The running away is what you know

Sorrow is not to be ended by the action of will. Do please understand this. You cannot get rid of it. Sorrow is something that has to be embraced, lived with, understood; one has to become intimate with sorrow. But you are not intimate with sorrow, are you? You may say, "I know sorrow", but do you? Have you lived with it? Or, having felt sorrow, have you run away from it? Actually, you don't know sorrow. The running away is what you know. You know only the escape from sorrow.

Jiddu Krishnamurti, Bombay, 10 January 1960, in On living and Dying, HarperSanFranciso, 1992, p. 88. 

Krishnamurti is extraordinarily ruthless. He won't have excuses, fantasies, wishful thinking. He doesn't want you to follow him -- he wants you to wake up and see, take up your bed and walk, "go into" the heart of the matter and understand with your own heart and mind what it is to live, to die, to love, to be alone, to be in communion. That requires ruthlessness. What he is asking us to consider here is properly a liminal experience, something terribly revolting to the common sense -- everyone knows that we must avoid pain by all means, it is unhealthy not to… But I am thinking of Liz's St Francis facing the wolf, and of the Greek word metanoia, usually translated as "conversion", and which literally means "turning around" -- turning on your heels, going in the opposite direction.  

Yes. Going there is an ambitious plan. Just to stop and meet what we are fleeing would be enough. 

A door into the unknown

Sir, have you ever died to your pleasure -- just died to it, without arguing, without reacting, without trying to create special conditions, without asking how you are to give it up, or why you should give it up? Have you ever done that? You will have to do that when you die physically, won't you? One can't argue with death. One can't say to death, "Give me a few more days to live". There is no effort of will in dying -- one just dies. Or have you ever died to any of your despairs, your ambitions -- just given it up, put it aside, as a leaf that dies in the autumn, without any battle of will, without anxiety as to what will happen to you if you do? Have you? I am afraid you have not. When you leave here now, die to something that you cling to -- your habit of smoking, your sexual demand, your urge to be famous as an artist, as a poet, as this or that. Just give it up, just brush it aside as you would some stupid thing, without effort, without choice, without decision. If your dying to it is total -- and not just the giving up of cigarettes or of drinking, which you make into a tremendous issue -- you will know what it means to live in the moment supremely, effortlessly, with all your being. And then, perhaps, a door may open into the unknown. 

Jiddu Krishnamurti, Saanen, 21 July 1963, in On living and Dying, HarperSanFranciso, 1992, p.54. 

In this extraordinary series of talks Krishnamurti is concerned with the problem of death. He discusses the fear of death, the desire for continuity, the way our mind is dealing with both death and life. His approach is not speculative at all: he wants his audience to see, to approach the mystery of death -- not merely to have an idea or a theory about it. In this passage, I am reminded of Jesus's words that so many Christians would like to take out of the Gospel: that whoever desires life shall take up his cross, deny himself, and follow Him. The Gospel would be so much more acceptable, agreeable, understandable without these words... But there they are, and (worse!!) there will be St Paul with his "dying to sin", where the only word we can possibly utter without resistance is "to". But when the resistance is gone, when words are seen without the burden of the associations, thoughts, traditions  conditioning what we call "thinking" -- then it just makes sense... 

Tyranny and fear of impotence

Virtue is happy to pay the price of limited power for the blessing of being together with other men; fear is the despair over the individual impotence of those who, for whatever reason, have refused to "act in concert"... Fear as a principle of action is in some sense a contradiction in terms, because fear is precisely despair over the impossibility of action. 

 Thus the common ground upon which lawlessness can be erected and from which fear springs is the impotence all men feel who are radically isolated. One man against all others does not experience equality of power among men, but only the overwhelming, combined power of all others against their own... Out of the conviction of one's own impotence and the fear of the power of all others comes the will to dominate, which is the will of the tyrant. 

 Just as virtue is love of the equality of power, so fear is actually the will to, or, in its perverted form, lust for power... Power itself in its true sense can never be possessed by one man alone; power comes, as it were, mysteriously into being whenever men act "in concert", and disappears, not less mysteriously, whenever man is all by himself. Tyranny, based on the essential impotence of all men who are alone, is the hubristic attempt to be like God, invested with power individually, in complete solitude. 

