The Link #26 - The Transformative Psychology of J. Krishnamurti

Stephen Smith taught for many years at Brockwood Park School, where he was also a Director of Academics; he was later an editor at the KFA. The following is the second half of a talk he gave in January 2006 at the International Conference on Krishnamurti and Consciousness, in Hyderabad, India. This is the second part of his talk.

...To engender a new way of seeing is, it seems to me, the most urgent human task. Seeing and being are closely aligned. For, it is when we see clearly that we truly are. We are then not what we think we are – which is, to put it briefly, a thought-world of conditioning – but we discover that what we thought we were – and what we are in terms of thought – is just a fiction of circumstances, one more image making its appearance in the hall of mirrors we call reality. Trouble is, it has no substance; to attribute, as we do, such importance to it is to lose ourselves in an endless, painful game. When we wake up, the game is over. We are now looking down a different track or, to put it more accurately, down the same track seen differently. Here, words can take us only so far because the act of seeing transforms the reality. We are seeing, literally, with eyes made new: the seer is the seen, instantaneously.

What we have come to within our own ontology, our own sense of who we are, is a new and different place of poise. We no longer see our self and its history – which includes its salvation, soteriological or otherwise – as the sole focus of our attention. Something has taken place in us which makes it clear that what requires attention is not the me and its history, but the total panoply of consciousness itself, of which the me and its history is a part. We are no longer enclosed within the valley but have caught a whiff of the air of the mountaintop.

This doesn’t mean that we are totally transformed, but it does mean that we have taken the first step: we are looking in the right place. For, to remain in the self, with its history and salvation, is not only to lead a very narrow life, it is to perpetuate a collective, collusive fallacy. After all, the sense of separate identity, nurtured and strengthened by centuries of tradition, is what gives momentum to the false. And, as Krishnamurti so aptly points out, to see the false as false is the gateway to truth. There is no need to devise an antidotal strategy; as soon as we see the false as false, the self and its history as a fiction, i.e. false – the whole process of it, not just some items – then, essentially, we are loosening the knot which, if left unquestioned, undissolved, gets tighter and tighter the longer we live. And, since this loosening is not of time, we can begin on it at any age, which is why education is so important.

Seeing this, we have now entered what one could call the generative matrix of consciousness. It is constantly active, constantly moving; it seems to have no resting place. Because of our investigation, we can no longer see it as deriving from the ego which, even intellectually, is partial and fragmented. But, neither are we beyond the ego which continues to dictate our way of life. We are in a kind of no man’s land. This is the condition of many, perhaps most, of us. What next?

Of course, the what next? is itself the problem. For, what next? is a return to the egoic identity, the self that wants to grasp and control. And, that is the very core of the problem: this age-old, obdurate, selfreplicating phenomenon that shows up in so many guises and disguises. There is nothing for it but to wait.

This implies not sitting back and waiting, but being in that state of alert passivity which we referred to above as negative thinking. It means that, even in and by waiting, we are preparing the place of transformation. This, again, is rather tricky because we cannot, by virtue of the nature of the task, be waiting for anything to happen. It is not the waiting of expectancy, even the void, fruitless expectancy of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. No, it has a different quality, a wholly different kind of vibration. It’s rather like the wellstrung bow, or the well-tuned violin waiting to be played; it is ready, it is attuned – but no note has been played. The work of transformation implies all this; it implies that we be fit and ready, waiting but not waiting for. Abandoning the story, we simply wait.

to remain in the self with its history is to perpetuate a collective, collusive fallacy

In a nutshell, this is our dilemma. As Beckett puts it, “We are between a death and a difficult birth.” Paradoxically, however, this difficult birth involves death, the death of who I think I am. This is not traditional self-immolation, paring oneself down to nothing at all; it is not renunciation in the accepted sense. Rather, in the act of waiting, in the patience and strength of “holding consciousness,” we gather energy for the task in hand – the immediate, necessary perception of what is. But, it isn’t something we bring about. As the Zen poem puts it:

Sitting quietly,
Doing nothing, the spring comes,
Grass grows by itself.

It is there in natural, spontaneous abundance, once we are able, by a widening of consciousness, simply to allow what is to be. It is not a recipe for quietism, for “doing nothing” the lazy way; on the contrary, it may well be a call to action. And, heaven knows, there is plenty to do if the age-old trend towards conflict and violence is to be arrested and reversed. The heavy dough of consciousness is in need of leaven as never before.

The very perception of this urgency, which is certainly a perception of what is, is in itself a call to awakening – perhaps it is part of awakening. For, in the world of thought, things are sequential; in the world of perception they are not: they are direct. By this I mean that there is no intervening mechanism, nothing that translates the seen into the known. In fact, in this moment, in this act of insight, the seer is the seen and there is instantaneous perception. Action then flows from the insight itself – it is not translated, not mediated – and can thus be said to be free of time, which is the heart of freedom, freedom-initself. Such action contains no trace of conflict, since its place of origin is beyond mentation, the corridor of the opposites, the hall of mirrors. Being thus free, it engenders freedom also. That is why those who live in that freedom create the space for others to be free – which does not mean they can do their work for them.

