So, you believe that having no self-image does mean living 24/7 without a center. I am not talking about the psychological form of “me” called Dan or Sree. The thought of Sree or Dan is an idea, and we – who have read Krishnamurti - can now banish the thought as easily as swatting off a pesky fly. I am talking about the physical form of Dan, the “you”, that center that can be arrested by the police and locked up in jail.
Renunciation is indeed a conscious act, and for me, it was a painful act of will.
I listened to Krishnamurti and wanted to find out what he meant by “negation”. I couldn’t do that while living the way I did working at my job which required me to do everything that thought has put together. My office walls were plastered with project plans covering a 15-month schedule. My mind was stuffed with exciting things to do both at the office and in my personal life. Unless I gave all that up, I could never begin to find out what “negation” meant. Never mind my parents who raised me and invested heavily in my success, could you imagine the anguish on my fiancée’s face when I did a Siddharta on them and took off to find the “deathless state”? I quit my job and renounced them all at the age of 32.
If it’s not all about renunciation, then you did not give up anything, Dan. You did not hear Krishnamurti’s plea as he concluded his talk when he said: ”Will you find out? Please give your heart to this. Please find out. Will you?”
Emptying the mind, you say. It’s just talk, Dan. In India, if you want to catch a monkey in the jungle, drill a hole in a coconut and put food inside it. The hole must be large enough for the monkey to get his hand in, but small enough that he cannot get it out once he grabs the food. Chain the coconut to a tree. Once the monkey grabs the food, he is stuck. The monkey will not renunciate. Monkeys never do.
But thats not a ‘center’ as in a psychological image, that is a physical entity, an organism with a brain (in fact three brains!)
Sree, isn’t the question here, do my actions buttress the ego or do they undermine it? That can only be answered in ourselves and honesty is required. As I see it, there is no map and nowhere to get to. No one, nothing to follow, etc. That is what the ego / self is all about isn’t it, getting somewhere, doing something?
What we analyze is our own interpretation. This is the lack of shared communication, of a common sense of mind. If someone points this out, why continue with all the same old stuff, maintaining a distance and even cultivating division? Is it because we don’t understand this nature of a sharing awareness where there is a flow of thought, with people, but not from a self center? Yet there is so much I don’t understand and can leave it at that, without a fuss. Either the communication is understood selflessly, or we might wonder why not, looking to discover, not intellectually, but for the actuality.
The physical entity is not an organism with a brain. You are conditioned to see it that way by knowledge, as depicted by science. If we can use the Buddha story to show what I mean, Siddharta did not see it that way two thousand years ago. He saw the body, that fathom long carcass of a physical entity. You are your body, and your body is you. And that realization scared the bejesus out of Siddharta who, at that moment was awakened to his predicament: his enchainment to the source of suffering.
Buddhist meditation didn’t come from the Buddha. It is the invention of monks just as Christianity was founded, not by Jesus but by the early Christians some four hundred years after Jesus died. And the monks took the easy way out to escape suffering. They pinned the root of suffering on the mind, the psychological image of the self.
Getting rid of the self is silly. Even though it is not easy, it is doable if you are determined. Getting rid of the body is impossible. I am certain that Siddharta didn’t find a way out of his predicament. Research has uncovered no evidence connecting Buddhist scriptures directly to Siddharta. In other words, nobody knows what the Buddha taught.
The ego/self is a mind game to save humanity. It can be as addictive as any online multiplayer game.
Free of what? Ten years ago, I was the monkey who let go of the food, pulled my hand out of the coconut, and scampered off. Having done that, I was not much happier, suffered self-doubt, boredom, identity crisis, and treated like a misfit by other monkeys with hands stuck in coconuts. Yeah, I am free, free to spend my days now watching the squirrels in my garden. The birds are coming back now that the worst of winter is over. I am as free as any retired 75-year-old Krishnamurti reader without a wife and family. But I am only 45.
