In may 1987 I wrote this for my column in a local Forest Hills, Queens newspaper. In this instance I used a question by a student of mine, Debra Cavaler, age 16. Question: Why is it that when I read columns, everyone recommends counseling every time a question is asked? It isn’t that I disagree with counseling. There is nothing wrong with it, but I feel it builds dependency. Don’t you think it builds character to cope with and solve’s life’s problems on one’s own?
By this time, eleven years into reading K, my response reveals how saturated I had become. The “Answer”:
The great spiritual teacher Krishnamurti (1895-1986) said that the way to truth is a “pathless land.” His desire was to set man free. “I desire to fee him from all cages, from all fears, not to found religions, new sects, nor to establish new theories and new philosphies…I have no disciples, no apostles, either on earth or in the realms of spirtuality.”
A psychotherapist should not convert his client into a Freudian, or Jungian. At termination of therapy, a client should be free of the therapist and the therapy. Although a therapist is a kind of secular healer working from a body of immense clinical knowledge, the issues are perennial — to see, to know to choose, to be autonomous and inner-directed, to be in relationship.
Life is a great teacher — if lived profoundly. Psychoherapy is one of many paths to tgruth and not for all.
Most of what we on interiorly is second hand, other people’s smarts. It is hard to be original. Some human beings are followrs, chamelons. Some find it hard to act from within an internal compass.
I believe we are conditioned, asleep in life. Our task is to decondition ouirselves, to defeat fear and anxiety.
Existentially, we are alone. Yet you are the world as well. The observer is the observed, Krishnamurti says.
Do you not sense that you rife, at moments, is driven by an engine and combustible not of your own making?
Some of us are seekers. Others work the soil of job, family and security. Some go along, quietly desperate. Some choose tofollow, for their emptiness needs grounding in a cause or leader. These are the hollow men.
Psychotherapy, a guru, a belief, a movement, a religion answer certain needs in men and women. A transcendent effort, altered state, awareness is sought by few.
Imagine mankind as a midnight croaking in an indifferent universe. We alone give meaning to ourselves. The task of anty significant philosophy, therapy or tent is to set someone free of any method or belief system.
Dependency is on a continuum. The human being’s lengthy childhood is a estament of the need to be succored. A dependency which inhibits,enfeebles, cripples, or narrows is a deteriorating relationship. Toask for help is not to be weak. And to give help to someone who is “weak” is to uplift both of you. The real task is to help each one of us to be internally, externally free.
So, to be in relationship is the crux of the matter, not solely one of dependency. The nub of your question rests on giving up something that you feel is vitally authentic, human and inherent in your very concept of who you are.
To see a need in oneself is not a kind of weakness, rather a point of departure. To ask for help dfoes not necessarily mirror an impaired sense of self. At times is iimportant to know how to lean. Some artists mistakenly feel, for example, they will lose their talents if they were analyzed. It is an untruth. Artists find new and more fertile fields to till in analysis.
Insight liberates. Seeing releases energies. Any therapeutic dialogue frees the individual from shadow, self-deception and conditioning.
The material world gives temporal pleasure and that is not to be denied. Putting on a brand new shirt feels good. Owning a new car gives a kind of empowerment. However, it is meaning and purpose, relationship, kindness, the love of a close one, friendship which enable us to live creatively, to live well anonymously, to accept our daily dying, our mortality, to leave worth behind us, and not chaos.
Psychotherapy is a significant collaboration of two people, no master and no disciple. It is a quest as well, a search, and at parting at the end. It’s nutrient is rich, mutual respect.
In society experts offer all kinds of answers, balms. Some of us are thrown off balance by questions and prefer the rock hard surface of an answer. Answers are a variety of finality, a kind of sediment that accrues, calcifying into rigid beliefs and systems.
A question unlocks and gnaws. It bites and signs. It challenges, riles and dares. It shatters; it sheds light. Perhaps the way to an answer is to pose another question and then another.
Your question provoked more questions than I’ve been able to answer. And like all intelligent questions both people, in dialogue, go away with more questions. This is very good.
To sit on the cusp of ambiguity, to entertain doubt, to question without need of answer is to create an internal awareness.
Think on these things! Krishnamurti might say.
After 24 years I would not change much except to be more felicitous in the writing of it. At 47 I could fling hash with all the rest of the Krishnamurti’s devotees. K had gotten under my skin and I was using what I had learned to experiment with, and that testing continued in other articles as well as you will see.
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