Bottomless Well — an Inward journey digest! [Part 2]

[Refer here for Bottomless Well Part 1 Well rounds]

Well Round 12 : How do we get free from the ‘Known’?

Fundamental hypothesis in Philosophy is to admit our limitation on our worldly awareness and demonstrate being inquisitive in every situation. The real humanness is not observed from mere servicing to the physiological and psychological needy in our social world. It goes beyond this basic interpretation. The real inward journey lies in the continuous self-examination and interrogation of all prejudices which fundamentally disproves the ‘Followership’ fantasy. Confused? Welcome aboard. Let met attempt to clarify!

DO NOT FOLLOW ANYBODY! Instead, just take the IDEA/PRINCIPLE that inspires you from a person but not the person. ‘FOLLOWING’ someone is not necessary to walk ahead.

Humans always have a cognitive bias towards everything. Most of our beliefs and interests emerge from our cognitive bias towards a person, community or stories. This is a self shackling process for a real cognitive freedom. Apparently, philosophers emerge only by questioning the prejudices not by following the systems. Great philosophers of all time like Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Gautama Buddha and even many contemporary ones never entertain any of their study circles/readers/listeners to blindly follow their discoveries. The moment you start following somebody you start cementing a boundary for your thinking ability. Philosophers always recommend to use them as facilitators to take your perspective of life ahead. Simple tip for your mental wellbeing is to cordially ignore those who expect (sometimes demand) you to follow them. It could be a priest, a god, a celebrity, your boss, teacher, father/mother, spouse or any relationship entity in your circle of life. This means they do not want you to think any further. To make it simple, give up following anybody; not worth for your highly finite lifetime. Instead, pick up the ideas from him/her that inspire you and develop your inquiry further upon.

Jiddu Krishnamurthi a.k.a JK is one of those philosophers of our time who strongly recommends to stay away from the disease of following someone or influenced thought process. In this post, I am going to discuss his ideas on how to possess purely independent worldview through his powerful quotes from his most popular work ‘Freedom from the Known’. To ensure that I do not spoil the context while rewording, I have directly used his excerpts from the book to let you enjoy this unique intellectual journey as-is. Get ready, focus and ready further!

We are Second-hand people.

For centuries, we have been spoon-fed by our teachers, by our authorities, our books and saints. We say, ‘Tell me about it-what lies beyond the hills and the mountains and the earth?’ and we are satisfied with their descriptions, which means we live on our words, our life is shallow and empty. We continue living on what we have been told, either guided by our inclinations, our tendencies or compelled to accept by circumstances and environment. So, nothing is new in us; all are age-old prejudices.

First thing to learn is not to seek. When you seek, you are really only window-shopping.

The primary cause of disorder in ourselves is the seeking of reality promised by another. Most of us are opposed to political tyranny and dictatorship, we inwardly accept the authority, the tyranny, of another to twist our minds and our way of life.

Leaders destroy the followers and followers destroy the leaders. You have to be your own teacher and your own disciple.

All authority of any kind, especially in the field of thought and understanding, is the most destructive, evil thing. To be free of all authority, of your own and that of another, is to die to everything of yesterday, so that your mind is always fresh, always young, innocent, full of vigor and passion. It is only in that state that one learns and observes.

If you do not follow somebody you feel very lonely. Be lonely then.

Why are you frightened of being alone? Because you are faced with yourself as you are and you find that you are empty, dull, stupid, ugly, guilty and anxious — a petty, shoddy, secondhand entity. Face the fact; look at it, do not run away from it. The moment you run away fear begins. Each of us has an image of what we think we are or what we should be, and that image, that picture, entirely prevents us from seeing ourselves as we actually are. To understand anything you must live with it, you must observe it, you must know all its content, its nature, its structure, its movement.

A confident man is a dead human being.

When you look at a tree and say, ‘That is an oak tree’, or ‘that is a banyan tree’, the naming of the tree, which is botanical knowledge, has so conditioned your mind that the word comes between you and actually seeing the tree? If you see the danger of your conditioning merely as an intellectual concept, you will never do anything about it.

If I am all the time measuring myself against you, struggling to be like you, then I am denying what I am myself. Therefore I am creating an illusion.

Comparison in any form leads only to greater illusion and greater misery, just as when I analyse myself, add to my knowledge of myself bit by bit, or identify myself with something outside myself, whether it be the State, a saviour or an ideology — when I understand that all such processes lead only to greater conformity and therefore greater conflict. Verbally we can go only so far: what lies beyond cannot be put into words because the word is not the thing. No words or explanations can open the door. What will open the door is daily awareness and attention — awareness of how we speak, what we say, how we walk, what we think.

A mind which is not crippled by memory has real freedom.

Anything that is the result of memory is old and therefore never free. There is no such thing as freedom of thought. It is sheer nonsense. Thought is never new, for thought is the response of memory, experience, knowledge. From the old you derive pleasure, never from the new. There is no time in the new.

It is the struggle to repeat and perpetuate pleasure which turns it into pain.

The very demand for the repetition of pleasure brings about pain, because it is not the same as it was yesterday. You struggle to achieve the same delight, not only to your aesthetic sense but the same inward quality of the mind, and you are hurt and disappointed because it is denied to you. When you don’t get what you want you become anxious, envious, hateful. Living in the present is the instant perception of beauty and the great delight in it without seeking pleasure from it.

