While writing these short essays I am struggling to get through Krishnamurti’s Notebook, a diary he kept of his daily observations that went on for seven months in 1961. What he does here is to make minute observations of his environment, streams, waterfalls, meadows, mountains, stars, sun and moon, the seasons at the places he was giving talks. And then he slips into his observations about all and everything and sometimes it is rather dense. Each comment more like the nut in an acorn in that it has to be driven out. Experiencing this is somewhat tedious, for the method, nature then mind , repetitively, throughout the book, I find tiresome, regardless of the insights. Quite frankly, I tire of his working out his own reflections. Perhaps after all these years the shine has worn off and I am left with a patina not at all to my liking in some instances. So it is not a “happy” book for me, one that is compelling. It was written about 50 years ago.
Gnarly, condensed, knotty, his prose or his thinking rather is resistive to easy comprehension; it needs to be read and read again, if you feel it is worth it. Often I feel as if I need a forceps or a tweezer to get at the nub. I admit at times I feel stupid which is not the most requisite feeling to continue reading. I dread the doctoral theses that will be written about his writings years hence, a deadly dross as a footnote to his testimonies. In all instances the Notebook is dated, the location made clear, Paris, the Eiffel tower, et al. He writes of the zinc roofs of the buildings from his balcony and I have seen that as well as French zoning prevents houses above six stories in Paris until you get out of town. And then he usualy speaks of the “benediction” or the psychological nature, if that is what it is, of a very palpable pain he is experiencing or a sensation that cannot be measured by him, only observed, for as he insists the word is not the thing itself, for language can not encapsulate the unencapsulated. So one is reminded of the admonition in the editor’s introduction that all this is a real and physical process he experienced for almost all his life which has nothing to do with drugs, etc. If this is so, and I have no reason to doubt it but curiously intrigued and fascinated, he was in a measure of pain to the end of his days and yet from that pain he was gifted with something remarkable and he fashioned a creation of his own. I associate his psychical pain, a consequence no doubt of Kundalini yoga and that special day in Ojai in which he was transformed, or “awakened,” to the statue of Laocoon.
So the Notebook describes the day, the light, the pain (what has been called the “process,” stemming from that momentous and tranformative experience under the pepper tree in Ojai) and then he very often moves into some conceptual idea and describes it, again, with care and definition, often hard to extract, although I am sure if I had a greater mind I would see into it. I don’t have that mind. What am I left with? At times nothing; often irritation at what I cannot grasp. It is like seeing a beautiful picture of a Weber grill in an ad, buying it, laying out all the parts and then reading the directions which are in early Mayan. At times one wishes to return the whole shebang, stomp it, or as I do, hand it over to a greater and more tactile mind, my wife, Jane. K attracts, often at a personal cost.
I mention this because there were years in which the idea of going to my bookcase and taking down one of his books was met with resistance. What generally came to mind was that I had to work, not read, and so I stayed away for long stretches of time. I still do, although I do recall and savor the refreshing shock of my earlier readings of K. The therapist in me rose to the fore and decided that I wasn’t to put myself in a punishing position. Some of his works are like gnawing on teflon, some, I suppose, are above my level of awareness, some of them are too deep and hard for me to grasp no matter how I try. (Freud’s writings can tie you up into knots as well.) I tired, which may be a consequence of reading him extensively, of getting into this brilliant man’s mind. I had enough trouble accessing my own belfry. Perhaps he was a kind of spiritual firecracker and all we can do is observe, approach, but never get really close for it was all his immolation, not ours.
And so I would hang suspended between two bounces of the stone across the water for months if not years at a time. However, K left residues of worth in me, deposits of ore that I still mine in my writing and thinking. I recall the first terrifying tremors and then quakes he brought about in my mind, he appeals mostly to one’s mind. A few words about that. If anything else, K expresses the passion of the mind. I remember reading what a fellow Indian spiritual thinker, a woman in this case, had to say about K. That he was too much of the mind and not enough of the feeling basis in men, which might account for his own austere and ascetic personality. However, it is on the level of the mind that he made an appeal to me which goes a long way in explaining why I incorporated him into my self, clung to his side. I am too intellectual and so is he and it is at this place I could accept his magnificent thinking if I could understand it. As the years went on and feeling became paramount to me rather than the passion of the mind which I did not cast aside, for it was so much of my nature, I began to feel that K, for me, was lacking. Oh, how we find warts and all in father figures. And why not, for we are all mortal men and women. What was missing in him, which I needed, was the passion of the woman’s mind for instance, something else, for if anything, it smacks of nurturance that sidesteps reason and rational thinking processes. Perhaps the old and chronic jeers at women drivers reveal that men dislike the lack of directionality in their driving, a lack of purpose, and gnash their teeth when a left turn is just an intuitive guess, answer or response, especially when the Pekinese is in her left arm and she is texting. We need women drivers.
