Continuing on the summarizing through excerpts from “Talks and Dialogues” JD Krishnamurti.
When we talk
about being serious, we mean serious about everything, from the most trivial
things you do to the most profound questions of life. One cannot be casual about
anything, because a casual mind is just a frivolous mind flitting from one
thing to another, is quick in offering opinions, a mind that flits about from
one idea to another, or from one experience to another. Such a mind is not very
serious. Such a mind will not only have more and more problems, but also it
cannot possible understand the very complex problem of life.
We, each one
of us is responsible tremendously for the world all around us - our society,
our country, our religion, everything. And what have we built? We have created
war, and a society where the most important thing is success, big business and
religion where there is no meaning or essence. What are the young to do? Join
the army and kill or be killed or train in schools and then spend the next 40
years in wretched little offices? Or join the religions or take up drugs? The education which we received, we are
trained to fit into certain grooves, become a cog in this society, do
mechanical things. And for all this chaos and misery we are responsible.
This confusion and misery, this personal achievement of which we are so very
proud is what we call living. This culture we live in where the desire for
power, position, prestige, name, success and intermingled with it this peculiar
idea of spirituality of find God through mind expanding drugs and so on. This
field where there is turmoil, conflict in every form of relationship, hatred,
antagonism, and wars – we call living. This is all we know.
We have
cultivated escapes from this life though alcohol, religion, literature, music
and art. Being incapable of solving this enormous battle of existence, we are
naturally frightened of life, and we seek every form of escape. We don’t
understand the known like our
everyday existence; we do anything to get away from this life of being
frightened of living. We are frightened of the unknown too like death, and what lies beyond tomorrow. So we are
afraid of the known and the unknown – and this is our daily life.
If we are at
all serious we have to face this, not allow ourselves for a single minute to
escape from this, from this actual fact of what actually is. To face it one
must be extraordinarily fearless because the facing of it involves not only how
to observe it but to also look at the question of time.
To understand
this misery of life, one has to understand the question of time. By
understanding we mean not the intellectual understanding of a concept but an
understanding that comes when you give your whole attention to something. I can
only give my attention completely when I really care to understand this
problem, which means when I really love to understand it and am not frightened.
Previous experience, knowledge prevents you from looking and listening and
paying attention. If you hurt me, then if I look at you with that memory, then
I don’t see you. I look at you from the image I built about you when you hurt
me. This image, which is memory, idea, is looking at you; therefore I am not
looking or listening to what you are saying at all. I am listening to my own
whispers of my image about you, so one can look only when there is freshness,
an innocence, and freedom to look. Once this is understood, we can look at
time.
By time we do
not mean the time of the watch. We mean the time in which there is the interval
between idea and action. We have ideas like being communists or capitalists or
religious. The “idea” is to protect ourselves; it is the idea of being secure.
But action is always immediate, it is not in the past or in future – action
means to act, is must be always in the present. And action is so dangerous, so
uncertain that we make it conform to an idea which will give us a certain
satisfaction, pleasure, safety – and this leads to conflict. It is like this –
I have an idea of what is right or what is wrong, or an ideological concept
about myself or about society and according to that idea I act. Therefore the
action is in conformity with the idea, hence there is conflict. There is the
idea, then the interval and the action, and that interval is time.
We need to ask
if time can come to an end – which means can conflict come to an end, not
gradually but immediately. If conflict ends gradually, then it is the idea of
conflict coming to an end, not the real conflict. Again there is an interval
between the idea of ending conflict and the action. This time which is the
interval between idea and action is thought. When you think you will be happy
tomorrow, then you have an image of yourself achieving a result of being happy
tomorrow. It is thought, through desire and the continuity of that desire, as
pleasure, sustained by thought, which says “tomorrow you will be happy”. So
thought creates that interval of time.
How can we put
a stop to time? Time is sorrow, because thought thinks over and over again
about desires and pleasure; it creates further desire for pleasure and breeds
not only sorrow, but also gives continuity as time. As long as there is this
interval of time bred by thought, there must be sorrow, there must be
continuity of fear. You understand that if we try to answer this question of
when will it end, we have created an idea of ending time or thought and
therefore we again have that idea, and the interval and we are caught again.
It is really
extraordinary to watch the operation of one’s own thinking, just to observe
that reaction which one calls thinking. It springs from memory. But is there a
beginning to thought? To us thought is very important, the more clever, cunning,
subtle, the more you can express it – the ideas, intellectual or otherwise
which fills books, which we worship. So we are looking at - can the mind be
made fresh, new and innocent, so that it can look at this existence and bring
about a different world altogether?
We have
separated action from idea, and to us ideas are far more important than action.
But ideas are always of the past, and action is always of the present. We are
frightened of that living present, so that past as ideas becomes very important.
Just like death.
We are
frightened of death, ill health, old age, disease and pain. So you see how
thought creates fear? We are frightened of life and we are frightened of death,
the known and the unknown, and that fear is bred by thought. So we think about
death, we think about it and by thinking about it we are creating that interval
between living and that which we call death. By thinking about our possessions
and everything which matters to us, we are creating an interval between what we
think as an idea, and the actual fact. Even when you say “I won’t think about
it”, you have already thought it.
So thought
breeds, through time - not only the fear of living but the fear of death and
because death is something you don’t know, thought says “let’s postpone it,
avoid it, keep it as far away as possible”. You have thought out how to avoid
it and use many escapes – churches, gods, saviours, and the idea that there is
a permanent, eternal self in yourself which is endless. But because thought thinks
about it, it is not real. Thought has created the idea of an eternal self –
Soul, Atman - in order to find safety, hope.
So the problem
arises of how to go beyond this so called living and the thing called death, is
there an actual separation between the two? To live intensely is to die to
everything of yesterday – all the pleasure, the judgements, opinions,
knowledge, achievements etc. To die to that brings an intensity, brings about a
state of mind in which the past has ceased and the future, as death, has come
to an end. So the living – you cannot live if you do not die. But most of us
are frightened because we want surety, because we want to continue the misery
which we have known, the disease, the pain, the pleasure, the anxiety. Because
we avoid, push away death (thought pushes away death) there is fear of the
known and the fear of the unknown. When there is no interval between death and
the living, then you know what it means to die, to die everyday to everything that
one has. Then the mind becomes extraordinarily fresh, eager, attentive and
innocent. When one dies to thousand yesterdays, then living is dying.
It is only in
that state of time comes to an end and thought functions only where it is
needed and not at any other level or at any other demand.
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