Category Archives: Philosophy

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.

In the last several days I’ve ordered two biographies about Krishnamurti. I feel I need to dwell within his context. His writings are so voluminous, his collected works in 17 volumes, in addition to many other transcriptions of talks, several films about him, videos, tapes and CDs is all beyond my ability to comprehend or assess. At his deathbed his chef, Michael Krohnen, whose book I have read, The Kitchen Chronicles gives his response to a question put to him. “‘What really happens to that extraordinary focus of understanding and energy that is K after his death?’ His answer was immediate, short and unambiguous, ‘It is gone.’ Almost as an afterthought, poignant and poetical, and not without an enigmatic touch, he added, ‘If you only knew what you had missed — that vast emptiness.'” Think on that. I see it as pure, unadulterated emptiness, the exquisite negation of it all.

I went to my bookcase and took down several books I have on him, two by a philosopher, Raymond Martin, another is a collection of his writings over the decades, another is a collation of different readings, all of them not really helpful for my purposes. Scouring the introductions and the bibliographies, I am seeking something, some scrap of information that I can peg my feelings on and continue to write about him, but to no avail. I am not a biographer, I am not a scholar. I just read or sampled Krishnamurti’s writing as they interested me, a kind of buffet browsing you might say at a very good bar mitzvah. Yet what I read has impacted upon me and I feel inadequate in any way to do him justice. That is not my task, I have realized of late. I want simply to assay what he has affected within myself, feeling that I may have only the barest threads of his total measure as a spiritual thinker. So here in these essays may rest the expression of a dilettante revealing his superficialities about K. However, what “truth” I do possess is only what I know about myself as I came into contact with his writings. He awakened something in me and that I can try to struggle and to reveal to you. Other than that there is the entire cosmic world contained within his own world for you to explore. I can say that I have nibbled around the edges, and what I devoured was very illuminating. And what I can also say is that when I cannot go any further into understanding K, you will be the first to know it as I will call time out and take a rest.

There is much to K that I cannot grasp or comprehend; much that eludes me, no matter how many times I read him. I don’t think I am alone in that judgment. However, I have detected much of that idiosyncratic scent he gave off. He is so different, so new, that I found it alluring and difficult at the same time. He made me struggle, he made me think, he made me annoyed and angry with him. He challenged ancient belief systems in me, he made see into my society and my own ethnicity; metaphorically he threw ice water at my face. He left me to brood and brew in my own slosh, he was Socrates for the Twentieth Century. Other than Kazantzakis, I have never read a writer with so much zeal on my part. Perhaps this small book is a fool’s errand; yet I want to write it. It explains me more than it explains Krishnamurti and if that is of some interest as I encountered this spiritual thinker, take it for what it is. I think K might proffer that all this is to the good, for he should be removed from all this as any radical and revolutionary change should come from me. He is not even the tour guide.

As previously said he touched me in areas that were of psychological and emotional concern. I was especially drawn to his questioning of authority; what compels us to obey and heed, the good Nazi in us? What is the herd instinct in humanity  that leads to the ovens at Auschwitz? And what would it take in me to question my parents, my friends, my boss, my culture? All of society is given to us throughout the lengthy years of our childhood and if it is not questioned (often not) we carry this stale pablum to our graves unaware. All this K termed conditioning and if you take the blinkers away from your eyes you can see how we swim in a sea of visual, media, societal and religious pollution, conditioners.

As an example, poor unaware Sean Hannity of Fox News. If you look at him and the way in which he inquisitorially goes about his reporting, how he is trapped forever in his own political opinions which allow for little or subtle gradations of gray, if you observe the hardness, the brittleness in him, if you see the rigidity, you can see how paralyzed he is as a human being, and strongly conditioned  by his church beliefs. It cascades from his pores, that he has the religious answer, the one true faith. Send him to the Incas with a sword in one hand the Bible in the other. His mind is closed, his thought processes arthritic, because he has swallowed whole the calcified bromides of his two thousand year old religion. Hannity, alas, is inhabited by dogma and doctrine.  I believe him to be a man who has never dared intellectually or psychologically. He cannot be retrained. He cannot learn another way. That will only occur if he comes to it, which is unlikely.  He cannot come upon the new and fresh, for his religious background is old, state and inflexible. He does not inhabit his self.

