The Book of Yourself Newsletter
Issue 44: July 2025
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Our human condition seems to be such that our multiple immediate challenges come with such urgency that we often have little time for looking past them to their deeper roots. We know these roots exist because the problems we face keep repeating themselves, not only on a global and social scale but at home and under the skin. If our house is burning, we must of course put out the fire, but we must then look deeper into the causes so it does not happen again. These immediate issues have to be tackled but their solution is not at their own superficial level. It may sound a bit callous to say that war, economic depressions, social injustice, racism, violence or even climate change are superficial when they have such devastating consequences and cause so much suffering. And yet, without underestimating their seriousness and grave danger, we also realise that they are the direct consequence of our conflictive relationship with things, people and ideas. The source is therefore in us, in the operation of consciousness, which is not yours and mine, not the mere result of individual experience or collective cultural heritage and conditioning, but common to all mankind. Were we to realise this universality of consciousness, we would have a common ground of compassion and total responsibility. We would then come naturally together to look into the deeper causes of division and conflict, of violence and sorrow. Those causes are active in the way of our perception, feeling, thinking and action. They are the outcome of our fundamental lack of self-understanding. While we must naturally take care of our daily functional and relational commitments, without this deeper concern with the source of our problems, the latter will keep coming back endlessly in different ways.
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In the examination of the factors of of the division and conflict afflicting mankind, K finds that it all comes down to a question of observation, of knowing how to look so that we see what is, for unless we perceive the facts correctly, we cannot respond adequately and that very inadequate response is what gives rise to our problems. K places the primary source of this inadequacy in the very nature of what he calls the observer, the thinker and the experiencer.
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“Now what is this observer, or thinker, or experiencer? The observer is the living entity who is always moving, acting, who is aware of things, and aware of his own existence. This existence he is aware of is his relationship to things, to people and to ideas. This observer is the whole machinery of thought, he is also observation, he is also a nervous system and sensory perception. The observer is his name, his conditioning, and the relationship between that conditioning and life. All this is the observer. He is also his own idea of himself – an image again built from conditioning, from the past, from tradition. The observer thinks and acts. His action is always according to his image about himself and his image of the world. This action of the observer in relationship breeds division. This action is the only relationship we know. This action is not separate from the observer, it is the observer himself. It is the observer who talks about the world and himself in relationship and fails to see that his relationship is his own action, therefore himself. So the cause of all the division is the action of the observer. The observer himself is the action which divides life into the thing observed and himself separate from it. Here is the basic cause of division, and hence conflict.”
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Freedom, Love, and Action, pp. 110-112
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This pretty much describes any human being. We are indeed such living entities that move, act and are aware of things and of their own existence, which is our relationship with things, people and ideas. We are a nervous system with its machinery of thought, sensory perception and observation. Each of us is defined by our names, our conditioning and the relationship of that conditioning and life. Besides, each one of us has an idea or image of himself built over time on the basis of experience, tradition and conditioning, which image shapes our perception, feeling, thinking and action. We might readily understand that acting from our conditioning might be a source of problems, for we are all conditioned differently and hold different and conflictive identities, which are the images we have of ourselves. It is in the self-image that K places the primary source of conflict in life because it inherently splits the world into the observer and the observed, the me and the not me. The observer would thus be the basic cause of violence and suffering. So if we want to live in peace, with cooperation and compassion, we need to look more closely into the nature of the observer and how it brings such chaos about.
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In K’s general description the observer is the entity that observes out of the accumulated knowledge of experience. He looks with his conditioning and comes to conclusions based on his desires, fears, hurts and inclinations. The potential immediacy and totality of perception is thus limited or denied by the interference of the memory of conditioning and knowledge. So the observer does not observe and consequently his actions do not meet the challenge. The observer observes things, people, ideas and his own inner feelings and attributes through what K calls images. The image is central to the process of the observer, because we observe through the image we have created about what we observe. These images of the thing being looked at is what K calls the observed. Normally K only talks about the observer and the observed, but from this description, this process of observation involves the elements of the observer, the image and the thing that image is about. What the observer sees is not the thing but the image it has of it, which it takes to be the thing and, therefore, separate from himself. If this is correct, such a process would involve a breakdown of self-awareness or proprioception (Bohm’s term), since the observer does not see that the image is not the object but himself. So not only does the observer not observe, but it is caught in a reflex system of self-deception.
