You’re with a friend, a good friend, somewhere relaxed. You’re chatting about this and that, your work, your families, the mental condition of the President of the United States. The usual comfortable subjects. And then your friend bowls you a googly. (A googly is a term from the game of cricket: it’s a trick of the bowler in which a ball that looks as though it will spin one way, deceives the batsman by spinning another.) You pause. And how do you react?  Krishnamurti? Ah ...em ...well ...you begin.

Have you ever been in this situation? For me at least, the first thing to note is that it certainly warrants the word ‘situation’, that’s to say it’s a psychological blind, a social inconvenience. And yet the question is meant in a friendly way. So why this squirming, this discomfort? A sense of tiredness, of hopelessness overtakes me. Why? Can’t we get back to the President of the United States?

This article is a sort of enquiry, informal, and apparently random. I don’t know whether it ’s going to go anywhere.

1. Being articulate is frequently a problem. But talking about K seems to require a particular form of articulation. It feels more difficult, it feels like I ’m having to translate from one language into another. In the language of friendship, the subjects covered are to some extent circumscribed by the need for comfort, or at least, familiar discomfort. The question about K makes me feel I have to leave a well-known conversational path. At the same time, I feel obliged to take my friend with me. I feel a burden of responsibility. I feel I may fail, though I know my friend won’t mind. Or will he? Is the question about something we both know to be serious, so innocent? It breaks the rules. My friend must know this. By asking it, my friend is taking a risk. How dare he?

2. In my attempts to talk about K to someone who knows next-to-nothing about him or his teachings, I play safe and emphasise what the teachings are not. We live in a negative age. I prefer a negative to a positive. I ’m more at home with it. I think I might regret it less later. I begin: it isn ’t a set of beliefs, nor a dogma, nor a religion in the sense that it requires belief.  Do you understand? There’s no god. He wasn’t a guru. I could keep this up all night. And at the end,what have I said? I have described a black hole when I wanted to talk about stars and meteors. But I don ’t seem able to. Why? And I ’m sorry.

3. Sometimes, I see these conversations as a trade-off of assertions, a game of chess, a power struggle, in which I find I am seeking personal vindication, if not outright victory. And if I see a conversation in such military terms, no wonder I ’m nervous: I might lose. Is that the heart of the problem?

4. No it isn ’t that simple. Is the central problem a psychological one? I create myself by talking, by using ideas that I identify with. The reaction to these ideas from others is therefore a very confirming fact. To have my ideas repudiated, on the other hand, may threaten this self, or else create a stronger more belligerent me, strident and defensive. Such conversations then are not so much holding a mirror up to nature as holding my nature up to a mirror. Hence the sense of displeasure and risk?

5. Is there something inexpressible in this? Language breaks down under the strain, like a bridge collapsing under too heavy a weight. In the shift from silent to spoken, something gets lost. Our choice: to speak or to stay silent. Speech is only verbalised thought — visible thought — and thought is, at the least, a diminishment of K ’s teaching, which is concerned with essence rather than information. Yes I prefer this: it ’s leading me to the conclusion that there ’s no point in trying.

I am now nearly at the end of this brief exploration. How to talk about K? Don’t talk about him. Let go of K ’s hand. I look at my friendly questioner and ask: where do our minds meet? This is the end of our competitiveness. I do not give evidence of something completed. Instead I say, “Let ’s find out about how to live.” This is the way to talk about K: talk about life. In this, I am not serving up preconceived packages labeled: my thought, K’s thought, your thought, etc. Now it becomes a different kind of conversation. It isn’t an account at all. It isn’t a painful exchange of selves. It feels like freedom.

Michael Butt
December 2001