I think I can comment on Hannity without denying my political point of view which is an antithesis of his politcal views. Nevertheless, I do see him (psychotherapeutically so) as a highly restricted, self-confined human being who believes in god and all that and is so sure that Christ exists and the rest of it. I wholly subscribe to Freud’s comment that a man becomes fully mature when he puts away or outgrows the illusion of religion, his childhood blocks, pun intended. Perhaps psychotherapy, especially in this country, causes such antipathy, rejection or negative humor is that what it offers is insight, or awareness at levels most Americans shun. We rather not know. Oh, yes, we rather not know. I call that FEAR. Someone like Krishamurti is totally anathema. I make the case that one has to be prepared or ready at some level of consciousness to allow Krishnamurti’s thinking to enter one’s mainstream, one’s very arterial passageways. And so it was with me.

While writing these short essays I am struggling to get through Krishnamurti’s Notebook, a diary he kept of his daily observations that went on for seven months in 1961. What he does here is to make minute observations of his environment, streams, waterfalls, meadows, mountains, stars, sun and moon, the seasons at the places he was giving talks. And then he slips into his observations about all and everything and sometimes it is rather dense. Each comment more like the nut in an acorn in that it has to be driven out. Experiencing this is somewhat tedious, for the method, nature then mind , repetitively, throughout the book, I find tiresome, regardless of the insights. Quite frankly, I tire of his working out his own reflections. Perhaps after all these years the shine has worn off and I am left with a patina not at all to my liking in some instances.  So it is not a “happy” book for me, one that is compelling. It was written about 50 years ago.

Gnarly, condensed, knotty, his prose or his thinking rather is resistive to easy comprehension; it needs to be read and read again, if you feel it is worth it. Often I feel as if I need a forceps or a tweezer to get at the nub. I admit at times I feel stupid which is not the most requisite feeling to continue reading. I dread the doctoral theses that will be written about his writings years hence, a deadly dross as a footnote to his testimonies.  In all instances the Notebook is dated, the location made clear, Paris, the Eiffel tower, et al. He writes of the zinc roofs of the buildings from his balcony and I have seen that as well as French zoning prevents houses above six stories in Paris until you get out of town. And then he usualy speaks of the “benediction” or the psychological nature, if that is what it is, of a very palpable pain he is experiencing or a sensation that cannot be measured by him, only observed, for as he insists the word is not the thing itself, for language can not encapsulate the unencapsulated. So one is reminded of the admonition in the editor’s introduction that all this is  a real and physical process he experienced for almost all his life which has nothing to do with drugs, etc. If this is so, and I have no reason to doubt it but curiously intrigued and fascinated, he was in a measure of pain to the end of his days and yet from that pain he was gifted with something remarkable and he fashioned a creation of his own. I associate his psychical pain, a consequence no doubt of Kundalini yoga and that special day in Ojai in which he was transformed, or “awakened,” to the statue of Laocoon.

So the Notebook describes the day, the light, the pain (what has been called the “process,” stemming from that momentous and tranformative experience under the pepper tree in Ojai) and then he very often moves into some conceptual idea and describes it, again, with care and definition, often hard to extract, although I am sure if I had a greater mind I would see into it. I don’t have that mind. What am I left with? At times nothing; often irritation at what I cannot grasp. It is like seeing a beautiful picture of a Weber grill in an ad, buying it, laying out all the parts and then reading the directions which are in early Mayan. At times one wishes to return the whole shebang, stomp it, or as I do, hand it over to a greater and more tactile mind, my wife, Jane. K attracts, often at a personal cost.

I mention this because there were years in which the idea of going to my bookcase and taking down one of his books was met with resistance. What generally came to mind was that I had to work, not read, and so I stayed away for long stretches of time. I still do, although I do recall and savor the refreshing  shock of my earlier readings of K. The therapist in me rose to the fore and decided that I wasn’t to put myself in a punishing position. Some of his works are like gnawing on teflon, some, I suppose, are above my level of awareness, some of them are too deep and hard for me to grasp no matter how I try. (Freud’s writings can tie you up into knots as well.) I tired, which may be a consequence of reading him extensively, of getting into this brilliant man’s mind. I had enough trouble accessing my own belfry. Perhaps he was a kind of spiritual firecracker and all we can do is observe, approach, but never get really close for it was all his immolation, not ours.

