Yes, the observer is envy, but how does that make the observed envy?
When the observer, which is thought as thinking, is at one with pure perception, the observer is the observed. There is still an observer, BUT the observer - the thinker - does not trigger the fear response psychologically.
The actual fear response to external stimuli is where, again, the observer and the observed are one, and there is no separate entity measuring the object initiating that fear response (being flight, fight or fright direct actions).
When the observer measures itself and a psychological centre as self arises, its reactionary actions to the images it generates (of past knowledge) internally trigger the fear response, causing what are wrongly termed āthe emotionsā.
Here there is no external object causing the fear, but rather a network of thought-based images which trigger physiological actions manifesting internally as the fear response, when in fact there is no real fear generator.
These psychological thoughts, through behavioural conditioning and pleasure centre addiction, bring about a total physiological and psychological chaos.
The brain/mind connection is at war with itself, as one cannot move away from an internally generated image-based fear responses.
The problem is that the physiological reaction of that psychologically-activated fear response is as real as a genuine externally-based fear response of fight, fright and fight, except one cannot flee or get away from the fear generator - being the self. So the mind collapses into complete physiological and neurological conflict.
āI am natureā is still the self exerting its presence.
Envy is an image and a feeling is a tactile senseā¦ So there is no āfeeling of envyā. There is however a physiological impact of the disorder of the self as not-earthed images on the neurological mind/body connection.
Thought technically is always the observer.
The sole difference is in its technical or psychological actions: - technical observation has no centre as self, as it is mitigated by actuality, whereas psychological thought has an image centre as self.
The āobservedā here being my image of the other person, right? The actual person (the person who I envy) is obviously not envy.
In the observerās thought-dominated relationship to the other person, the pseudo-relationship of the observer-image to its image of the other person (which involves comparison) generates the condition of envy in the mind.
To repeat: the observer is the self-image, the observed is the image (created by the observer) of the other person, as well as the envy that arises (simultaneously) from comparison between the two. It is a joint process, a unitary event.
So: āI am (my) envyā.
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Yes, thatās why it is in single quotation marks (it is not meant literally, because obviously there is no āIā in such a complete act of perception). In pure perception (as I understand it) the mind and the other (nature, people, rivers or stars) are not separated by thought, by the observer.
There is a moving passage in Krishnamurtiās Notebook which gets at what is meant:
Along that road, a villager and his wife were walking, one behind the other, the husband led and the wife followed; they seemed a little more prosperous than the others that one met on the road. They passed us, she never looking at us and he looked at the far village. We caught up with her; she was a small woman, never taking her eyes off the ground; she wasnāt too clean; she had a green soiled sari and her blouse was salmon coloured and sweat-stained. She had a flower in her oily hair and was walking bare-footed. Her face was dark and there was about her a great sadness. There was a certain firmness and gaiety in her walk which in no way touched her sadness; each was leading its own life, independent, vital and unrelated. But there was great sadness and you felt it immediately; it was an irremediable sadness; there was no way out, no way to soften it, no way to bring about a change. It was there and it would be there. She was across the road, a few feet away and nothing could touch her. We walked side by side for a while and presently she turned off and crossed the red river-bed of sand and went on to her village, the husband leading, never looking back and she following.
Before she turned off, a curious thing was taking place. The few feet of road between us disappeared and with it also disappeared the two entities; there was only that woman walking in her impenetrable sadness. It was not an identification with her, nor overwhelming sympathy and affection; these were there but they were not because of the phenomenonā¦ She was the only human being that existed on that road. She was and the other was not. It was not a fancy or an illusion; it was a simple fact and no amount of clever reasoning and subtle explanation could alter that fact. (November 4th)
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Thanks for posting this James. In the passage, K says, āa curious thing was taking placeā. Does this suggest to that this āthingā didnāt happen very often?
With Krishnamurti itās very difficult to know how frequent these āexperiencesā took place. The Notebook itself was written on and off over a period of just under a year (1961-1962), and almost every entry describes what (for an ordinary person) could be termed a completely anomalous event. According to various biographers, these (or similar) āexperiencesā continued throughout the course of his life (through to the 1980s).