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The issue of conflict, as K sees it, is inherent to this process because it implies a spacial and temporal division and, according to him, where there is division there must be conflict. The division arises because the referent of the image, which the observer mistakes for the thing, is the past. The spacial divide is the distance from the actuality implied in that time interval. What we see is not the actual living thing but something dead we recognize. So there is a loss of contact resulting in a contradiction between what is and what was. This generates its own friction and we then try to resolve it by countering it with the ideal of what should be, which introduces another contradiction and conflict. So, once again, there are three elements at work: what was, what is and what should be, i.e. the past, the present and the future. K suggests that this chain reaction of psychological time can be broken if we are able to suspend or delay the reflex response of the past, which ends the image.
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“If you have observed yourself carefully, you will see that a part of your brain, which has evolved for many thousands of years, is the past – the past being experience, the memory. In that past there is safety. I hope you are watching all this in yourself. The past always responds immediately; and to delay the response of the past when you meet a challenge, so that there is an interval between the challenge and the response, is to end the image. If this does not take place, we will always be living in the past. So, that is our life, a constant battle, the past, modified by the present moving into the future – which is still the movement of the past, though modified. As long as this movement exists, man can never be free, he must always be in conflict, in sorrow, in confusion, in misery.”
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We can see that our identifications with the past, e.g. as nationalistic, ethnic, ideological or religious affiliation, is a factor of division and conflict. The same with the ingrained memories of our own experience, conscious and unconscious, that constitute the nucleus of our personality. All of which is indeed a matter of the persistence of psychological time. This dualistic approach to relationship as between the me and the not me extends to the inner relation with our own thoughts and feelings. Just as our images separate us from each other, so our concepts of hurt, anger, jealousy and loneliness separate us from them and condemn us to a perpetual struggle with ourselves. We take it that we are different from our anger, jealousy, hurt and loneliness, but this division, as we have seen, is produced by the observer looking at these feelings and reactions with the memory of things past, so it is not observing. To perceive the present, the past, the observer must be absent. So when we are angry, there is only that. There is no naming, justifying, condemning or suppressing it. So the division and conflict with it comes to an end. When we do not resist a hurtful situation and pay complete attention to it, the pain is not recorded as a psychological wound and is not strengthened by subsequent similar incidents. When we feel desperately lonely, we try to escape from it, but loneliness is the result of our isolating self-centred activity, so it is us, which means the observer is the observed.
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The truth is that we are not different from loneliness, anger or jealousy. When the observer is the observed we can no longer act on such things, for the agent that would act on them is the one whose very structure is at their source. So the more he acts, the more the duality and the conflict that underlies and sustains them. This quality of non-duality not only permits us to see what is without any bias but it dissolves what is, because the latter is itself the result of the process of duality. With the ending of division, the conflict that is jealousy, anger or loneliness ends effortlessly, never to come back. All this points to the liberating nature of the perception that the observer is the observed. The ending of the division between the observer and the observed is not only the ending of all these inner and outer conflicts but the emptying of the psychological content generated by the self-centred movement of consciousness. This opens up the quality of space and silence at the heart of meditation. Then we are observing and learning without the watcher, without the past or its accumulation, beyond the divisive boundaries of the space generated by the psychological time of the observer. As K puts it, we are then watching nothing, the nothingness in which everything is.
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“We are watching, not waiting, not expecting anything to happen but watching without end. In that watching there is learning, not the accumulation of knowledge through learning that is almost mechanical, but watching closely, never superficially but deeply, with a swiftness and a tenderness; then there is no watcher. When there is a watcher, it is merely the past watching, and that is not watching, that is just remembering, and it is rather dead stuff. Watching is tremendously alive, every moment a vacancy. Those little crabs and those seagulls and all those birds flying by are watching. They are watching for prey, for fish, watching for something to eat; they too are watching. Somebody passes close by you and wonders what you are watching. You are watching nothing, and in that nothingness everything is.”
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Krishnamurti to Himself, pg. 103
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Take care, amigos, and let’s delve into the wholesome emptiness when the watcher is not,
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P.S.: I have been offered a residency by the KECC (https://krishnamurti-canada.ca/) for the whole month of October at their centre on Vancouver Island, with an open programme of organised and informal meetings which you are all most welcome to join. For further information, please contact Ralph Tiller: ralph@krishnamurti-canada.ca.
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Photos by J. Gómez Rodríguez: 1. View of the marina, Amsterdam, NL ; 2. My cottage in the woods, Rianxo, Spain.
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