Most of us crave the satisfaction of having a position in society because we are afraid of being nobody.

Position must be recognized by others, otherwise it is no position at all. We must always sit on the platform. This craving for position, for prestige, for power, to be recognized by society as being outstanding in some way, is a wish to dominate others, and this wish to dominate is a form of aggression. A mind that is caught in fear lives in confusion, in conflict, and therefore must be violent, distorted and aggressive. We are all afraid about something; there is no fear in abstraction, it is always in relation to something. One of the major causes of fear is that we do not want to face ourselves as we are.

The movement from certainty to uncertainty is what I call fear.

At the actual moment as I am sitting here I am not afraid; I am not afraid in the present, nothing is happening to me, nobody is threatening me or taking anything away from me. But beyond the actual moment there is a deeper layer in the mind which is consciously or unconsciously thinking of what might happen in the future or worrying that something from the past may overtake me. Thought, which is always old, because thought is the response of memory and memories are always old — thought creates, in time, the feeling that you are afraid which is not an actual fact. The actual fact is that you are well. There is no new thought. If we recognize it, it is already old. What we are afraid of is the repetition of the old — the thought of what has been projecting into the future. Therefore thought is responsible for fear.

Most of us want to have our minds continually occupied so that we are prevented from seeing ourselves as we actually are.

We are afraid to be empty. We are afraid to look at our fears. One of the functions of thought is to be occupied all the time with something. You can watch only when the mind is very quiet, just as you can listen to what someone is saying only when your mind is not chattering with itself.

When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence.

Violence is not merely killing another. It is violence when we use a sharp word, when we make a gesture to brush away a person, when we obey because there is fear. Relationship between human beings is based on the image-forming, defensive mechanism. In all our relationships each one of us builds an image about the other and these two images have relationship, not the human beings themselves. The actual relationship between two human beings or between many human beings completely ends when there is the formation of images. All our relationships, whether they be with property, ideas or people, are based essentially on this image-forming, and hence there is always conflict. In all our relationships, whether with the most intimate person or with a neighbor or with society, this conflict exists — conflict being contradiction, a state of division, separation, a duality. Man has accepted conflict as an innate part of daily existence because he has accepted competition, jealousy, greed, acquisitiveness and aggression as a natural way of life.

Poverty is to be completely free of society.

Poverty becomes a marvelously beautiful thing when the mind is free of society. One must become poor inwardly for then there is no seeking, no asking, no desire, no — nothing! It is only this inward poverty that can see the truth of a life in which there is no conflict at all. All stimulation, whether of the church or of alcohol or of drugs or of the written or spoken word, will inevitably bring about dependence, and that dependence prevents us from seeing clearly for ourselves and therefore from having vital energy. The mere intellectual acceptance of an idea, or the emotional acquiescence in an ideology, cannot free the mind from being dependent on something. The fact is what you are, and by comparing you are fragmenting the fact which is a waste of energy.

Freedom is a state of mind — not freedom from something but a sense of freedom, a freedom to doubt and question everything.

To be alone you must die to the past. You are never alone because you are full of all the memories, all the conditioning, all the mutterings of yesterday; your mind is never clear. You cannot become free gradually. It is not a matter of time. If you say, ‘I am free’, then you are not free. Freedom can only come about naturally, not through wishing, wanting, longing.

The interval between the living and the dying is fear. Freedom from the known is death, and then you are living.

We have separated living from dying. Death is extraordinarily like life when we know how to live. You cannot live without dying. You cannot live if you do not die psychologically every minute. To die is to have a mind that is completely empty of itself, empty of its daily longings, pleasures and agonies.

Meditation is not following any system; it is not constant repetition and imitation. Meditation is not concentration. Meditation is not control of thought, for when thought is controlled it breeds conflict in the mind.

• Meditation is the understanding of the totality of life in which every form of fragmentation has ceased. Meditation is to be aware of every thought and of every feeling, never to say it is right or wrong but just to watch it and move with it. And out of this awareness comes silence.
• Meditation is a state of mind which looks at everything with complete attention, totally, not just parts of it.
• Meditation is one of the greatest arts in life — perhaps the greatest, and one cannot possibly learn it from anybody, that is the beauty of it. It has no technique and therefore no authority.
• When you learn about yourself, watch yourself, watch the way you walk, how you eat, what you say, the gossip, the hate, the jealousy — if you are aware of all that in yourself, without any choice, that is part of meditation.

The religious mind is something entirely different from the mind that believes in religion.

• You cannot be religious and yet be a Hindu, a Muslim, a Christian, a Buddhist.
• The religious mind is a state of mind in which there is no fear and therefore no belief whatsoever but only what is — what actually is.
• It is a brutal thing to have ideals. If you have any ideals, beliefs or principles you cannot possibly look at yourself directly.
• That state of mind which is no longer capable of striving is the true religious mind, and in that state of mind you may come upon this thing called truth or reality or bliss or God or beauty or love.

These are the bunch of thoughts and ideas from a contemporary Philosopher JK which I found very relevant to my inward journey. However, as we discussed earlier, we have freedom to pick what really makes sense to us from his ideas and think deeper instead of following him or glorifying him for his great thoughts. Strictly, no cognitive bias or a Halo effect to be entertained on anybody we love for their ideas :-)

Let us dive deeper.

[Refer here for the previous Well rounds]