself and the trees, between himself and what is. Without the observer, distance ceases. Identification with the trees, with another or with a formula, is the action of thought in its desire for protection, security. Distance is from one point to another and to reach that point time is necessary; distance only exists where there is direction, inward or outward. The observer makes a separation, a distance between himself and what is; from this grows conflict and sorrow. The transformation of what is takes place only when there is no separation, no time, between the seer and the seen. Love has no distance.”
|
Krishnamurti’s Journal, pp. 44-45
|
The limited space created by thought, which makes up consciousness and produces cultures and religions, is the movement of time configuring its own prison. The narrow confines of the centre divide, bringing about strife and breaking down relationship, which is life. So this self-centred consciousness denies living. The separation between us is generated by the word, which is knowledge and time as the observer. The distance is between the past, with which the observer is identified in its desire for security, and what is. From this distance spring conflict and sorrow. So the transformation takes place when the time gap between the seer and the seen ceases. This cessation of distance K calls love. Let me see if I can put it differently for myself. The observer is constituted of the internal space generated by its identification with the past. This limited domain of time in turn brings about a distance with what is. The very limitation of psychological space-time is the separation from which all the contradiction and sorrow arise. But it is the ending of time as content and identification that breaks down the limitation of space. Space, freed from the bond of thought-time, opens up to a measureless emptiness that burns with the living flame of love.
|
|
“There is a space of nothingness whose volume is not bound by time, the measure of thought. This space the mind cannot enter; it can only observe. In this observation there is no experiencer. This observer has no history, no association, no myth, and so the observer is that which is. Knowledge is extensive but it has no space, for by its very weight and volume it perverts and smothers that space. There is no knowledge of the self, higher or lower; there’s only a verbal structure of the self, a skeleton, covered over by thought. Thought cannot penetrate its own structure; what it has put together thought cannot deny and when it does deny, it is the refusal of further gain. When the time of the self is not, the space that has no measure is.”
|
Krishnamurti’s Journal, pg. 126
|
This is fascinating. The mind as thought-time cannot enter the space of nothingness; it can only observe. So there is a quality of observation of the mind past the limiting measure of thought. That means there is no experiencer, for experience is recognition, which is the operation of thought-time as knowledge. K still uses the term ‘observer’ to denote this quality of observation devoid of history, association and myth, so that the observer is the observed. Knowledge is the past and as such it necessarily introduces a limitation into the infinity of nothingness. The identified sphere of knowledge is the self, which K describes as a verbal skeleton fleshed out by thought. Then he adds that thought cannot penetrate the structure of what it has put together nor can it deny it, for that denial is the outcome of its own motivations. But then he confirms what he had been previously hinting at, namely that with the cessation of the time of the self, the measureless space is. And this space is the depth of silence.
|
|
“There is a silence of the mind which is never touched by any noise, by any thought or by the passing wind of experience. It is this silence that is innocent, and so endless. When there is this silence of the mind action springs from it, and this action does not cause confusion or misery.
|
|
The meditation of a mind that is utterly silent is the benediction that man is ever seeking. In this silence every quality of silence is. There is that strange silence that exists in a temple or in an empty church deep in the country, without the noise of tourists and worshippers; and the heavy silence that lies on water is part of that which is outside the silence of the mind. The meditative mind contains all these varieties, changes and movements of silence. The silence of the mind is the true religious mind, and the silence of the gods is the silence of the earth. The meditative mind flows in this silence, and love is the way of this mind. In this silence there is bliss and laughter.”
|
The Only Revolution, pp. 31-32
|
Life is action in relationship and the essence of relationship is love, which is the absence of separation. The action that proceeds from the little space created by thought-time as identity is inherently divisive and therefore destructive of relationship, love and life. We might say that this very destructive structure of consciousness is what makes life meaningless. The meaning is found, rather, in the action of the mind in meditation, which K calls the true religious mind, in whose space and silence there is love, bliss and laughter. This is the revolutionary nature of religion in K’s sense of the term, for it implies an ending of the inherently divisive and sorrowful world created by thought. The revolution lies in the timeless observation that sees through the self-enclosed little space of the self. Implied in the ending of that time-space is the emergence of a wholesome dimension of being in which love lights the way of the sacred.
|
Be well, amigos, and let’s observe the boundaries of time-space and its needful ending,
|
Photos by J. Gómez Rodríguez: 1. Het Bovenwater, Lelystad, NL; 2. View from the canal, Lelystad, NL.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