Apparently Krishnamurti originally wrote the Notebook with no intention of publishing it. When it was eventually published (over a decade after writing it) he said of it that,
I have attempted to put into words the actual pain and sensation which goes with the heightened consciousness
One can certainly assume from his writings that the depth of his perceptions and insights fluctuated in intensity, much as the character of a river changes depending on how fast or slow the water is moving, how shallow or deep the river-bed (whether it has been raining or sunny, and so on).
This network or brain pattern of āmeā can be seen in dreams. Though the images generated can be fantastic, disjointed, menacing, the observer, me reacts to them as if they are ārealā, as if they are actually happening. Here in the waking state a similar thing is happening though not as obvious.
Perception is distorted through the accumulation of neurological connections that form the self image, the āmeā?
This really depends on what you mean by feeling. The etymology of feeling is to ātouch, feel, senseā; and I think most people would agree that envy involves sensation at some level.
Indeed, you freely admit this when you write
The construct of envy (what you here call āthe disorder of the selfā) is certainly first of all cognitive (in that it consists of a thought-response - of self-image, other-image, and measurement/comparison); but because thought and brain and body are not separate, oneās thinking also automatically involves a physiological response (aka, the sensation or feeling we call āenvyā).
You may not like the word āfeelingā (for your own reasons), but envy - like fear, like hate, like pleasure or desire, certainly involves a physiological or sensational component that could otherwise be called a feeling state.
When you perceive that nationalism is poisonous as in Ukraine is that pure perception ? By destroying yourself you destroy life . The self is to be understood not destroyed .
That is the most ridiculous thing to say about the teachings. If nobody understood K would he talk for over sixty years? And what is there about the teachings that makes it impossible to understand , he didnāt speak Chinese !
Who ever said the above falsehood apparently didnāt understand K because he or she was extremely confused.
What would convince you that he did say that?
For me personally ,from my experience and looking around at the state of things, it seems perfectly plausible that at the time of his death no one, as far as he knew, āgot itā.
Not so now.
Somebody āgot itā? If not you, how would you know?
Why not me? Why not so and so? If he had said āwell Billy got it. But thatās about allā. Then everyone would follow Billy. Billy would be the next Krishnamurti. Then the succession would start. Billy would pass the mantle to Tony and then perhaps to Loretta, etc. This is all nipped in the bud by saying simply ānobody got what I was talking aboutāā¦ no imprimaturā¦so now you follow your own Krishnamurti guru, teacher, interpreter, etc, at your own peril.
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Dan -
Perception remains whole.
It is thoughtās attachment to the measurement of perception integrated as an image of self which is distorted - reactionary, divisive and an illusion.
I donāt understand this.
Yes, I thought that was why K said it, too, but now Iām not so sure. If K knew that some got it, he didnāt need to acknowledge them because they would know who they are, and it would have been enough for him to know that his lifeās work was not in vain.
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James -
Envy does not exist. It is a name given to a fictitious bunch of so-called emotional responses. In fact all that envy - jealousy - love - hate - faith etc. are - is a clutch of psychological images as psychological thought in conflict with itself.
Fear is another matter entirely.
Yes, these psychological images are used by the self to access the pharmacy shop of the brain - to trigger certain sensations as behavioural reinforced conditioning, pleasure centre control - and desire to be in a constant state of ecstasy, being out of time - as the self. This is disorder and not enlightenment.
As feeling is a tactile sense, to name the battle of psychological thought-based images as such is to give them a reality which they donāt actually have - or deserve. That is, the body registering psychological disorder, this image war, sensorially.
The naming of such images brings about further conflict in the mind by validating the self - granting it a virtual base from which to act.
Emotion (meaning etymologically āagitation of the mindā) has simply entrenched the self as a physical/physiological fact, when it actually is nothing more than a conflict of images which knowingly controls a physiological/neurological connection. In an ordered sensitive mind/body state, this does not occur.
Furthermore, the invention of āemotional intelligenceā is a horror, and so on the wrong track that it is not even funny.
Humans took a wrong turn. What was it that led to such universal human disorder?
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Envy does not exist. It is a name given to a fictitious bunch of so-called emotional responses
There seems to be a lot going on here, not all of it entirely comprehensive to me. So let us just back-up and reintroduce the original context for using the word envy.
