Last Post?

Have started another blog where I am writing anonymously since a while. So, I may not write any more out here. This may be the last post. On the other hand, it's quite possible that I may write something once in a while here too. :)

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Haven't read the book but saw the movie today. Liked it a lot.
Great acting by Jack Nicholson & direction by Milos Forman. Makes me want to read the book too, but dunno if I'll ever get around to it. :)

American Neuroses

American Neuroses - A Cultural Analysis - a very good essay by Dan Rowden on Genius Realms - a discussion forum.

On Pleasure and Pain

Never admit the pain,
Bury it deep;
Only the weak complain,
Complaint is cheap.
Cover thy wound, fold down
Its curtained place;
Silence is still a crown,
Courage a grace.

- Mary Gilmore (1865-1962), Australian Poet

Something I read recently made me recall this poem from my 8th or 9th grade school textbook. I remember it word-to-word, not just because it is short but also because the teacher who interpreted it for us seemed to like it a lot. It was visible in the interest with which she spoke about it as opposed to other things that were in the syllabus.

The poem advocates a stoic courage and an ability to deal with pain with a silence forced upon oneself. It advocates hiding one’s wounds from the view of the world, because we know how ruthless the world is. It does not care about the wounds that one carries. On the contrary, it inflicts more wounds once it realizes how frail one is. In saying “Never admit the pain, Bury it deep” the poet seems to be advising us to bury the pain so deep that not only is it not visible to the outside world but also so that we can therefore have the ability to deny or hide the pain from our own selves. It sees this as strength, and loathes complaining as cheap and a sign of weakness.

This kind of stoic courage has helped me on many occasions in my life. I am sure many people adopt the same approach. However, then as well as now, there seems to me something seriously wrong with this approach to dealing with pain, although I perhaps still resort to it sometimes.

All of us are hurt. We experience pain right from the time we are born. Being born itself is such a painful and traumatic process. We are pushed out from our mother’s womb, which is such a comfortable and secure place, into this world. The first thing we do is cry. As babies, we experience pain even though the concept of “I” has not yet fully developed. For several months, a baby does not know that it is a separate entity from the world. Experience of pleasure and pain play a critical role in the development of the concept of “I”. Through such experiences we realize how the world is separate from us, that we are a distinct entity upon which pleasure and pain are bombarded. Later, as we get more integrated with society, the development of the process of thought and the thinker (an entity created by thought itself) also plays an important role in strengthening the “I”.

We are born with a high sensitivity. We continue to experience pleasure and pain all through life - only perhaps less keenly as we grow older. We see pleasure as something good, desirable, and pain as something to be avoided. We either run away from it or develop strategies to deal or fight with it. In doing so, we lose our sensitivity and become thick-skinned and hard-hearted – not sensitive even to our own pain, forget others. We want pleasure, comfort, security… And in trying to have this we become clever, escapist, insensitive, thoughtless, blind… We do not realize that pleasure and pain are two sides of the same coin. We cannot have one without the other. The pursuit of comfort and security, material as well as psychological, is such a tortuous process, filled with conflict, uncertainty and effort. And it ultimately leads to pain. Pain remains the central fact of human life.

One may say that one is not pursuing pleasure or comfort, and that we just want to be happy, content. But upon looking carefully within, one realizes that this is just a form of self-deception. One may not be greedy or covetous, but one still wants happiness through pleasure. We confuse the two. Pleasure can be pursued or sought. But happiness does not come from seeking. One cannot go to it. It comes to us. And it comes to us, only if it wishes, as a kind of side-effect of something else, of a different quality within oneself than one which is always “seeking” or “becoming” something. One need not name this quality – why give it a name? If we give it a name, a word, then again our clever minds will snatch upon it and bring it within the realm of thought, as something to be pursued or achieved. It is easy to be firm or stubborn and pursue something; it is far more difficult not to do that and instead try to understand why one wants pleasure, happiness (or whatever you want to call it) in the first place.

To quote J. Krishnamurti, “I have been hurt all my life, I am sensitive - you know what hurt is, the wounds that one receives, and what effect it has in later life. I have been hurt. I can deal with superficial hurts fairly intelligently. I know what to do. I either resist, build a wall around myself, isolate myself so that I will never be hurt, or grow a thick skin - which most people do. But behind that they are wounded deeply.” The Buddha was perhaps trying to convey the same thing by saying that “Life is suffering (Dukkha).” It is significant that this is the first of the ‘four noble truths’ that he preached.

