Fascinating … this is almost exactly word for word what a Tibetan Buddhist teacher said to us in a retreat a while back: “No matter how hard you look for it, you won’t find it. No matter how much you grasp at it, you can’t hold it. But it’s everything there is … and you are it.” I can’t help but wonder if this is simply ‘the universal truth’ hence the striking similarity, or whether it’s something that is taught in Eastern traditions, and we’re all just quoting an authority? The mind is eminently capable of imagining and believing in the existence of ‘another dimension of reality.’ (My mind does it all the time.) Which doesn’t prove or disprove anything, just gives one pause.
It made more and more sense that this was what JK was pointing at with in his words, “you are the world”. Not DanMcD is the world, that made no sense, (I’m hardly New Jersey!), but when the ‘you’ is referring to ‘being’, the feeling of ‘I Am’ that ‘belongs’ to no single thing but to all living things…then it does and has, over time, made more and more sense to me. As you point out, it has been said in many ways but whether it is actually realized and until that “immensity” becomes a reality, it is just speculation, a possibility.
Also the idea that ‘it’ can’t be sought, searched for, desired, etc is obvious when looked at in this way. Perhaps that is why he said that the ‘what is’ is “sacred” And made so much
of, pointing out the error of desiring to “become”, to change or alter ‘what is’ as regards the self? It is the self that ‘desires’ to become.
Thought cannot exist without the past, the old. We cannot think without using images. The habitual use of these images in consciousness to manipulate our environment means that the brain has become conditioned to the existence of images. The movement of these images is then taken for the semblance of a living entity. The images are old, dead, but the observer of these images assumes he must be fully alive because of all this activity going on around him. The peripheral movement of the past is merely creating the impression of a living centre.
Can the centre see this? No. The centre is impelled to make yet another image of it. It just becomes another problem to solve. So what is it that is actually alive in my consciousness? This dead centre of thought is not alive; the centre is not alive. So what is alive? Inside of me, what is alive, living?
I want to apologize first as I’m really tired here so the following is going to contain some plagiarism of myself, but I’ll indicate when I do this. I’m going to start by saying first that it never was “thought” per se, that was the trouble, but it’s the ways and habitual manners in which we think; or “the tradition,” in K lingo. The tradition is to think of word as arbitrarily correlating to some “thing” that has been selected via some convenience of the historical. And that “correspondence model” represents a certain habitual manner of relating word and thing. The model is over privileging; and over privileging via over analysis (and no small portion of irony I might point out).
Now, you seem to think of tools also as a correspondence. Like a key corresponds to a key hole (the teeth matching the tumbler). But one does not come into existence without the other. A lock with no possible key, cannot be said to be a lock at all, but instead just another piece or part of what might be called “barrier;” and then actually a “lock,” which is supposed to indicate security, is now more likely to be the weakest part of the barrier. For instance, if you’re going to kick in a door, right next to the lock is where your foot should land. So, lock and key to do not come into existence separately, but (and here comes the Mahayana logic), they dependently originate. They are not exclusive, forged and related by chance alone, but mutually constitute each other; both in function and in meaning.
Likewise, words and language are mutually constitutive; the one calls the other “to be.” They call and are called by what there already is to say. And what is “always-already,” exists as and in a time prior to origin. And again, as mentioned above, the difficulty for the “conditioned mind,” is conceiving of a time before origin. That’s where we trip up.
Think on this: this insufficiency of language along with its inability to correspond, is it’s perfection. It’s what makes the more-to-it, possible to say. Therein lies it’s potential for the creative. Absolute symmetry would annihilate meaning. It would be coped with and handled as easily as a key disappears into a lock, with the whole act so transparent to consciousness that it would vanish completely. Nothing would remain. Nothing would “stand out.” And nothing would call you to attend.
Well, no. From my view, you’re not right. And you’re not wrong. Again there is a double aspect to words and language, not unlike Bohm indicating the double meaning of the word meaning itself.
"This double meaning of the word “meaning” is not just an accident of our language, but rather it implicitly contains an important insight into the structure of meaning.”
–Soma-significance and the activity of meaning, Chp 5, Essential Bohm
I’m extremely tired. It’s been a long and brutal Monday. I apologize in advance, but I’m going to address “word is not the thing” by plagiarizing my own work from a few years ago in a blog I wrote called “Putting ‘word is not the thing’ back in its place.”
" “The word is not the thing,” is a psychological exercise that provides for skeptical pause, questioning of basic assumptions, a space in which to assess, overturn, reconfigure or abandon etc. and does not describe, define, indicate or allude to any absolute metaphysical truth.
In order to understand the line of reasoning that is going to be pursued here, it is crucial that the following passage from Bohm’s Seminar be read before continuing with the exposition of this chronically misunderstood and overused cliché.
Thank you for your patience.
