I don’t know. I can say that for at least 34 years I have struggled with that. Dr. Neil Friedman started my search when he assigned Krishnamurti’s The Flight of the Eagle in his social work class. I recall how I found that book so dense with meaning, so conceptual that I felt for a while as if I was reading Plato as a freshman. Supremely intellectual. I underlined passages as if a freshman; I tried to access the author’s mind and mentation. It was a brilliant work. I went to other works of his, Think on These Things and The Awakening of Intelligence. I still read Krishnamurti, for he has permanently challenged me to be free, to decondition myself, to acquire what he terms choiceless awareness. Chew on that for a while. I still wrestle with his teachings and I admire and respect his express wish not to have disciples. I like that very much, given that the twelve disciples, if they really existed, were really a pathological group.
The great appeal of Krishnamurti, for me, is that he insists you be free of him. If you struggle with his writings — his prose is lean — you might come upon yourself one day. The consequences of reading his work affected the way I practiced as a therapist, how I see the world, how I see others. One of his basic concepts which bridles not a few is that society, all societies, are essentially corrupt. If you come to accept that premise, it is quite freeing. It helps you to make your way in the world as much as not having expectations for people as they will most likely disappoint you. Like you, on many levels, I assume, you want to be free. I choose to be free without a god, without a religion, without a minister or rabbi, without an ism, without a cause, without a philosophy.
I can look at our “leaders” (as if we need leaders) without regard to my political preferences or their parties as the fools or jerks they are. No, I have not been conditioned by Krishnamurti. I have learned from him and I am free of him. I see cant, I see nonsense, often I can see my own conditioned responses for what they are — self-limiting. I have always worked on myself, whether psychologically, existentially or just by self-noodling. I am of a constitution that questions. I ask questions not for the answers I may receive. I ask questions to break down the walls, lift the ceiling, blow out the floor beneath me. I want to see free of all prior conditioning — memory, religion, conditioning, parenting and experience.
The history of religion, to wit, if one has read well, is an abomination. More human beings have died throughout the ages, some historian proffered, than all the wars we have had as a race. It is a divisive force beyond all divisive forces, from counting how many angels are on a head of a pin, to guilt-giving restrictions on self-pleasure or good old basic lust to the need to convert, which is in itself a blasphemous need to dominate others. Castigate me if you must, I find religion a defect of the personality, a need to be self-delusional, to be controlled, to be ordered, to be told what to do, the base alloy of the weak mind and the blessing of the slave mentality wishing to find a way out of his hell on earth.
Again, I am not inwardly free, for I see from time to time how limited I am in so many ways; however, since I question authority I am free in some quarters, a slave in others. I will end on this note: consider how much is undone in your own psychic world; consider how often we are so terrified by the free thoughts and actions of others that we are moved to act upon them, chastise or condemn them. Consider, if you can be a little honest, how you keep yourself limited and in a psychological girdle. In short, we are hurtling to our demise and apparently we have no time, nor do we choose to give ourselves time, to scrutinize who we are and what our intent is as individuals. Often, or most cases, alas, we go to our deaths unknown to ourselves. One of the greatest obstacles to this is the dead hand of religion.
Leave a Reply