The word was brought up - along with the words greed and jealousy (although I could have used the words fear, hurt, sorrow, loneliness, anger, or any other psychological state) - to help explicate the issue of the observer and the observed. I did this because Krishnamurti uses these examples dozens of times to help explain the observer and the observed. For instance:
The truth is that āI am angerā - not āIā am different from angerā¦ I am anger; not āIā separate from anger. When I am jealous, I am jealousy; not āIā am different from jealousy. I make myself separate from jealousy because I want to do something about it, sustain it or get rid of it or rationalize it, whatever it is. But the fact is, the āmeā is jealous, isnāt it?.. When I think I am different from my jealousy, then I feel I can do something about it and in the doing of it there is conflict. Here on the other hand, when I realise the truth of it, that I am jealousy, that āIā, the observer, am the observed, then what takes place? (The Awakening of Intelligence)
And:
As long as I am psychologically separate from that which I perceive in myself as envy, I try to overcome envy; but is that āIā, the maker of effort to overcome envy, different from envy? Or are they both the same, only the āIā has separated himself from envy in order to overcome it because he feels envy is painful, and for various other reasons? But that very separation is the cause of envy (As One Is)
And yet you seem to be saying that by simply using the words envy, greed, jealousy etc (as examples to explicate the observer-observed issue), I am helping to
This would seem to imply that any reference to these words (envy, greed, jealousy, etc) must be inappropriate in a dialogue dealing with observation.
However, while Krishnamurti often pointed out that when observing the fact (of envy, greed, jealousy, etc) one must be attentive to the reifying nature of words (āenvyā, āgreedā, ājealousyā, etc), he did not mean that we ought never to use these words in our communications concerning the psyche. As you must know, he talked about these states all the time. For instance:
Do you know what envy is? It begins when you are still very small - you feel envious of a friend who looks better than you do, who has better things or a better position. You are jealous if another boy or girl surpasses you in class, has richer parents, or belongs to a more distinguished family. So, envy or jealousy begins at a very tender age, and it gradually takes the form of competition (Life Ahead)
and
You know what envy is - to be envious of somebody, to be envious of anotherās capacity, his position, his prestige, the way he looks, the way he walks? For most of us, envy is the basis of our actions; remove envy and we feel we are lost. All our effort is towards success, and in that there is envyā¦.
The moment there is comparison there must be envy. When I want more, not only of the mundane things, of the worldly things but also of love, of beauty, of inward richness, the very movement towards the more, towards the end, towards the thing which you are going to get, has envy behind it (1954, Rajghat School)
and
Let us take the example of envy, or greed, or feeling inferior or superior, or jealousy, and so on. Take one thing like that, and see what happens.
First of all, most of us are unaware that we are envious; we brush it casually aside as a bourgeois thing, as being superficial. But deeply, inwardly, profoundly, we are envious. We are envious beings. We want to be something, we want to achieve, we want to arrive ā which is the very indication of envy. Our social, economic, spiritual systems are based on that envy.
First of all, be aware of it. Most of us are notā¦ Then, if we are at all conscious, aware, seeing all this - then what happens? If we do not justify, we condemn, donāt we? - because we think that state of envy, or whatever state it is you feel, is wrong, not spiritual, not moral. So we condemn, which prevents us seeing what is, does it not? (London, Talk 2, 1952)
So using the word envy as a means of communication is not an inexplicable aberration - right? Only once we know that we are talking of something public and open (such as envy), can the non verbal, non-labelling observation of that thing we call envy be drawn attention to and efficiently communicated. See, for instance, how Krishnamurti approaches the issue here:
K: I am envious. There is no difference between I and envy. I am envious, envy is me.
IM: Yes. As we were saying earlier, the person isā¦
K: I mean envy is me. I cannot act on envy because it is me.
IM: Yes but you can become less envious.
K: But it is still me.
IM: Yes. Go on. Go on.
K: So there is no question of suppression, transmutation, or escaping from it, it is me.
IM: What do I do next?
K: Wait. Wait a minute. I will go into it. If it is me I watch it. I watch it very, very carefully, watch it, not try to act upon it.
IM: So there is a you who is watching the envy?