Hannah Arendt, On the nature of totalitarianism, in Essays in Understanding, Harcourt Brace & Company, New York, 1994, pp. 336-338. 

Hannah Arendt comments here on the political theory of different forms of government (monarchy, republicanism and tyranny) formulated by Montesquieu (and "virtue" as love of the equality of power is his concept). But beyond political theory, this is one of the deepest insights into the nature of abusive relationships I have ever met... With a terrifying clarity this text makes the point: lawlessness that the one in control practices towards the weaker partner is the expression and consequence of his or her utter isolation beyond loneliness and despair over the impossibility of action. Sounds only too familiar. 

Can one deal with it, be it on a personal or on a political level? Can the destructive power of fear be reversed, healed, can a tyrant be reconnected to the Body in a meaningful way, so that the real power coming from participation, not from domination, is restored to him? Hannah Arendt leaves the question open, and personally, I have no clue. "Leave it alone" (= "emigrate")  has been the only advice I have ever received, and it does not aim to deal with the abusive partner but with the abused one. 

On the activity of understanding

What is important to me is to understand. For me, writing is a matter of seeking this understanding, part of the process of understanding… Certain things get formulated. If I had a good enough memory to really retain everything that I think, I doubt very much that I would have written anything – I know my own laziness. What is important to me is the thought process itself. As long  as I have succeeded in thinking something through, I am personally quite satisfied. If I then succeed in expressing my thought process adequately in writing, that satisfies me also…

You ask about the effects of my work on others. If I may wax ironical, that is a masculine question. Men always want to be terribly influential, but I see that as somewhat external. Do I imagine myself being influential? No. I want to understand. And if others understand – in the same sense that I have understood – that gives me a sense of satisfaction, like feeling at home.

Hannah Arendt, “What Remains? Language remains”, in Essays in Understanding, Harcourt Brace & Company, New York, 1993, p.3

This is an archetypal enneagram Five statement! They do not write, paint or found a new branch in psychology (like C.G. Jung, a notoriously Five personality too) to share knowledge  or vision out of philanthropy (in the literal sense, that of “love of humanity”) , like Twos do; nor do they express their thoughts and visions  to be original, special and appreciated, like Fours. Fives are interested in processes, articulations, relationships between things as such, they like connecting facts and weaving them into dynamic systems; they only use different means of expression insofar as they are of an added value to this process.

This explains why Fives do not aim to convince and do not mind disagreement – as long as they are satisfied with their thought process, fuelled by insatiable curiosity and often impressive erudition, as long as the picture they are busy at completing is complete in their mind, opinions of other people matter very little. This is not because Fives are such snobs (which occasionally they are, to be sure), nor because they find other peoples’ opinions insignificant – they are just too absorbed and exhausted by their thinking to worry about those opinions.

 



On humility

The word "humility" comes from the Latin word "humus",  which means fertile ground. To me, humility is not what we often make of it: the sheepish way of trying to imagine that we are the worst of all and trying to convince others that our artificial ways of behaving show that we are aware of that. Humility is the situation of the earth. 

The earth is always there, always taken for granted, never remembered, always trodden on by everyone, somewhere we cast and pour all our refuse, all we don't need. It's there, silent and accepting everything and in a miraculous way making out of all the refuse new richness in spite of corruption, transforming corruption itself into a power of life and a new possibility of creativeness, open to the sunshine, open to the rain, ready to receive any seed we sow and capable of bringing thirtyfold, sixtyfold, a hundredfold out of every seed.  

Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh, School for Prayer. Daybreak, London, 1989, p 11.

Leaving the results to God

What I aim at is to live within a situation and to be totally engrossed in it, and yet free from involvement. The basic thing is that I never ask myself what the result of any action will be -- that is God's concern. The only question I keep asking myself in life is: what should I do at this particular moment? What should I say? All you can do is to be at every single moment as true as you can with all the power of your being -- and then leave God to use you, even despite yourself.

Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh, School for Prayer. Daybreak, London, 1989, p xvi.