And so I would hang suspended between two bounces of the stone across the water for months if not years at a time. However, K left residues of worth  in me, deposits of ore that I still mine in my writing and thinking. I recall the first terrifying tremors and then quakes he brought about in my mind, he appeals mostly to one’s mind. A few words about that. If anything else, K expresses the passion of the mind. I remember reading what a fellow Indian spiritual thinker, a woman in this case, had to say about K. That he was too much of the mind and not enough of the feeling basis in men, which might account for his own austere and ascetic personality. However, it is on the level of the mind that he made an appeal to me which goes a long way in explaining why I incorporated him into my self, clung to his side. I am too intellectual and so is he and it is at this place I could accept his magnificent thinking if I could understand it. As the years went on and feeling became paramount to me rather than the passion of the mind which I did not cast aside, for it was so much of my nature, I began to feel that K, for me, was lacking. Oh, how we find warts and all in father figures. And why not, for we are all mortal men and women. What was missing in him, which I needed, was the passion of the woman’s mind for instance, something else, for if anything, it smacks of nurturance that sidesteps reason and rational thinking processes. Perhaps the old and chronic jeers at women drivers reveal that men dislike the lack of directionality in their driving, a lack of purpose, and gnash their teeth when a left turn is just an intuitive guess, answer or response, especially when the Pekinese is in her left arm and she is texting. We need women drivers.

When K spoke about conditioning, questioning authority, challenging I grasped his hand and we both jumped off the diving board. For in my life’s context he touched that which was inexpress in my life,  deeply frustrated me, and kept me from fulfilling any personal fantasies I may have had for myself. Additionally, as I read him, he touched that which I felt in my core, much like any great novelist who makes you feel in such a contiguous way that he is personally addressing your needs as a reader, as a fellow human being, for literature, in my eyes, is the true internet among human beings. As I look over this paragraph I know I fall short of what I want to say and so I will struggle a while longer. I often think of what I could have done or been. I am not looking at this with regret or ruefulness. I am just trying to look as if for the first time. And what do I see?

Born apparently by random chance or unconscious drives to experience inordinate amounts of frustration, untutored in the ways of social skills, bereft of real parenting and so tasting for much of my first eighteen years benign neglect, I grew up as a very wired, tight ball of anxieties, imagined fears, tremendous self-doubt, stifled passions, unrequited dreams, and  unfulfilled hopes. I could not express myself, like Billy Budd.Consequently I presented to the world an inhibited, shy, withdrawn, if not depressed young boy and young adult who had difficulty expressing his feelings, of touching, of being open and express, fearful of extending my limited self to others, dreading the impact of young women on me lest I know not what to do, which was a reality, and all the while wanting to unfurl like a flag, to wave in the wind, to beat wildly against the flagpole. Needs gone unmet were my youth. The milieu of the times, the Fifties, a period of repression and suppression of wants, in which schools were rigid and authoritarian, white lines down the high school corridors that students couldn’t cross over to get to their classroom, but had to go to the end of the hallway and then turn around and proceed up are mild instances of the rigidity of the Eisenhower years. It was a time in which Elvis had the lower portion of his body cut off from view on the Ed Sullivan show. When looking back, that hunched shouldered  and Nixon grimace on Sullivan himself, aptly expresses in gesture and posture the “square” of the time and the attitude of the time. Sullivan only knew the missionary position, believe it. So self and society were beautifully matched in my case.

It was not until my early thirties did I emerge from the dead tissue which encased me, molted. I began to self-debride dead matter, thanks here to the tag end of the Sixties. I see my life as I look back over the decades as one of a very tardy and very slow emergence. The old adage says that we grow old too soon and smart too late. Agreed! The exoskeleton had been shed but you know, as well as I do, memory traces remain of the old self which we carry to our graves, often responding in new instances within the ancient framework. However, it is here that K has helped me to see and so has my working on myself throughout the decades, for I am besmirched, affected by, infected with the tenor of Kazantzakis’ injunction, “reach what you cannot,” which was advice given to him by his intuitive Cretan grandfather when he was a child of eight or nine, a remarkable child at that. Earlier Nikos rejected his grandfather’s first advice, “to reach what you can.” He shook that off as not demanding enough. I relate very well to that. I have been demanding of my “weak” self for all my life, trying to make me rise like yeast to demands I have self-imposed upon me, for we can be more injunctive and demanding than our parents ever were. We internalize all that parental should and should not junk, and as Alice Miller has written, in our later years we turn around and flagellate ourselves in harder fashion than we were originally treated, a unique perversion of the past. That is a psychoanalytic truth that I value as much as any other of Krishnamurti’s axioms. So I attained a superego the size of Manhattan.

