The Book of Yourself Newsletter
Issue 35: October 2024
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I believe that the saying ‘May you live in interesting times’ was not meant as an expression of good will but as a curse. By interesting times they meant times of trouble. And those troubled times are very much upon us. One has the strange feeling that humanity has lost its way to such a degree that it is no longer able to find its intellectual, ethical or spiritual bearings. The whole thing seems to be falling apart. When one was growing up, there was a certain faith that although the time was out of joint, we still had it in us to set it right. It might not be easy, but we trusted our own sense of order, truth and justice to keep our compass needle pointing to the true north. We knew we had a lot of work to do, not just out there in terms of information, culture and social organization, but inwardly on ourselves. But it looks as though instead of advancing, that sense of clear and universal purpose has yielded to a widespread quality of conceptual arbitrariness and moral disarray. It occurs to me, however, that this might not be such a strange phenomenon. Historically, this sense of pervasive confusion seems to have overtaken the enterprise of civilization over and over again. After a time, the pillars of morality, knowledge and belief that had been so carefully erected could no longer hold up the grand edifice. The disorder became so pervasive that the only hope seemed to be for it to suffer a total collapse so we might begin anew. In the past, decadent societies might wait for the barbarians to come to their rescue, but nowadays the only option is for us to destroy ourselves, as there are no other barbarians left. The rise and fall of civilizations is a fascinating subject but what concerns us here is the inner structure of this cyclical phenomenon, which I would tentatively venture to propose concerns the dynamic in consciousness between knowledge and creativity.
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Societies and civilizations collapse because they become stagnant and fail to renew themselves. In other words, they follow a habitual pattern that reduces the whole movement to a mechanical system and eventually brings it to a halt through either exhaustion or violence. Knowledge as the crystallization of experience tends to the static and repetitive. It is bound to the past, is inherently limited and carries with it the shadow of ignorance. Knowledge is the essence of science and as such it is necessary to manage our practical affairs and meet all kinds of existential challenges. Because such knowledge is factual and applicable, we have placed a great deal of hope in it as the factor of human improvement and salvation. But apart from technological advances, this faith has not proved itself particularly effective in the pursuit of goodness and moral excellence. K tends rather to identify knowledge as the key factor in our overall degeneration and that knowledge is not the way forward from the crossroads at which we find ourselves.
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“Sirs, human beings right throughout the world are at the crossroads, whether they are aware of it or not. And all these scholars and other people, including the scientists, say that the ascent of man depends on his knowledge: the more knowledge he has, the greater is the ascent. Knowledge is memory, past experiences collected in the brain as memory. And if you are living on the past everlastingly, the past is ascending, human beings are not ascending. They ascend only when there is no fear and when they have understood the nature of pleasure and desire. And when there is love, there is real explosion in the mind. It is up to you whether you want to break the shackles of time or live in it.”
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The Seed of a Million Years, pg. 86
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We tend to believe that the record of history confirms the ascent of humanity by means of knowledge. One standard view is that we started out with magic and superstition, that we then moved to metaphysical and theological thinking, and finally ended up with proper science as the only reliable guarantor of truth. But K was adamant that no such ascent of humanity had taken place by this epistemological route. He denied that the advancement in scientific knowledge went together with the corresponding psychological progress. On the contrary, he maintained that there was no psychological evolution. So knowledge was not the way to the transformation of man. This transformation involves, among other things, the understanding of desire and fear and the explosion of love in the mind. This explosion implies freedom from the prison of knowledge, thought and time, which are all the past content of consciousness.
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“Time has bred consciousness with its content. It is the culture of time. Its content makes up consciousness; without it, consciousness, as we know it, is not. Then there is nothing. We move the little pieces in this consciousness from one area to another according to the pressure of reason and circumstance but in the same field of pain, sorrow and knowledge. This movement is time, the thought and the measure. It is a senseless game of hide and seek with yourself, the shadow and the substance of thought, the past and the future of thought. Thought cannot hold this moment, for this moment is not of time. This moment is the ending of time; time has stopped at that moment, there is no movement at that moment and so it is not related to another moment. It has no cause and so no beginning and no end. Consciousness cannot contain it. In that moment of nothingness everything is.”