From Bohm Seminar November 8, 1987:
*I start with the assumption limitation is unlimited. It applies to everything, which we have said. Everything is limited. It also must apply to limitation. Therefore, limitation is limited, right? But suppose I turn it the other way. I make the opposite assumption. I say, limitation is limited. It applies to everything. It also applies to limitation itself. There is nothing else left, so it is unlimited… I am saying you cannot adopt either position. I say, limitation is either limited or unlimited. That’s all that’s possible. Everything is limited, I say… our thoughts are limited, …objects… then, I say suppose one of the possibilities is limitation is unlimited… it just goes on and on… but then it applies to everything, it must apply to limitation too. From that we deduce, limitation is limited in contradiction to our starting point. Therefore, if we deduce a conclusion that contradicts our starting point, we say the whole thing collapses, right? Now, that means we should go to the opposite assumption, right? Is anybody understanding this? *
**I will repeat it once again just to help. I say that everything is limited. That is our assumption. But I notice the process of thought, its essential feature is to establish limits, which I call limitation. Then I say this process itself, which is a real process is either limited or unlimited. I begin with suppose it is unlimited. If it is unlimited, it applies to everything, that’s all. It also applies to itself because otherwise there would be a limit, right. Therefore, I deduce that limitation is limited though I started with the assumption that limitation is unlimited. Right? Therefore, that assumption must collapse. Then I take the opposite assumption. Ok? Limitation is limited. Limitation applies to everything by our original assumption. It also applies to itself, we have just said. Therefore, limitation applies to everything and therefore, it is unlimited. So I say I can neither say limitation is limited nor can I say it is unlimited. That seems really a nice paradox. There is a logical step yet, you see. First, we appreciate the paradox. Now, if you have a paradox it means some assumption in your reasoning may be false. What is the assumption we have made?.. that everything is limited…. No, we said only limitation is unlimited, you see. We are trying to say, we get into trouble about saying that everything is limited. We can’t seem to say it. … I have demonstrated the paradox, you see. You cannot make sense of the statement that everything is limited. The assumption that everything is limited has collapsed.
Let us continue our exposition of “word is not the thing” and remove it from it’s soteriological context and treat it as a metaphysical statement that accurately reflects a true division between the illusion of words, and the reality they describe.
If “the word is not the thing” is to define a universal limitation of words, then it applies to all words. It also applies to itself. If it applies to itself, then it is able to indicate it’s own limitation. If it is able to indicate it’s own limitation, then it has presently both transcended it’s limitation and acted as it’s own instance. Word is the thing.
If “the word is not the thing” is understood deeply and abidingly such that a reality behind words is disclosed, (“you must see it sir, not intellectually”) then the very comprehension of “the word is not the thing” would no longer be a descriptive act of speech, but a performative act that presently instantiates itself as-in its very utterance. At it’s very utterance, word is the thing.
And what of the act that it performs? Does not the utterance wish to call and reorient the attention of those that are able to hear its call? (“but there is a voice crying in the wilderness” -JK) But, then the essence of speech and language is no longer to indicate, point and represent, but to call to itself so that it can reorient attention. Word is the thing.
Call is the essence of word, not image. In calling, word gives and what it gives is our own affect; it is “I.” Where springs the call, there burns speech. A speech that orients all to the direction and flow of that greater current that floods over Krishnamurti’s pathless land.
Yes. In fact, words can be thought of as an extension of body. They’re a “bodying forth.” Another way that we touch and are touched. We affect as we are affected.
…and the cow goes “moo,” and the pig goes “oink.” But one thing they do not do is speak in true syntactic recursion.
I have no idea what “more metaphysical” means. I’m simply depriving words of their “safe space” as “illusion.” A category in Eastern mysticism that is habitually misunderstood by Western audiences. If that makes them “more real” then okay. But “more metaphysical” has no meaning to me.
This analogy of a lock coming into existence with the key holds because of course we humans invented locks and keys. But in the case of words and things the same analogy does not hold because we humans did not invent plants, animals, planets and stars etc. - the latter came first, without our human words being there to “constitute” them (to use your language).
It is clear that in nature certain symbiotic relationships have evolved over literally millions of years. For instance, there is evidence that colour vision in insects co-evolved with the colouration in flowering plants; and we all know the relationship that plants have with the insects that visit their flowers, or the birds and mammals that feed on their fruits: these are complex and deeply symbiotic relationships (forged over millions of years) that sustain the life of the plants, and the lives of the countless animals that pollinate them.
And even though the language here (in plant-animal symbiosis) is not one of words, there is a complex communication present that only the prejudice of anthropocentrism would deny: a syntactical language of scents, odours, colours and chemicals; a language of dance (as with bees) or cries and calls (birds and mammals). This is all language: the variegated “tongues” that speak in all nature.