K: No, watching, there is no you. When you are watching a bird there is no you, you are just watching the bird.
IM: Well watching a bird is quite different from other kinds of watching.
K: Thatās just it.
IM: There are other kind of watching.
K: Of course. Is there a watching without the word, watching without condemnation, just watching, or agreeing, or rejecting, or resisting.
IM: Well there can be such watching, yes, it is difficult. Wait a minute. We have got this envious person, oneself, one is envious. Then one is aware of the envy, one watches it, but just watching.
K: Watching.
IM: Or being it if you like, put it in another way. Consciously being your envy. Would you accept that form of words?
K: You are envy.
IM: But you are consciously - when you enviously do something thoughtlessly you are not watching. But then for a moment perhapsā¦
K: That is what I am saying. Look, you are watching a precious, intricate jewel. Then you are looking at the extraordinary delicacy, the bright light and the beauty of the jewel.
IM: Yes, yes. In this care you are looking at envy.
K: Envy. I am doing exactly the same thing. Then I see the whole movement of envy, which is comparison and so on and so on.
IM: Yes, yes.
K: So I watch it without any thought interfering with my watching. That requires a great deal of attention, not concentration, real attention in which the self is not.
IM: But are you not making a judgement?
K: No.
IM: You are watching without judgement.
K: Oh no, I have no value. I donāt say you must or must not have envy, it is immoral, or anything of that kind. Human beings have lived with envy for thousands of years.
IM: But then is not the result of this attention that envy disappears?
K: Watching with attention. Watching is attention. (Conversation with Iris Murdoch)
Finally, I want to briefly address this question of feeling (which you seem to totally disregard). It is very clear from Krishnamurtiās discussion of qualities such as envy, greed, jealousy, etc, that they involve a feeling component. The feeling component (in envy, greed, jealousy, etc) is obviously in part maintained through the word, through the structure of an apparently separate observer; but so long as envy, greed, jealousy etc have not been thoroughly exposed to the light of attention there will inevitably be a feeling component to such states. Would you disagree with that?
Feeling has its place in our relationship to the world; to deny or repress it leads to aberrations of its own:
You never remain with any feeling, pure and simple, but always surround it with the paraphernalia of words. The word distorts it; thought, whirling round it, throws it into shadow, overpowers it with mountainous fears and longings. You never remain with a feeling, and with nothing else: with hate, or with that strange feeling of beauty. When the feeling of hate arises, you say how bad it is; there is the compulsion, the struggle to overcome it, the turmoil of thought about it. Try remaining with the feeling of hate, with the feeling of envy, jealousy, with the venom of ambition; for after all, thatās what you have in daily life, though you may want to live with love, or with the word love. Since you have the feeling of hate, of wanting to hurt somebody with a gesture or a burning word, see if you can stay with that feeling. Can you? Have you ever tried? Try to remain with a feeling, and see what happens. You will find it amazingly difficult. Your mind will not leave the feeling alone; it comes rushing in with its remembrances, its associations, its doās and donāts, its everlasting chatterā¦ Can you live with the feeling behind the word, without the feeling that the word builds up? If you can, then you will discover an extraordinary thing, a movement beyond the measure of time, a spring that knows no summer. (Commentaries on Living Series 3)
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Hello again James. The relationship between thought, brain and body is interesting and not very well understood as far as I am aware. There is an idiomatic expression in English āto be green with envyā. The origin of this expession is usually attributed to Shakespeare - in Othello, Iago gives this warning to Othello: āBeware, my lord, of jealousy; it is the green-eyed monster which doth mock the meat it feeds on.ā I have read that in pre-Shakespearian times, a pale (green) complexion was associated with fear, illness, and poor humour, so a link between envy and a phyisiological response is perhaps implied in the origin of this English idiom. The colours associated with different emotions vary from culture to culture, however.
I could be wrong about this, but I understand that Krishnamurti was not completely immune to envy, anger, fear and other emotions. It seems that when these emotions arose in him, due to a very high level of awareness and attention, he was very quickly on to them. With a complete understanding of what was happening to produce the envy, ander etc., there was instant action in ending it. I see this as instant action to end the self in the moment when it arises. How do you see this?