In the back of my mind, now forwarded to the front optics, has been a long term fantasy. I intend to read many of the world classics I either avoided, chose not to read or delayed reading until I reached this dramatically telling age. Recently I spotted and then bought a mint copy in 8 volumes of Edward Gibbon’sThe History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I read volume I enduring, rather, suffering that arch latinized English style of the 18th Century. It was grinding but I endured. I was going to read the entire work over a period of months, I imagine. In any case in volume II I came across his famous 15th and 16th chapters in which he examines the role of Christianity in Rome. I had heard that as a rationalist and man of the Enlightenment, I suppose, he would set about dissecting the deleterious effects of Christianity on Rome, if you choose to see it that way. In any case the Jews got in his way.
As he wrote about the beginnings of Christianity as a religion or sect, I came across that same severe tongue-lashing that Judaism gets from historians, old and new (Toynbee viewed Judaism as a “fossil” religion). It was annoying to put up with his aspersions and “critique” of judaism, with the implicit assumption that regardless of how you see the impact on Rome, Christianity was a significant improvement over the people of the mountain god, Yahweh. I stopped reading the book and it will be put up on Ebay. (I will give this series away FREE if you pay postage.) The anti-Semitism of Dickens, Shakespeare, Pound, Voltaire, Dostoevsky, Chaucer, Eliot runs like a clear stream through the western Canon as it does through Christianity itself. Here I am ready to read one of history’s classics and I am hit with this crap. I recall in college that the four term course in contemporary civilization only had two selections from Jews — Spinoza and Freud, as if to say that in 2,000 years it was the best Jews could do.
It wouldn’t be so bad but this week I had a participant in a writer’s class speak of a Jewess. Well, for those of you who don’t know, there’s no such thing except that expressed by the unlearned, ignoramuses and racists. Negress is equally unacceptable. Both terms denigrate minority women just as squaw does. When was the last time you came across a Catholicness or Protestantness — point made.
In the same group this participant went on to tell me that Freud had purchased a painting by Hitler in the early years of the 20th Century. It depends on what level you want to listen; I generally listen to levels equivalent to the basement and sub-basement, as I have been trained to do. Is this clown informing me about a piece of historical curiosa, if such an event did occur? Is he telling me that Freud was a variant of the self-hating Jew? Is he also telling me that Jews have no boundaries and they do whatever pleases them? In any case he thought he was sharing a tantalizing fact with me. I think not. Was I to shake my head at Freud’s indiscretion? Is it an indirect and not subtle way of telling me that Jews are this and that? And if I would take him on he could easily and comfortably say that I was reading too much into this. I think not. Human beings are like bowls of slopping gravy — they drip wherever they go.
Of course, this off-centered gent said that he had a Jewish ancestor which always makes me feel that this is an excuse for vile behavior or that it is a kind of fashionista thing to claim. Three years ago in a trip to Spain I sensed more than once that Spaniards could not talk openly about Jews or having Jewish ancestors (conversos) but that it was also an “in” thing to be connected — the ambivalence was strident. It reminded me of Planet of the Apes in which Chuck Heston is caged as a sample of his species.
Since I’m living in the Silver State now, whose listing in terms of education is extremely low, worse than Mississippi, to wit, a state made up of transients, much like Arizona, knowledge about other ethnic groups is dismal, I believe. The one religion that sticks in the craw of Christianity is grossly misunderstood and grossly misperceived which makes total sense. After all, Jews are one percent of the population of this country. Nevertheless, the assumptioms and hearsday about Jews borders on the appalling. I listen as some group members talk about what it is to be kosher, assuming all Jews are kosher and all such drivel. It is a naive to expect Jews to be humanized if they serve better purposes to be demonized. I sometimes feel as if I am a member of a rare species, to be spoken of, to be looked at, to be examined. I know more about Christianity than Christianity knows about me. And the black slave knew more about his white master than the master cared to know about him.
I step back and observe this appalling ignorance about a remarkable people who have made a monumental contribution to western civilization. . . So what else is new?