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Krishnamurti’s Journal, pp. 99-100
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For K time, psychologically, is the enemy of man. It is this content of consciousness that is preventing the wholeness and freedom of man. The content of consciousness is the movement of thought as time and measure. As it is the response of memory, it is always tethered to the past, which is the essence of its inherent limitation. When thought becomes dominant in our lives it makes for problems because it cannot meet the newness of life. As it is invariably conditioned by the old, it is not free and the very time gap between it and the present moment is the factor of division and conflict. If this is correct, and everything indicates that it is, it would follow that knowledge, thought and time are not the factors of change, for change means the ending of division and conflict at every level of our being, both inwardly and outwardly. So we need to understand this whole process if we are going to put knowledge and thought in their right place. This points to the absolute importance of self-knowing, which is made possible through the mirror of relationship, where through our conduct the content of consciousness is exposed.
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“If I do not understand myself completely, I have no basis for rational thinking; I have no foundation for action, I have no roots in what is virtue. Unless I understand myself, I am always in contradiction, in confusion and hence in conflict and misery. And being in conflict, in sorrow, inevitably that must express itself in some form of violence. So it seems to me very important to understand oneself, not according to any specialist, nor to any religious concept of what is the ‘me’, the self, but actually to become aware of it as it operates, as it functions. But if I try to understand myself according to some philosopher or psychologist, then I am trying to understand them: what they think about me, what they think is my structure, my nature. Most of us are second-hand human beings and there is nothing original in us (not that we are seeking any originality). But merely to operate in a second-hand way without any original feeling or any original understanding must inevitably lead to conflicts, miseries and endless anxieties.”
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Talks and Dialogues Saanen 1967, pg. 184
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It is interesting that K says that without understanding ourselves completely we have no foundation for rational thinking, action or virtue. He adds that without self-understanding one is always in contradiction, confusion, conflict and sorrow, which state must express itself in the form of violence. This understanding of the self is not to be done via some religious, philosophical or psychological concept as to what it is. We would then be borrowing the thought of others as to what we are, which would make us into second-hand human beings devoid of originality and thus unavoidably bound to continue with our conflicts, miseries and anxieties. So the very need for self-knowing demands a creative approach. This requires that we see directly for ourselves without the authority and influence not only of others but of our own past experiences and conclusions, that we face ourselves as the living things we are without the dead weight and judgement of the past. The quality of creativity or creativeness, which is essential for meeting life, for living fully and for dissolving the mechanical conditioned movements of knowledge and self, begins in the very act of perception and learning. It is here where K finds the freedom from the known that is at the heart of wholeness.
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“Creativeness comes into being when there is constant awareness of the ways of the mind, and of the hindrances it has built for itself. The freedom to create comes with self-knowledge; but self-knowledge is not a gift. One can be creative without having any particular talent. Creativeness is a state of being in which the conflicts and sorrows of the self are absent, a state of being in which the mind is not caught up in the demands and pursuits of desire. To be creative is not merely to produce poems, or statues, or children; it is to be in that state in which truth can come into being. Truth comes into being when there is complete cessation of thought; and thought ceases only when the self is absent, when the mind has ceased to create, that is, when it is no longer caught in its own pursuits. When the mind is utterly still without being forced or trained into quiescence, when it is silent because the self is inactive, then there is creation.”
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Education and the Significance of Life, pp. 127-128
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The constant awareness of the ways of the mind without judgment, without choice, without the observer is the ground of self-understanding, which is the source of the freedom to create. Following on his negative approach, K describes creativity as a state of being in which the self, with its desires, sorrows and conflicts, is absent. In the absence of the self thought abandons its pursuits and in that utter stillness of the mind truth can come into being and there is creation. This creative state is what K calls the religious mind, without which there is no renewal of culture, which is the glue of society. Without this quality of mind society must break down and degenerate, as it is currently doing on a massive scale and with potentially devastating effects.
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This question of the decadent state of the world would require a more incisive treatment. As a first approach, I ventured that the key to understanding the cyclical pattern of the rise and fall of civilizations might be found in the internal organization of consciousness around a stagnant center of identity rooted in the past. This psychological time conditions the mind, makes it mechanical and essentially uncreative. This inherently limited and conditioned structure is at the source of all our human problems. To understand it and be free from it is therefore imperative if we are to discover the source of creativity, without which there is no wholeness. And for that we must approach ourselves without preconceived notions or judgments, without the observer, which is the first and last freedom and the doorway to the religious mind.
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Take care, amigos, and let’s explore the transformative potential of seeing without knowing,
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Photos by J. Gómez Rodríguez: 1 & 2 Sunset, View from Central Station, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
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