I worm my way through life, a double helix of Krishnamurti and psychotherapy, contradictions in and of themselves, an uneasy truce but like everything else, a composite of good, bad, and indifferent. I can say clearly as I clear my metaphorical throat that all systems get in the way, all methods close our eyes, but I do need to learn how to drive before I can buy a car. Absolutisms are not the way. K is one of many contending “systems” before we evanesce, although he constantly reiterated that he offers no philosophy — true! On my stone will not be a bibliography of what I have read in life. Kazantzakis’ epitaph reads: “I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.” Kind of like that, don’t you? I’ll probably request something existential, something that sums up my existence on this planet. Here goes: “Duh.” Don’t be put off by the colloquialism, for it says it all, doesn’t it? reader.

In the selections from “Gruffworld” which follow, substitute the writer for each time the Gruff muses about self and other in this apocalyptic world.

Finally, the largest slab gave more than all the rest. It fed continuity and brought about sense. The gruff was no longer diffident, but vastly curious and concerned. Could it be?

Woe. All is woe. The sound itself runs downward into my pith, my soul. Crag to crag, I live, a splinter of flesh seeking hearth, respite — anywhere. All is egress. I flee more than any other ever runner. I ache. I lack the solace of a mate. I am bereft of all outward gestures, of any kind, for so long have I been absent from other men. I am among animals, a sparkle of intelligence easily destroyed. What folly! I find it hard to go on, so I glyph (write out runes) these slate sheaves for any other awareness to see. What folly! How I record and how foolish is this effort, yet I persist or I will be driven mad in scape…I must give meaning. How ironic, indeed. Mad in a mad world –how sane that is. To be aware, wanderer, is to bite fate upon the amstring, bitterly. Yet i cannot capitulate. I will not cede. I will endure. Although I am not gruff nior any longer friend ofthe greart gruff, I will make do. Or e devoured as I try to make my way in this sinkhole of existence.

So after many adventures the gruff has reached a point at which he is becoming aware, the awakeening of intelligence. And now he decides to record what he feels and thinks, to leave a record of his presence in the very world which inanimately seeks to destroy him. It is, of course, a pronouncement by me, the writer, of my intent. We go on.

Indeed, the gruff’s first breakthrough to awareness was his intensely rude and shocking realization that he was in his world, and not a device or fabrication of the heavenly abyss above.

As a remembrance the gruff chose to create a monument. He wrought havoc upon the walls of a cliff, and composed several great stele in a semicircle, rubbed smooth ith the abrasive rock about, until their amber yellow limestone shone glumly, ready for sign or symbol.

For a moment he could not write. It did not come easily, all was evanescent in his mind. Then, almost feverishly, the dam burst within, and the gruff carved deeply his own script into the cheap resiliency of the steles, flakes falling lustily upon his horned soles.

To you, exile and wanderer, my friend, I send my love and fondest thoughts. Like everything else upon these barrens I came aross your cairn by accident. You and I, are we not? an event of such randomness, and so was our friendship. It is as if a prime mover moved over the firmament of scape and punctuated it with both of our awarenesses. I have read closely and behind word your lonely memento of a life spent in flight from my kind and I am sorrowful. I cannot protect you from them. I cannot protect man. The task is too much. I can only share what awareness forms a bond between us. I urge you not to ‘capitulate.’ I urge you not to fall prey to such guilt, for it is awareness that is our father and mother, not our species; a species is just the flesh and blood expression of that. We each inhabit a bruyise. Awareness carries nointegument.

Here the gruff left space,paused for a moment, and continued his efforts.

We are a rare happenstance, you and I. Let us reunite when and if we can upon scape. We cannot rush that. It will occur when we least expect it. Since we haveparted I have taught one other gruff to see. He has become my son. And like you, he has gone on his way. We three share knowing, the spiritual lightning of within. It is our relationship no matter how far we travel from one another, or what fate decides to give us as our reward for such suffering. When you are alone and in the grasp of awareness, torn and harried by its demands, what best remedy is there than to think of we three, ‘scape shapers,’ all thinking, feeling, worrying about one another?We are very much part of each other, and we drink fromn the same tarn. When and if you can, leave your mark, for we are a testament. It is allwe have,our curse,our blessing — and I am beginning to blieve, our real meaning: to express ourselves in act, creatively,  when we meet our death maker in scape, we only surrender ouyr weary husks and no more.