Most of us do not even realize that we are in sorrow. Sorrow is the human condition. We either try to overcome it or explain away our suffering. And so we never understand it.

Some of us are good at seeking escapes. Or to put it another way, we are successful at escaping and so we do not even realize that we are being escapist.

Having beliefs and clinging to them is being escapist. A belief is not a fact. For example, does one believe that fire is hot or does one know it as a fact? Isn’t it stupid to say “I believe fire is hot.”? We have beliefs only about things that we do not know anything about. We do not know what love is or what truth is and so we have beliefs or ideas about it. If we want to know what love is or what truth is one has to know oneself first – and we do not want to do that because that is not the easy way. So we seek escapes by believing in this and that… and engaging in action based on that, which only adds to the chaos although one may think otherwise.

Being committed to some idea or values is also being escapist. Why do we choose some idea or value? It is because by believing in or being committed to it we hope to achieve something. Behind that, what we are still seeking is comfort or security. We are disturbed by the chaos of life, and so we try to escape from it rather than face the reality within ourselves. By conforming to some pattern based on conditioning, we become half-dead human beings. Escape can take various forms – seeking pleasure or not seeking pleasure, seeking money or some object or not seeking it, seeking love or not seeking it, seeking comforts of the city or seeking an idealistic rural life, wanting something from someone or not wanting it and so on… We all indulge in being escapist in some form or another. Even pursuing spirituality is an escape.

There is no limit to the ways in which one can escape. We seem to have an ingrained tendency towards flight from disturbance rather than understanding oneself. Perhaps it is a natural and genetically encoded impulse in human beings. But that makes it all the important for us to see the danger of it. What is wrong with being disturbed? Unless we are disturbed, we will not have the energy to change and understand the cause of the disturbance. Understanding oneself means investigating into one’s psychological processes and instincts. This leads to self-knowledge or freedom. It leads to an understanding of life that is different from that which most people are used to. (In using the word “life” I am including death in it because death is not the opposite of life or something separate from it. It is a part of life.) That is the only basis upon which one can engage in right action or the foundation upon which one can build one’s life. Then whatever action one engages in is right action. The same action, if it does not come from self-knowledge is mere conformity with the intention of achieving something and thus being secure, which leads to more chaos/confusion.

However, when we look within ourselves, we may see many things that are ugly. It is difficult to simply look at the fact, or what-is, without any acceptance, justification, condemnation or running away. Similarly, it is also difficult not to turn self-knowledge into another thing that needs to be achieved or pursued by means of a path, system or method. I know this problem only too well and probably the way I am struggling to overcome it is also a part of the problem. In the spiritual realm, the effort to do something does not accomplish anything. As Krishnamurti said, “It is the truth that frees, not your effort to be free.”

There is no easy way out. There is no refuge – neither outside nor within.

Thoughts on Thinking

A man who does not think for himself does not think at all.

- Oscar Wilde

To understand the misery and confusion that exist within ourselves, and so in the world, we must first find clarity within ourselves, and that clarity comes about through right thinking. Clarity is not the result of verbal assertion, but of intense self-awareness and right thinking. Right thinking is not the outcome of or mere cultivation of the intellect, nor is it conformity to pattern, however worthy and noble. Right thinking comes with self-knowledge. Without understanding yourself you have no basis for thought; without self-knowledge, what you think is not true.

- J. Krishnamurti

The unexamined life is not worth living.

- Socrates

Our system of upbringing is based upon what to think, not on how to think.

- J. Krishnamurti

A consistent thinker is a thoughtless person, because he conforms to a pattern; he repeats phrases and thinks in a groove.

- J. Krishnamurti

In a certain sense we are nothing but a complex mass of mental, nervous and physical habits held together by a few ruling ideas, desires and associations--an amalgam of many small self-repeating forces with a few major vibrations.

- Sri Aurobindo

There is no refuge other than conquest of the mind.

- Katha Upanishad

Thought sees itself to be impermanent, in constant flux, so it creates the thinker as an entity apart and dissimilar from itself. Then the thinker operates on thought; the thinker says, “I must put an end to thought”. But there is only the process of thinking; there is no thinker apart from thought. The thinker and the thought are one.