Everyone starts from the same ground, which is consciousness, and it is only by entering into that consciousness in as full and honest a way as possible that we can hope to find our “own way home.” For, paradoxically, entering the generative matrix does not make the task less personal: it becomes personal and impersonal, both. No longer focused solely on the ego and its story, I am now aware of a much vaster field – not only that, but the field is me: there is no separation of seer and seen. It is not that things are happening to me – they are happening, pure and simple, and that is me, or, more accurately, the me. The very structure and nature of the me is out there in everything I see and hear, filtered, mediated, translated by thought and hence reduced to its own norms. In other words, there are not two worlds, that of the outer and the inner, but only one, self-sustaining and self-replicating. It’s the same thing going on everywhere, in India, in Iraq, in America, in me – all of which are forms of separate identity. The fact is, this self-sustaining, self-replicating system must break down when the reality is seen. And the reality is, these structures are illusory: they have no basis whatsoever outside the mind that has conceived them. One mind or many minds, it doesn’t matter: it is all part of the same collusion. Independent, as it were, of the mind that sees, this is consciousness awakening to itself, to its own multifarious, devious ways.

in the world of thought, things are sequential; in the world of perception they are not: they are direct

When this is seen – the whole wide field – then it is clear that nothing we call human lies outside its nascent scope: our highest hopes and dreams, our wildest imaginings. All belong to the matrix of consciousness or, as Krishnamurti might put it, “consciousness as we know it.” There is, he maintains, something infinitely vaster, but the way to it lies through this, the common consciousness we have. It does not lie in any form of escape – not only because such escape is false, but because escape inevitably shoots us back to the very point we were escaping from. Implicit in this is what we might call the ontological psychology of Krishnamurti. It is a very precise psychology of being which is, at the same time, a rigorous teaching. One cannot get away from it. Most of us, of course, do want to escape, and there is a whole structure called the entertainment industry ready to provide us with just that – at a price. But, crossing the threshold is what it’s all about and, until we do that, we are still in the miasma.

This question then becomes crucial: Is there observation without the observer? We have implied all along that there is, or that there might be. Now is the time to go deeper into it.

Students of Krishnamurti will be aware that he draws a distinction between the psychological and the inward; indeed, in terms of this inquiry, the inward begins where the psychological ends. The psychological treats of, and sometimes treats, common consciousness “as we know it.” It delves, probes, discerns common trends; it describes symptoms and proposes cures. Including the vast reaches of the unconscious, which is not to be confused with the unknown, it is like a mediaeval castle – some of it above ground, much of it below – with labyrinthine passageways and underground tunnels. But, it all exists in terms of the story: it is something “put together by thought.” This means that there is nothing original in it.

those who live in freedom create the space for others to be free

When this is clear there is a new beginning, which is not the discovery of hidden chambers, dank dungeons or distant towers, illuminating as this may be, but something outside the castle altogether. And, it is only from here that one can see the castle properly – with its moat, portcullis and numerous defences – only now is the whole thing clear. For, the observer is necessarily part of the castle; tower-top or dungeon, it still holds him. Indeed, to put it bluntly, he is the castle. Wholeness lies not in itemising the rooms, or even in making a synthesis of them, but rather in stepping outside altogether so that the entire structure comes into view. One is then aware not of each separate item, but of how each item coheres with the whole, is part-and-parcel of it, indistinguishable from it. This is the transition from analysis to seeing, from inference to perception, from what appears to what is. The shift has occurred inwardly, within ourselves.

This is where the journey begins: observation without the observer. Characteristically, it is expressed via the negative. For, we have acquired nothing – quite the reverse – we have abandoned our baggage, nothing more. This may give a feeling of angst, of void; we have and are nothing, and the signposts are gone. It is important to “hold” to this no-place of being, not to revert to the former state of conditioned certainties and false gods. It may be quite uncomfortable, we must wait. There may be no dramatic revelation, no conversion “on the road to Damascus.” One rather feels that, in this age, it will not be like that at all – or it may be.

Observation without the observer signals the beginning of the journey in inwardness. It is not psychological, in the terms we have described it, which has everything to do with living “as we know it.” What enters the equation at this point is death. For, it is part of the shift in consciousness that death is no longer marginalised. Intimations of death – fear, angst, the sense of void – are part-and-parcel of our resistance to it, our felt sense that it must inevitably happen. The shift in consciousness frees one from it – not because one thinks differently, but because, at bottom, one is different; one’s being is no longer identified with what one thinks and feels, or even angst and void. This detachment – what Krishnamurti calls freedom from the known – opens out onto a free field where everything phenomenal comes and goes, ebbs and flows, including birth and death.