When K spoke about conditioning, questioning authority, challenging I grasped his hand and we both jumped off the diving board. For in my life’s context he touched that which was inexpress in my life, deeply frustrated me, and kept me from fulfilling any personal fantasies I may have had for myself. Additionally, as I read him, he touched that which I felt in my core, much like any great novelist who makes you feel in such a contiguous way that he is personally addressing your needs as a reader, as a fellow human being, for literature, in my eyes, is the true internet among human beings. As I look over this paragraph I know I fall short of what I want to say and so I will struggle a while longer. I often think of what I could have done or been. I am not looking at this with regret or ruefulness. I am just trying to look as if for the first time. And what do I see?
Born apparently by random chance or unconscious drives to experience inordinate amounts of frustration, untutored in the ways of social skills, bereft of real parenting and so tasting for much of my first eighteen years benign neglect, I grew up as a very wired, tight ball of anxieties, imagined fears, tremendous self-doubt, stifled passions, unrequited dreams, and unfulfilled hopes. I could not express myself, like Billy Budd.Consequently I presented to the world an inhibited, shy, withdrawn, if not depressed young boy and young adult who had difficulty expressing his feelings, of touching, of being open and express, fearful of extending my limited self to others, dreading the impact of young women on me lest I know not what to do, which was a reality, and all the while wanting to unfurl like a flag, to wave in the wind, to beat wildly against the flagpole. Needs gone unmet were my youth. The milieu of the times, the Fifties, a period of repression and suppression of wants, in which schools were rigid and authoritarian, white lines down the high school corridors that students couldn’t cross over to get to their classroom, but had to go to the end of the hallway and then turn around and proceed up are mild instances of the rigidity of the Eisenhower years. It was a time in which Elvis had the lower portion of his body cut off from view on the Ed Sullivan show. When looking back, that hunched shouldered and Nixon grimace on Sullivan himself, aptly expresses in gesture and posture the “square” of the time and the attitude of the time. Sullivan only knew the missionary position, believe it. So self and society were beautifully matched in my case.
It was not until my early thirties did I emerge from the dead tissue which encased me, molted. I began to self-debride dead matter, thanks here to the tag end of the Sixties. I see my life as I look back over the decades as one of a very tardy and very slow emergence. The old adage says that we grow old too soon and smart too late. Agreed! The exoskeleton had been shed but you know, as well as I do, memory traces remain of the old self which we carry to our graves, often responding in new instances within the ancient framework. However, it is here that K has helped me to see and so has my working on myself throughout the decades, for I am besmirched, affected by, infected with the tenor of Kazantzakis’ injunction, “reach what you cannot,” which was advice given to him by his intuitive Cretan grandfather when he was a child of eight or nine, a remarkable child at that. Earlier Nikos rejected his grandfather’s first advice, “to reach what you can.” He shook that off as not demanding enough. I relate very well to that. I have been demanding of my “weak” self for all my life, trying to make me rise like yeast to demands I have self-imposed upon me, for we can be more injunctive and demanding than our parents ever were. We internalize all that parental should and should not junk, and as Alice Miller has written, in our later years we turn around and flagellate ourselves in harder fashion than we were originally treated, a unique perversion of the past. That is a psychoanalytic truth that I value as much as any other of Krishnamurti’s axioms. So I attained a superego the size of Manhattan.
I worm my way through life, a double helix of Krishnamurti and psychotherapy, contradictions in and of themselves, an uneasy truce but like everything else, a composite of good, bad, and indifferent. I can say clearly as I clear my metaphorical throat that all systems get in the way, all methods close our eyes, but I do need to learn how to drive before I can buy a car. Absolutisms are not the way. K is one of many contending “systems” before we evanesce, although he constantly reiterated that he offers no philosophy — true! On my stone will not be a bibliography of what I have read in life. Kazantzakis’ epitaph reads: “I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.” Kind of like that, don’t you? I’ll probably request something existential, something that sums up my existence on this planet. Here goes: “Duh.” Don’t be put off by the colloquialism, for it says it all, doesn’t it? reader.
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