The Link #26 - Letters to the Editor

Note for our Readers
While space to include articles and letters in The Link is naturally limited, the editors nonetheless appreciate hearing from as many readers as possible. Having said this, it has become a bit too much for us to engage in correspondence with everyone. We would therefore ask all correspondents to advise us, when writing, whether or not you would permit your letter, or extracts from it, to be published in a future issue of The Link; we would include your name, together possibly with your country, unless you specifically instruct us otherwise.

Seeing that nothing can be done is mutation

In a letter in your last issue (No. 25, pg. 17), John Raica, after mentioning his having been interested in K for over 30 years, proposed “a new topic for discussion in The Link: Why the teachings seem not to work, even for many serious and dedicated students of all ages.” To start the discussion, he suggested several reasons: K “denied the idea of help” without making it clear why; he left “the issue of inwardly ‘letting go’” in need of clarification; and he totally neglected “the issue of identification,” adding that “probably, like those fine university professors who ... don’t bother to touch on ‘self-evident’ issues, K missed this step of the ‘dismantling of identification’, leaving it to other forces from other dimensions.”

I wonder what we mean by “the teachings don’t seem to work.” Is it that, after so many years of study (over 40 in my case), we find we haven’t changed psychologically, haven’t undergone the “radical mutation in consciousness” that K talked about? If so, then presumably what we are seeking is a way of making ourselves ‘mutate’. But K always said there is no ‘way’, that “truth is a pathless land.” In his view, there can be no effective psychological techniques for inwardly letting go, dismantling identification, or changing our consciousness in any respect at all; and that, surely, is why he denied the idea of help.

K made his view particularly clear, to my mind, in the first public talk at Saanen in 1970, when he said: “One has to find out how to look so that one sees all the things that are happening, outside or inside oneself, as a unitary process ... as a living, moving process, a total movement of which one is a part and from which one is not divided.” (The Impossible Question, pg. 14)

If that is right, then not only do we have no way of making ourselves mutate, but we have no control over ourselves whatsoever: all our perceptions, thoughts, feelings, decisions, and actions are happenings in the unitary process, and it is the process, not the imaginary, supposedly independent agent that we think of as our ‘self’, that brings them into being and is responsible for them. Hence K said, challenging all traditional forms of human society: “To see the absurdity of punishment and reward is to see the whole; when you see the whole there is the operation of intelligence which functions when you behave.” (Talks in Saanen 1974, pg. 15)

It may seem, though, that if K was right, our situation is hopeless: everything depends on perceiving life as a unitary process of happenings, which we cannot control because we are in it; moreover, as that crucial perception would itself be a happening, and therefore part of the uncontrollable process, there is nothing we can do to bring it about. But I think the solution is simple. Once we see that there is nothing we can do, we stop trying – and that is the radical mutation in consciousness.

Francis Ellingham, July 2006

The material limitation of a science of consciousness

It seems to me that Mr. Williams’ terminology in Mind, Brain, and Behaviour (No. 24, pp. 32-33) is somewhat at variance with K’s, and that from this variance flow serious difficulties of understanding.

K, I think, distinguishes very sharply between thought, including “fear, belief, desire,” as listed in the article, and that which is not of thought, including “understanding, love, beauty.” For K, what is derived from thought remains a material process; it may indeed become measurable by science in the future. But that which is not derived from thought can never be measured, because it has no material base; it is of a different nature altogether. That which may manifest “when the brain is completely still,” as Mr. Williams states, is not generally lumped by K with the contents of consciousness as we know it. In fact, K is almost allergic to any such undifferentiated usage.

As a more general statement, I think that science, especially psychology, has shown very little capacity for learning from K, because it cannot get a handle on the unmeasurable. We can measure insanity, not sanity; disorder, not order; war, not peace; we can measure the ego, not the state of selflessness. Only if science accepts this basic limitation is there any hope of going beyond it.

Hermann Janzen, December 2005

Mind and brain

The Link has printed several articles on this topic, some of them reflecting an increasing tendency in science to see consciousness as the product of material processes alone. For many people, such an hypothesis is profoundly anti-intuitive and unacceptable. For thousands of years, if not tens of thousands, there has been a feeling of a spiritual world somehow beyond the material. We generally share the assumption that we as homo sapiens enjoy qualities that are independent of the physical organism, as echoed in the belief in reincarnation or that a soul survives the body in some other way.

Important in this context is that most of us have a very simplified idea of what matter is, thinking of it as something mechanical, something close to dust with no relation to life and mind. But isn’t the world of matter much more wondrous than we think? Many scientists, certainly, would be the first to admit that. Matter very quickly dissolves into strange forms of energy and the laws of quantum physics are largely beyond our imagination. I am not a scientist, but I think we should remind ourselves of how little we know and how many things we ‘know’ incorrectly.

Many would claim that the human mind cannot be the outcome of material processes only. Yet, do we really know the inherent depth and complexity of matter (and material processes), or what mind or spirit is, to be so sure of that statement? What if the world is basically one integrated process – the flower and the seeing of the flower both material processes – the whole of life and non-life contained in one and the same dimension?

I would say we cannot be sure, nor can we be sure if other ways of explaining the universe are true or not. Many religions reflect a view that can be described as being basically two-dimensional: a world of ‘matter’ (including bodies and brains) with which a world of ‘spirit’ interacts, allowing for life and mind. And there are eastern philosophies which see ‘Mind’ as the basic factor, with the world of objects and beings only phenomena in the unlimited space of this ‘Mind’.

It is in relation to the question of mind and consciousness, which involves our sense of ‘me’, that it seems we harbour our most hidden and strong assumptions.

[On the following page, there is another article on the topic. Independently of what you may think of its thesis, it is worth reading the list of questions at the end of it.]

Jürgen Brandt, September 2006