In the final chapters I reveal the struggle of awareness, the awakening of intelligence, the need for relationship, to express one’s self creatively. I try to reach an apotheosis. And what better way to attain all this than to have gruff become an artist of a kind. I write:

Breathtaking in its scope, intensely subtle in every detail for its mammoth size, the sculpture evoked a constellation of feelings in the observer, a galaxy of mood; and the galactic effect was brought down to the real grit and grub of scape by an all encompassing resonance that spoke gently to the artist, to all men and gruff who wish to create from their very essences a magnificent expression, in loving defiance of death — To the gruff, he had read and deciphered it with ease.

Artist, it has been given tyo you to be your own expression, for you are the inheritor of awareness, life giving life. Artist, you areyour own beauty and truth. Rejoice!

HereI am beginning to bring all aspects of my own personal struggle, latently so, for I was not conscious at all of what I was writing so embedded was I in the gruff’s apocalyptic awareness, but the engine driving all this was my own unconcious needs, to express, to be, to transcend, to learn very much, to be the perennial learner, to evolve, to grow, to ascertain self, to be a presence unto myself.

In a fantastic spasm of creativity the gruff creats a monument from all the riven cliffs and scarps about him; he creates his “David.” When writing these last chapters I recall how quickly they flw by, because of how quickly I was tapped into my unconscious and simply lifted the flodgates to whatever flowed within, down to a sunless sea.

And after making his masterpiece which was a huge enclave of promenade and statuary, I write:

One day, near dusk, filled with such mystical issue within — he impulsively carved into a slabs the following sentiments: —

What you see before you is mind speaking to this world. What you see is within you, stranger. And not to make of yourself a work of life is to add insult and injury to the world. Whether you raise monuments such as these or attain great heights of intelligence, it does not matter. What matters is that you see as clearly as the pydhawk’s eye…that you are in relationship to all. In that there is much truth and wisdom…Look about you…even scape struggles to be..Look as if it were the first time!

Clearly this is swollen with what I was reading and metabolizing from Krishnamurti. So another duck and drake entered my blood system.

In the penultimate chapter, “Choiceless Awareness,” I finally am able to stammer out all that has preceded the gruff’s adventures.

So It came to pass that the great gruf lived moment to moment, in action, free of idea and ideology. Acting in one fell swoop of process, experience in itself, free of the split between experience and the experiencer, he was all, and he truly saw what is, free of the accumulation of past experience, thought, and meory, and his life was whole.

He was happy. He entered the deep stream of life unconcerned about endings or beginnings, but to see what is. fully and completely, rid of the tempestuous thought of nhis past. And his mid was swift and true, for he discovered truth in what is, in the moment, and he chose to be choicelessly aware, not give truth meaning or taint it with label or give it flesh and bone.

For once the gruff categorized, identified, condemned, judged or justified what is, it became old and weary, a truth to be remembered. Since memory was conditioning, it prohibited seeing what is freshly. In his genius the gruff realized all this, and consciously avoided any system, any method that would arrest him in dealing with his world. For him the world was his relationship with his gruff son and man friend. It was in this relationship that he knew himself, and it was this knowledge that changed his world.

Clearly it was who he was that he projected upon the world. Scape took on that sense and sensibility of his  inward projection. If he could psychologically revolt, he could be in his world, a free gruff, for all else was imposition from without. All his life, in one way or another, aware and unaware, he had been in revolt. The gruff saw deeply, split realiy into deep furrows, and plowed life energetically.

Themes aboud galore in the book, many come from psychoanlytic thought — loss, attachment and separation, trust, and from K’s focus on choiceless awareness, the awakening of intelligence, being as opposed to becoming, one denotes sruggle and evolution which he would say involves time and memory, or the heavily gritted emory board we apply to ourselves.in order to “become” wealty, et al. So K gave me nothign and that is what should be. I took from him what I needed to grow, to become aware. he entered surreptitiously my fiction at the time and in “Gruffworld” I work out, I do hope so, and I work in what I needed from Mr. Ducks and Drakes. Never met K. I only saw pictures of him, read about his life and read his testimonies. Fascinating, isn’t it? how casually we pick up stones on a shore and in casual play come upon all kinds of wonderful realizations.