- J. Krishnamurti

The world changes when the mind changes.

- Buddha

One makes all kinds of discoveries when the mental machine stops, and first of all one realizes that if the power to think is a remarkable gift, the power not to think is a far greater one; let the seeker try it for just a few minutes, and he will soon see what this means! He will realize that he lives in a surreptitious racket, an exhausting and ceaseless whirlwind exclusively filled with his thoughts, his feelings, his impulses, his reactions - him, always him, an oversized gnome intruding into everything, obscuring everything, hearing and seeing only himself, knowing only himself (if even that!), whose unchanging themes manage to give the illusion of novelty only through their alternation.

- Satprem (Bernard Enginger)

Thought has survived for millions and millions of years, and it knows every trick in the world. It will do anything to maintain its continuity.

- U.G.Krishnamurti

Thought is our enemy. However, we are not ready to accept the fact that thought can only create problems, but cannot help us to solve them.

- U.G.Krishnamurti

Thought is the movement of constant becoming... the moment we want to be something we are no longer free.

- J. Krishnamurti

Religion is the frozen thought of man out of which they build temples.

- J. Krishnamurti

What is jealousy? Can you look at jealousy without the word jealousy? The experiencing of a fact without thought and feeling is a profound event.

- J. Krishnamurti

Perception without the word, which is without thought, is one of the strangest phenomena. Then the perception is much more acute, not only with the brain, but also with all the senses. Such perception is not the fragmentary perception of the intellect nor the affair of the emotions. It can be called a total perception.

- J. Krishnamurti

The first task of yoga is to breathe freely, to shatter that mental screen, which allows only one type of vibration to get through, in order to discover the multicolored infinity of vibrations; that is, the world and people as they really are, and another "self" within ourselves, whose worth is beyond any mental appreciation.

- Satprem (Bernard Enginger)

But what makes you choose? What makes you say this is good, true, noble, and the rest is not? Obviously the choice is based on pleasure, reward or achievement; or it is merely a reaction of one's conditioning or tradition. Why do you choose at all? Why not examine every thought? When you are interested in the many, why choose one? Why not examine every interest? Instead of creating resistance, why not go into each interest as it arises, and not merely concentrate on one idea, one interest? After all, you are made up of many interests, you have many masks, consciously and unconsciously. Why choose one and discard all the others, in combating which you spend all your energies, thereby creating resistance, conflict and friction. Whereas if you consider every thought as it arises - every thought, not just a few thoughts - then there is no exclusion. But it is an arduous thing to examine every thought. Because, as you are looking at one thought, another slips in. But if you are aware without domination or justification, you will see that, by merely looking at that thought, no other thought intrudes. It is only when you condemn, compare, approximate, that other thoughts enter in.

- J. Krishnamurti

There is not a single movement of our being, at any level, not a single emotion, not a single desire, not the batting of an eyelash, that is not instantly snatched up by the mind and covered over with a layer of thought; in other words, we mentalize everything.

- Satprem (Bernard Enginger)

Thought is violence because it is trying to protect itself. There is no such thing as you and me. The totality has created you and me. You have no isolated existence. The demand of being an individual is the real cause of suffering. The how is absent for me. The hows dished out in the market-place are not for me. The one who is living doesn't ask how to live.

- U.G.Krishnamurti

This vast space which the mind, the I, cannot reach, is silence. The mind can never be silent within itself; it is silent only within the vast space which thought cannot touch. Out of this silence there is action which does not arise from thought. Meditation is this silence.

- J. Krishnamurti

Thought is time. Thought is born of experience and knowledge which are inseparable from time and the past. Time is the psychological enemy of man. Our action is based on knowledge and therefore time, so man is always a slave to the past. Thought is ever-limited and so we live in constant conflict and struggle. There is no psychological evolution. When man becomes aware of the movement of his own thoughts he will see the division between the thinker and the thought, the observer and the observed, the experiencer and the experience. He will discover that this division is an illusion. Then only is there pure observation which is insight without any shadow of the past or of time. This timeless insight brings about a deep radical mutation in the mind.

- J. Krishnamurti

If I really see what thought does, thought comes to an end. Whatever thought does it breeds misery, sorrow, conflict, and when thought realizes that, it will come to an end by itself, the vicious circle is broken; thought, which means time, has come to an end.

- J. Krishnamurti