Can one speak of a psychology here? I doubt it. For, the psychology we know is by its very nature part of the bio-chemical organism; it arises, grows and changes with it. What we come upon in “crossing the threshold,” opening our eyes to a wider field, is something not independent of the organism but not related to it in terms of birth, growth and decay. In other words, identification has ceased.

One may think that this is where the work ends, but in reality it has only just begun. Deeper and deeper levels of consciousness require deeper, earnest, ongoing penetration – there is more and more, the more you dig – and what is important is not to end the task but, by application, to understand it better. The looking and listening are not means to an end; on the contrary, they have their own still meaning in the deepening, everwidening search. By making time and space for them, by simply attending, we begin to discover, to realise, that the timelessness of simple attention is the clue to its meaning and, intrinsically, what it means. There are not two, only one. The incessant struggle of the mind to explain, describe and ascribe meaning turns out to be futile beyond a certain level: it cannot deliver what it thinks it is looking for, for the simple reason that it is what it is looking for. The process of “house building,” so necessary for functioning, is the theatre of our action with its ongoing display. We, however, are the authors. What we constantly tell ourselves has been put there by others is, in fact, the construct of our mind: we are directly responsible.

Things now appear in a new light – not fixed, rigid, permanent and immovable, but part of the “molecular dance of things” (Eckhart Tolle: The Power of Now). Being, reality, does not reside in the fixity of form, but fixity is the solid form of things at the surface level only or, to use the Bohmian expression, in the explicate order. Whatever is explicate is, of course, implicate at a subtler level, and this corresponds, more or less, to the external mind of sense perception and intellect, and the inward mind of attention and awareness. What has often been missed, throughout the ages, is the intimate connection between the two. Bohm uses the analogy of an ink drop “enfolded” in a cylinder of glycerine: if spun one way the ink drop disappears, if spun the other way it reemerges (David Bohm: Wholeness and the Implicate Order). Similarly with our thoughts and feelings: they are the articulated expression (the form) of something happening within awareness, including bodily awareness. Whatever the force of this expression, they are not as primary or as real as, ordinarily, we take them to be: they derive from a deeper reality.

it [the mind] cannot deliver what it thinks it is looking for, for the simple reason that it is what it is looking for

This has everything to do with the nature of illusion. Taking for real and primary what is secondary and derivative, as the majority of people are conditioned to do, can but lead to further folly. We are an insane species, as the evidence shows. There is, however, a remedy. Once the field of curative psychology has been cleared and we are, in Krishnamurti’s words, “fairly sensitive, fairly intelligent” we can – and must, if we are to survive – set ourselves the task of inward inquiry. It is what we are here for, actually. We do not have to be enlightened: it is enough that we are serious and that we make a start.

Then, what began as part of our story turns out to be much more than that; in fact, bursting the bonds of our own personhood brings us into contact with deeper distortions lying waiting, as it were, in common consciousness. Chief among these is what Krishnamurti refers to as “the sorrow of mankind” which he describes as being (K, Bohm, Shainberg: The Transformation of Man) “much deeper than personal sorrow.” Part of it is “the sorrow of ignorance,” the incapacity of human beings to learn from experience and to end wars, for instance; the constant, pervasive and increasing violence; the conflict in every heart and home; the lack of self-knowledge which engenders these distortions. All this now becomes part of the search – or, indeed, one could say, part of my story, which itself extends from my own little well to include all the waters of the earth. For, I am no longer an isolated entity fighting my little battle alone; I have made the engagement at a deeper level.

This is, literally, the place to be. It is not that I have found, exactly, but that seeking has taken on a whole new meaning. The observer has been enfolded into consciousness and what is looking now is consciousness itself, free of the distortions of the me. This means that things are seen as they are and not as we would like them to be. The revelation can be devastating! The crux of the matter, however, is that what flows from this seeing is accurate and true and, among other things, establishes order. For, as long as we live and accord importance to our various images and identifications, we have no access to this order – and that is one of our major difficulties.

But the point is, our quest has transformed; it has taken on a different tone and purpose. It is an axial shift from the world of my story. We are now “travelling,” to use Krishnamurti’s word – not with the aim of “arriving” somewhere, for that very arriving is part of the story, but simply for the joy and the adventure of travelling.

The dark continent of consciousness awaits us, with its depths, dangers and unforeseen vistas. And, as we journey through it and it unfolds before our eyes, we realise we have never been here before, that most of what we did was foreplay, at best. This is the real thing, happening now. There is nothing final or determinate about it. It unfolds constantly out of itself, like a flower in its own furl. And, as well as being constant, it is also never-ending: at no point is there any arrest. And, this is the nature of the transforming mind.