As I look back upon the decades of reading Krishnamurti, I’ve sensed that the essential teachings I was attracted to are these: K’s concepts of seeing, choiceless awareness, the observer is the observed, and the understanding of what is. Other ideas came along for the ride: K’s comments and definitions about conditioning, how to look as if for the first time, his thoughts about radical revolution within the individual person, his questioning of all authority, indeed, even of what K had to say; his putting the onus of his dialogues on the listener or questioner; his commentaries on society and religion which I delighted in, subversive that I was. Like preaching to the choir, we often like what we already know at some level of intelligence or understanding, and so it was with me, except he said what I was feeling, more than thinking, so lucidly, so eloquently. I am one of those human beings who feels first, thinks later — Shoot me!
I almost blocked out an association I just had. At my age I go for broke, as my writing has that characteristic to it because I am constructed in this way. I want to stay free as a man and writer. Sometimes I feel, in my younger days, there was an air of servility in me, that is, as a learner I wanted to please, or be the good child or son. It was not a measurable substance at that, but it smacks of pleasing the other so that I would be favored, adored or recognized in some fashion. I see some of that when I went about “acquiring” Krishnamurti into my orbit. I was Jacob, not Esau. Make of this as you will. To return —
K’s writings infiltrated my teaching, practice as a therapist, and life, to some degree. I wonder, as I reflect, if I wasn’t a parrot, good for a few vocabulary words and that’s all. Once you manage to get a hang on K you have a ready lexicon to use, much like religion — eucharist, consubstantiation, transsubstantiation, the trinity, et al. And for some years, I imagine, I tried K on for size, working out his thoughts into my own language in a small array of articles, and as you’ve read, a novel. I was searching to apply his constructs, observations and testimonies in my own life and I can say it did not work as I imagined it might. Rather, I sponged his reflections inwardly and they leak out and are applied even to this day; they just dwell within me. I see his thinking reflected in my own personal attitudes often inextricably wound up in my psychoanalytic thinking and perceptions. I find his idea of societal and religious conditioning monumentally freeing (especially so for me), once you allow yourself to enter, for if anything, you have to enter K as mercury seeking egress beneath a door. You have to come to K, for assuredly he will not come to you, nor should he, as is apparent in his writings. As he wrote, he wanted to set man free everywhere, yet he did not cajole, advise, stir up, appeal, persuade or any other human quirk to convert. He did not need or wanted disciples, but they did flock to him.
So in the human juice each one of us exudes everyday, K is part of my flavor. However, what is healthier now is a more balanced appreciation of the wizard of what is. Call it a good skepticism if you like. I am not capable as an academic philosopher raised in the West to abstract K’s testimonies and make comment, but they are decidedly experiential. I can more clearly view K dispassionately at this point in my life, see his flaws as a man, where before I challenged him, but overlooked “things.” Having read more about him as a man, I realize, as I didn’t before, how much of him was imperfect, not much of an insight. Rather, I’ve come to admire his teachings as one thing, his behavior as another — oh, the split. K has not changed, I have seasoned. I look back not with a jaundiced eye, for his genius was unique. I relent, that is, I am easier on myself for what I cannot grasp in his work, as if I was his doppelganger. He is K, I am me. I extract his presence which was too close, all a consequence of my own behavior, and hold him apart and away in order to see him better and his influence on me which was significant if not dramatic. I was a seeker, still am, have a philophical bent to my mind, quite useless in the land of Palin and Bachmann. He touched that in me, the desire to learn, to change, to better one self in ways other than capitalistic tracks set down for us all by this society.
Characteristically for all my life, I have had atendency to build up the other, over-esteem that person, and then if piqued, irked or hurt, degrade and demean that person. This cyclical behavior is seen by me and there is such an element for K in this writing. I have an appointment next Wednesday at 7.00.
As I write I think of an interaction I had with the next door neighbor, a likable woman in her forties with two youngsters in elementary school. She revealed an incident in which she came across two children in a local park who were left there by the father, the older sister to “watch over” the younger brother, both children under seven in an illogical, stupid and child abusive fashion. Concerned about these children, rightfully so, she called 911. Police arrived and in essence informed her, after speaking to the children, that under Nevada law, they could do so much, and in essence not very much in this instance, aggravating as it is to relate. What the father did was unimaginable, but a reality nevertheless. For my purposes here, in her telling of this incident our neighbor felt guilty in the sense that she called 911, but she did act appropriately — and she knew that. She was just feeling uncomfortable. I listened to her guilt feelings and then she said in passing, “As a Christian mother…” Everything was in all that; in fact she mentioned “Catholic guilt” in the telling. I did not smartass her and query what an atheist mother might feel, although it did cross my mind. What I found sad, if not appalling, was the conditioning in her, the religious lacquer that had polyurethaned her existence. So unnecessary, is it not? I see it, blind elsewhere in my own life, and she does not see it. This Krishnamurti and psychotherapeutic sensibility is always present in me.
What this anecdote just elicited in me was the feeling of being free, free of priests, rabbis and mullahs, of dogma and doctrine, of the deadening imposituion of school “learnings,” of a capitalistic system, in this instance, that defines poverty as a moral defect, and all the rest we imbibe in our mother’s milk. K spoke to that latent feeling in me to be free, free of my own parental and internalized injunctions about sex, of a defense system that camouflaged a child that needed to be felt, that caused me to use symbolically my own extremities to strangle my very self, to make me robotic, a stranger in a strange land, or to put it melodramatically, to never have had a close encounter with myself. To be free overrides the pursuit of happiness which is an insane idea to begin with, another American external we are taught to seek, much like the American dream which is entirely a nightmare, the soma, K might have opined, we give to one another, like Jim Jones ladling out cupfuls of cyanide in his compound.