Natural evolution is this web of calls and responses, unfolding over millions and millions of years, and which now makes up our natural environment.
Human beings come towards the end of this intimate conversation, and replicate it at the more abstract level of cultural evolution.
Human language is an artefact of cultural evolution, and the relations involved in cultural evolution are abstract relations. We can see these relations in the tree of human languages as they have evolved over time: our English or European languages all contain these various strata of previous usages, with most or many of our words traceable to ancient Proto-Indo-European roots (with their Sanskrit equivalents).
These relations are abstract. For instance, the English word “vision” is traceable to a PIE root (weid) meaning “to see” (which is also the root of our English word “wise”); but there is nothing about the eye - as it developed in insects and other animals - which contains a symbiotic relationship with the phonemes required to say: “vision”. The latter is merely an arbitrary abstraction at a certain level, no more symbiotic to the eye-organ than the call of a macaque (to signify the prevalence of a particular fruit) is to the particular fruit.
A word is a learned artefact of meaning - it is not passed on through our DNA (although the capacity for language obviously is) - so it can be forgotten or lost, or replaced with a new sound, a new word, which serves a similar purpose. Just as a chimpanzee can use a stick to eat ants with, or a leaf, or strip of bark.
So the tool is not more important than the function it serves and is forever subsidiary to its function. If the tool is no longer functional, it can be dropped and replaced with a better tool. This is all words are, as far as I understand them.
Yet it sounds, from what you write, that words are some kind of transcendent power, forged in the very bowels of being - in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with god, and the Word was god - or some such thing. But for Krishnamurti - as well as most forms of Buddhism, Christian or Sufi mysticism, etc - the fundamental state is one of silence, not words. In the words of Meister Eckhart:
There is a huge silence inside each of us that beckons us into itself, and the recovery of our own silence can begin to teach us the language of heaven.
I know this is not exactly in the stream of your conversation with nobody - but wouldn’t we say that, at the bare minimum, what is alive in us (apart from the movement of thought) is the brain-body complex?
It is the brain (and body) that feeds thought with electro-chemical sustenance; it is the brain (and body) that can be “tricked” by thought into getting flustered or aroused (physiologically). And without the brain (and body) there would be no movement of thought in the first place.
So it is the brain (and its attendant nervous system) that seems to be alive in us - yet what gives it life and motion is not so clear.
Or there is only the question, and looking and listening from the question. Any answers turn quickly into dead matter; this dead matter forms a centre around which more content builds. When I form any conclusion about myself, I have stopped looking and listening to the whole field of existence. When I say, ‘I see,’ it makes the entity that sees more important than what is being looked at or listened to. Seeing the world cuts us off from one another. Looking at it together creates a new energy, a new world, la primavera di una civiltà.
I’m all for the emergence of a new civilisation della primavera!
But I guess it depends - as you put it - on whether we really are seeing the same thing when we talk about “seeing.” This is where we get confused.
If it isn’t thought, and if it isn’t the brain-body (the living organism), what is it?
This is probably not answerable in words, as you say. It implies seeing at a different dimension from what we are commonly used to - a seeing without a see-er. Then it is an action which is non-verbal, which is not reducible to words.
The thing is, nobody, in order to find out the answer to your original question there has to be an actual nonverbal seeing (without a see-er) that takes place. Every other answer we give must be either confused or a word we throw at the question in order to satisfy our verbal imagination. The actual answer is not a word, but an action: an action of seeing.
It is only that seeing - if it takes place - that can reveal whatever there is to be revealed. Right?
Right … no matter how ancient and sacred the words, they’re not going to do the seeing. But words can point to actions, yes? Awareness, intelligence, Brahman – these each point to a way of seeing, each its own distinct flavor. Do any of the actions these words point to seem like a candidate for what seeing is?
And yes, I sometimes throw words around for the joy of throwing words around. Who doesn’t love those cute little things?!
The difficulty is that words can colour our actions if we are not careful. A word like Brahman - you must accept - carries with it traditional associations that can lead us in a completely speculative direction. It is unnecessary baggage. We are liable to get bogged down in questions such as “What is Brahman? does Brahman exist? Buddhists don’t accept Brahman, so what did the ancient people of India really mean by Brahman?”, etc etc.
The word “brahman” literally just means “great” or “greater” or “greatest”. So how does this help us to know what it means to see - right?
To see, don’t we ultimately have to just find out directly for ourselves; experiment with our own seeing, watching - and begin there? Everything else - what words we use, etc - is then a distraction from actually seeing and listening and watching. I think you would accept this, right?
It sounds a little boring to our playful imagination, or an evasion of some more satisfactory answer. And for those kinds of answer Krishnamurti has provided us with all kinds of interesting words. But - as the old bird said - the word is not the thing, the description is not the described. We have to forget all that and begin at the very beginning, with our own humble daily seeing…