A life of acquisition wasn’t a hot potato for me. How’s is a million-dollar apartment a hot potato for a young man starting out on a lovely stairway to the stars? I still have my Armani suits, BMW sports convertible, and golf clubs. What I dropped was the acquisitive power to stay in the fast lane. Success is not a hot potato. And working hard to stay on top of my game was fun. This was why renunciation was so hard to do.
But it was an act of will - it wasn’t the end of the self, the death of the ego, the emptying of content, awakening, etc. You got bored or disillusioned with your life, decided to renounce it, struggled and succeeded. So what’s new? Your life is still about you.
Can I renounce myself? Can I make the rational decision to cease and desist from being what I’ve become? Is it possible for what I am to transform to something irreducibly and irrevocably different? If it is possible, it can’t be more spectacle…it can only be the end of performance.
That’s the cover story. What’s covered up is that the ego/self is insanity. We’re insane and we know it but we don’t dare admit it…especially to ourselves.
Yes, my life is still about me now that I have pulled out of the rat race. I wasn’t bored or disillusioned with my life back then, but I am bored and disillusioned with my life now. My ego-consciousness now is that of a caretaker of a human body. Is this better than an ego-consciousness of a successful man of the world with a private jet, a fancy yacht, and a beautiful family? Why is acquisitiveness such a bad thing?
End of performance is an understatement. My life now has no purpose. I live in servitude: attending to the body till it dies.
There is a lot going on with us and in our world that is troubling. To deal with my insanity, I curb my ego/self the way a mental patient is put in a straightjacket. I restrict my daily activity to caring for the body. The mind has only one concern: the welfare of the body, not someone else’s body but its own. Altruism is a form of madness. Could you critique this approach? Am I doing it right?
What is the insanity you see in yourself and how do you deal with it?
My identity and environment is more a matter of conclusion and expectation than attention to the actual unfolding of events. The mind is less open to what-is, more attached to what-should-be.
This is insanity because it is willful disregard of what is actual in favor of what is imagined; deliberate denial of actuality for the sake of one’s own narrative. I feel compelled to be the author of my story because merely noting what happens does nothing for “me”, my fictitious identity.
How I am seeing this is that the senses operate always in the immediate moment. But there is recording going on constantly by the brain. It doesn’t store everything that is being sensed just somethings eg the bird was there and now it’s in a different place…the memory of the bird being there and the seeing it now here creates the illusion of time passing. Like a motion picture gives the illusion of movement when the individual frames are run at a certain speed. Isn’t the illusion of myself being continuous made in a somewhat similar way with the memory ‘frames’ stored in the brain? The actual moment the body is in, is ‘surrounded’ by a ‘reality’ composed of memories going back to childhood.
Is it an illusion? Does time not pass? Now leaves a trail of evidence showing what transpired, doesn’t it?
The rapid succession of still photos shows that time is the trail of Now, and the examination of that trail is no less significant than Now itself. It seems to me that the problem isn’t that time is an illusion, but that we read the trail of Now according to the illusions we have about what that trail tells us.
What you have explained here is basically true. Physical reality is illusory not just with regard to time and movement but also pertaining to the nature of space and the physicality of matter. Perception is truly magical in the way it conjures objective reality. This was why I did not dismiss those instances when Krishnamurti, in his Notebook, recounted the dissolution of conventional perception when time, space, and materiality dissolved. It was not spiritualism but something that David Bohm, of all people, should have latched on to and pinned down in scientific terms for peer review in academia. If he had done that, mankind would have taken a giant step in transforming its worldview of the universe and realize that it is not something out there separate from the observer
Yes, and when you’re surrounded, it’s game over…you haven’t got a chance. You learn how to live this reality without complaint, or demonstrate a better way to live.
Only if the understanding manifests in a new and different way of living that demonstrates its virtue. All of us here understand that “this reality based on the past is a false reality, an illusory reality”, but this so-called understanding is just second-hand knowledge. We don’t really see the falseness of it. We are living what we believe to be true - not what actually is.