The Book of Yourself Newsletter
Issue 37: December 2024
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I meant to write this issue of the newsletter much earlier, but events caught up with me. I am writing it now while staying at the KFI headquarters and study center in Chennai, India. They invited me to give the annual public talk for their Center for Continuing Dialogue, whose purpose is to address contemporary problems in the light of the teachings. Since one of the most pressing questions is the current outbreak of violence and its potential expansion into a wider war, we chose to address the perennial issue of conflict, its recurrent pattern and deeper roots. The talk took place yesterday, 26.01.2025, on the lawn of Vasanta Vihar, where I had been a resident scholar from 1993-1995. That leisurely and contemplative period in this beautiful oasis was pivotal in determining the primary orientation of my life to date, namely a commitment to this fundamental inquiry into the potential transformative potential of self-knowledge.
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Conflict is undoubtedly one of the most critical challenges we face as human beings, not only out there but in ourselves. When in the second talk in Colombo in 1980 K described his teachings as a reading of the book of life, he found that the first chapter dealt with the nature and causes of disorder and conflict. Conflict has been a persistent historical phenomenon. K used to mention that in the last 5000 years there have been as many wars. I don’t know where he got his figures from, but personally I suspect there have been more. Recently a friend of mine, quoting a UN agency report, cited an unbelievable number of armed conflicts going on concurrently in the world. Some of these, like the genocide of the Palestinian people, are not only a blight on human conscience but the most appalling confirmation of the profound sickness afflicting mankind. The pages of history are stained with the blood of millions and the glorious victories feeding the pride of nations are but the gilded masks of their unspeakable cruelty and sorrow. After all these millennia, we are none the wiser and the traditional butchery of war continues to be a core pillar of social respectability. All we have learned is to improve the instruments of mutual destruction, not to put an end to our savagery and brutality.
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As we have often mentioned, and must continue to remind ourselves, there is a clear contradiction between technological progress and psychological stagnation. This situation represents the gravest danger because the inner invariably overcomes the outer. In my view, it is not so much that it overcomes it as that it rules it, that psyche governs techne. So if the psyche is deranged, befogged by prejudice and caught in illusion, the chances are that our technological advances will end up being drafted into serving our self-destructive ends. It is important to heed this warning, which points out the primacy and predominance of consciousness in human affairs. While the inner and the outer are in an undivided tidal movement of ebb and flow, the crux of the matter is that consciousness is the primary source, not culture and society. This means that we are all responsible for conflict because we are all implicated in human consciousness, where the roots of violence are to be found. As K put it, bringing the issue of war, as was his wont, closer to home, “War is the spectacular and bloody expression of our daily lives.” So it is to our daily life that we must look if we want to put an end to war.
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K offers a single key to understanding this whole issue, namely that where there is division there must be conflict. He called it a law. Since I am not aware of his having said this in relation to anything else, I call it Krishnamurti’s law. The term ‘law’ here is used in its scientific sense, as in the law of gravity, i.e. that from a given cause a given effect necessarily follows. This causal necessity means that if we want to understand conflict and bring it to an end, we must investigate the factors of division or fragmentation that bring it about.
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One such factor of division is our tribal mentality. K used to define nationalism as a glorified form of tribalism and as a major cause of war. Nationalism involves not only a territorial, political and economic separateness but also a racial, cultural, ideological and religious divide. Every such national unit is in competition with other similar units for territory, economic resources and military might. These separate tribal identities are the product of the indoctrination of its members in the specific history and cultural tradition of the group by its ruling elite. Conformity is drilled into us through propaganda and education and enforced through a system of reward and punishment. Such identification is meant to infuse a sense of pride into us and to provide us with the needful security. But does it?
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The desire for security is perhaps the primary driving force behind the creation of these separate entities. Every nation on earth speaks of security as its fundamental raison d'être. Such security requires an army, which means that society has accepted violence as an integral part of its institutional organization. This concern with security requires a constant preparation for war and the consequent immense wastage of resources that go to feed the satanic furnaces of the military-industrial complex and its arms race. The search for security through nationalism is clearly a total fallacy. This indicates that as human beings we are all caught in a dangerous contradiction which condemns us to an endless round of conflict, violence and suffering. So what’s the way out of this vicious circle?