Ducks and Drakes, 9
As I look back upon the decades of reading Krishnamurti, I’ve sensed that the essential teachings I was attracted to are these: K’s concepts of seeing, choiceless awareness, the observer is the observed, and the understanding of what is. Other ideas came along for the ride: K’s comments and definitions about conditioning, how to look as if for the first time, his thoughts about radical revolution within the individual person, his questioning of all authority, indeed, even of what K had to say; his putting the onus of his dialogues on the listener or questioner; his commentaries on society and religion which I delighted in, subversive that I was. Like preaching to the choir, we often like what we already know at some level of intelligence or understanding, and so it was with me, except he said what I was feeling, more than thinking, so lucidly, so eloquently. I am one of those human beings who feels first, thinks later — Shoot me!
I almost blocked out an association I just had. At my age I go for broke, as my writing has that characteristic to it because I am constructed in this way. I want to stay free as a man and writer. Sometimes I feel, in my younger days, there was an air of servility in me, that is, as a learner I wanted to please, or be the good child or son. It was not a measurable substance at that, but it smacks of pleasing the other so that I would be favored, adored or recognized in some fashion. I see some of that when I went about “acquiring” Krishnamurti into my orbit. I was Jacob, not Esau. Make of this as you will. To return —
K’s writings infiltrated my teaching, practice as a therapist, and life, to some degree. I wonder, as I reflect, if I wasn’t a parrot, good for a few vocabulary words and that’s all. Once you manage to get a hang on K you have a ready lexicon to use, much like religion — eucharist, consubstantiation, transsubstantiation, the trinity, et al. And for some years, I imagine, I tried K on for size, working out his thoughts into my own language in a small array of articles, and as you’ve read, a novel. I was searching to apply his constructs, observations and testimonies in my own life and I can say it did not work as I imagined it might. Rather, I sponged his reflections inwardly and they leak out and are applied even to this day; they just dwell within me. I see his thinking reflected in my own personal attitudes often inextricably wound up in my psychoanalytic thinking and perceptions. I find his idea of societal and religious conditioning monumentally freeing (especially so for me), once you allow yourself to enter, for if anything, you have to enter K as mercury seeking egress beneath a door. You have to come to K, for assuredly he will not come to you, nor should he, as is apparent in his writings. As he wrote, he wanted to set man free everywhere, yet he did not cajole, advise, stir up, appeal, persuade or any other human quirk to convert. He did not need or wanted disciples, but they did flock to him.
So in the human juice each one of us exudes everyday, K is part of my flavor. However, what is healthier now is a more balanced appreciation of the wizard of what is. Call it a good skepticism if you like. I am not capable as an academic philosopher raised in the West to abstract K’s testimonies and make comment, but they are decidedly experiential. I can more clearly view K dispassionately at this point in my life, see his flaws as a man, where before I challenged him, but overlooked “things.” Having read more about him as a man, I realize, as I didn’t before, how much of him was imperfect, not much of an insight. Rather, I’ve come to admire his teachings as one thing, his behavior as another — oh, the split. K has not changed, I have seasoned. I look back not with a jaundiced eye, for his genius was unique. I relent, that is, I am easier on myself for what I cannot grasp in his work, as if I was his doppelganger. He is K, I am me. I extract his presence which was too close, all a consequence of my own behavior, and hold him apart and away in order to see him better and his influence on me which was significant if not dramatic. I was a seeker, still am, have a philophical bent to my mind, quite useless in the land of Palin and Bachmann. He touched that in me, the desire to learn, to change, to better one self in ways other than capitalistic tracks set down for us all by this society.
Characteristically for all my life, I have had atendency to build up the other, over-esteem that person, and then if piqued, irked or hurt, degrade and demean that person. This cyclical behavior is seen by me and there is such an element for K in this writing. I have an appointment next Wednesday at 7.00.
As I write I think of an interaction I had with the next door neighbor, a likable woman in her forties with two youngsters in elementary school. She revealed an incident in which she came across two children in a local park who were left there by the father, the older sister to “watch over” the younger brother, both children under seven in an illogical, stupid and child abusive fashion. Concerned about these children, rightfully so, she called 911. Police arrived and in essence informed her, after speaking to the children, that under Nevada law, they could do so much, and in essence not very much in this instance, aggravating as it is to relate. What the father did was unimaginable, but a reality nevertheless. For my purposes here, in her telling of this incident our neighbor felt guilty in the sense that she called 911, but she did act appropriately — and she knew that. She was just feeling uncomfortable. I listened to her guilt feelings and then she said in passing, “As a Christian mother…” Everything was in all that; in fact she mentioned “Catholic guilt” in the telling. I did not smartass her and query what an atheist mother might feel, although it did cross my mind. What I found sad, if not appalling, was the conditioning in her, the religious lacquer that had polyurethaned her existence. So unnecessary, is it not? I see it, blind elsewhere in my own life, and she does not see it. This Krishnamurti and psychotherapeutic sensibility is always present in me.
What this anecdote just elicited in me was the feeling of being free, free of priests, rabbis and mullahs, of dogma and doctrine, of the deadening imposituion of school “learnings,” of a capitalistic system, in this instance, that defines poverty as a moral defect, and all the rest we imbibe in our mother’s milk. K spoke to that latent feeling in me to be free, free of my own parental and internalized injunctions about sex, of a defense system that camouflaged a child that needed to be felt, that caused me to use symbolically my own extremities to strangle my very self, to make me robotic, a stranger in a strange land, or to put it melodramatically, to never have had a close encounter with myself. To be free overrides the pursuit of happiness which is an insane idea to begin with, another American external we are taught to seek, much like the American dream which is entirely a nightmare, the soma, K might have opined, we give to one another, like Jim Jones ladling out cupfuls of cyanide in his compound.