Krishnamurti, Krishnaji or K
Since 1975 I have been reading the works of Krishnamurti, spiritual teacher and remarkable human being. Often we are surrounded by rather unusual people in our culture or the cultures of other peoples who we know nothing about. And then they die, and we die. When you read history, you muse about the life of Spinoza, for example, who did his creative work and passed on. Often unknown to the world at large, these brilliant isolates are known to a few, most likely a friend or family, and yet a hundred years later they have shaken the world with their ideas. Such was Krishnamurti. His am influence will grow ever more. Only now are colleges beginning to introduce his works into their curriculum, for he is hard to define, corral or explicate, as most unique people are. I have learned a great deal from him over the years; he has opened my eyes a little bit more than they would have been. At the tip of my tongue are some of his insights, all societies are essentially corrupt, the observer is the observed (think on that one for an hour!), look as if it were for the first time (good for therapists and better still for family and relationships), and the word is not the thing itself.
After his death in 1986 the Krishnamurti Foundation continued to produce a plethora of materials, especially his recorded talks and writings; they are endless. The books that I have found quite telling are Think on These Things, The Flight of the Eagle and The Awakening of Intelligence. Read these three in this order and you either quit on him or have your pistons explode. His teachings have saturated who I am so that the plaque forming in my arteries have the letter K on them, delightfully insidious. When I am stressed or experience angst or the fear of fear or the fear of death, I return to his writings. A disciple of his, a misnomer, for he did not collect disciples about himself, wrote a biography of him which was given to me in the 1980s by a class that knew my fondness for K. They inscribed their feelings about me on the inside book covers which is interesting to read 25 years later. However, I am rereading the book once again, a chapter a night, for one has to go slowly with K. I will provide one quotation which I underlined last night and has motivated me to write this blog. Tell me what you think:
Krisnaji asked: If you knew that you were about to die, what would you do? Can you live one hour completely — live one day — one hour — as you were going to die the next hour? But if you die so that you are living fully in this hour, there is enormous vitality, tremendous attention to everything. You look at the spring of life, the tear, you feel the earth, the quality of the tree. You feel the love that has no continuity and no object. Then you will find in that attention, that the ‘me’ is not. It is then, that the mind, being empty, can renew itself.”
Let me assure you that this is mild K, for he can lacerate your mental structure, your sense of being through relentless and laser-like questioning that has no other purpose than to make you see. He is not a Western philosopher as we know it. He goes beyond Socrates in several aspects, for he pushes us to see what is, in the moment, right now, to observe our minds at work, how we go about thinking, how we project upon the world all our internal ills. It is much more, to my eyes, than merely examining one’s own self. And that is why, in some instances, this culture and others find it hard to digest what he is dealing with. I still struggle with seeing. In any case I have returned to him periodically for he provides not solace but a kind of reaffirmation of questioning as a way to get at core issues, which is to my liking. Answers are given on tablets and handed down to slaves. What if the decalogue was composed of ten or more questions? What larks, Pip, what larks!
As I go about aging, as I go about the slow dance to non-existence, I will not waste my time seeing meaning in what I have been, done, or accomplished. really irrelevant. I am more concerned in living the moments I have each and every day not in the pursuit of happiness, or nirvana, or moaning mantras which are all ridiculous. I seek no respite, no relief, no pleasure, nor transcendental aims. Krishnamurti seems to me to be about intellect, the awakening of intelligence, and we all know how tiring that can be; but he is suggesting that we maintain an ongoing internal dialoguing with ourselves; that we listen on levels that are almost at the level of quantum physics; that we dare not live the kind of life he lived, for he detests models, icons and disciples. He solely engages us to make our way in the world free of all conditioning, the pollution we face daily with the media and others about us; that we march not only to the sound of a different drummer, but that indeed, we become the drummer and drum, the music, the rhythm and the harmony (the observer is the observed). What I admire about this teacher is his diamond-hard yet compassionate injunction to be in the world, or as he said in the title of one book, you are the world.
The fact that such a man has lived in my time gives me some hope that humanity may yet have something going for it. He was no god, he was mortal, and for me that carries greater weight than any god created by man. Luckily for K, in any other century he probably would have been turned into a god.
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Posted in Commentary, Philosophy
Tagged Krishnaji, Krishnamurti, Socrates, Spinoza, The Awakening of Intelligence, The Flight of the Eagle, Think on These Things