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K used to identify various contributing factors, one of them being tradition. This might not be normally viewed as a cause of conflict, but we can readily appreciate the truth of it by considering that our divisive identities are based on the identification with what has been handed over from the past. As K put it, tradition means carrying the weight of collective knowledge, thought and experience over to the present. This is what allowed K to view tradition as the betrayal of the present by the past. This cruel betrayal includes such things as the division of the classes, the exploitation of labor, the bondage of marriage, the professional elitism and envy, the sectarian religious divisions, the ruthlessness of orthodoxy, and the worship of knowledge, success and power. Essentially, what tradition carries over are knowledge and belief and the desire to be psychologically secure through them.
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Belief and knowledge separate, isolate people and therefore are factors of conflict. We accept belief because we feel lost without a religious or ideological formula. Belief, as K sees it, is an escape from the fear of failure, of being nothing, whereas it is a mechanical repetition that hinders sensitivity and understanding. We believe because we desire to be economically, socially and spiritually secure. So, just as with nationalism, the issue is not belief but the desire for security. As long as that desire persists, we will have belief and therefore conflict, which is the denial of the love and peace preached by all religions. Knowledge, which is experience and information, does not free us from ambition, from the desire to become something. On the contrary, it builds the separate conditioned entity, separates people and destroys relationship. But belief and knowledge are the very structure and content of consciousness, so consciousness is in a contradiction with itself, since it seeks security through isolation. Not only that, but the conditioned reaction of the past prevents the perception of what is and thus generates conflict.
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Knowledge and belief, with their identifications and craving for security, constitute the nucleus of the self. For K selfishness is the pattern of society and the essential problem of our lives. We are all caught up in it in one way or another. The self uses everything for its own ends and goes together with conformity, competition and aggressiveness. And with the self goes the craving for power. Power is destructive, breeding authority, conflict and sorrow. K has no hesitation in calling it evil, as he also calls the self. Ambition, success, greed and ruthless respectability are part of it. It is an extension of the hierarchical principle of our animal background. It is worshiped by society and religion sanctions it as moral and gives it its blessing. K sees it as a disease to which we are so addicted that we don’t want to get rid of it. But this will to power is an escape from our inward emptiness and loneliness. To deny power completely is the way of virtue. And to do that we must not be afraid or escape from loneliness, which is created by the isolating and aggressive activities of the self.
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This examination points to the primary role that the fear of emptiness, of loneliness, of not being something or someone plays in the generation of conflict. The initial examination of the outer divisions that cause it, has led us into the inner causes of conflict, namely the inherent contradiction involved in the very content and structure of consciousness being essentially belief and knowledge, and finally to this internal movement of escape from what we are, namely empty, lonely and fearful. Our fear of loneliness sends us on a search for inward and outward security through the pursuit of fulfillment and becoming. This becoming manifests as attachment to and identification with things, people, ideas and beliefs. This identification implies conformity to tradition and authority, which denies sensitivity, intelligence and freedom. Conformity implies a conflict between what is and what should be, the actual and the ideal. Conflict denies love and breaks down relationship, so we are back to loneliness. Since we experience loneliness as frightful and painful, we run away from it, and we go into a new turn of the wheel. This inner pattern of fear, escape, attachment and conformity is the real fundamental vicious circle of conflict at work in our lives.
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The natural question is how do we break down or step out of it. In the first place, we must become aware of its existence. The whole pattern seems to escape our awareness. It might take a few catastrophic spins before we realize that something is deeply wrong with the way we are approaching our relationship with things, people, ideas and beliefs. These relationships keep breaking down and driving us back into loneliness, until we realize that we are trapped in a destructive pattern. Only then might we consider staying with loneliness and not escaping from it. After all, the escape is at best only a momentary reprieve from the pain and anxiety of it, but it is an escape in name only, for the very avoidance of the fact is what brings us back to it. So there is no escape. That means staying with the pain of feeling totally isolated, without any relationship, without any security, without any importance, respectability or power. After all, that state is brought about by the very movement of becoming, at the center of which lies the self. It is this that in spite of all our identifications, attachments and conformity ends up breaking down our relationships and destroying our security.
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But perhaps the vicious circle can be broken at any point in the chain. We can question the pursuit of security and becoming; we can see through the falseness of attachment and identification; we can realize the contradiction involved in conformity and its denial of intelligence and freedom; we can see that the division between what is and what should be at the heart of traditional morality, is still conflict and therefore the denial of virtue. That is why withering of the roots of self is our greatest responsibility, for where the self is there is no love.
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Be well, amigos, and let’s see whether we can step out of this vicious circle of consciousness,
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Photos by J. Gómez Rodríguez: 1. View of the Adyar river from the Elphinstone Bridge, Chennai; 2. Main building, KFI headquarters, Vasanta Vihar, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India.
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