Living truth

Truth has no path, and that is the beauty of truth, it is living. A dead thing has a path to it because it is static, but when you see that truth is something living, moving, which has no resting place, which is in no temple, mosque or church, which no religion, no teacher, no philosopher, nobody can lead you to--then you will also see that this living thing is what you actually are--your anger, your brutality, your violence, your despair, the agony and sorrow you live in. In the understanding of all of this is the truth, and you can understand it only if you know to look at those things in your life.

--Jiddu Krishnamurti, Freedom From the Known (1969)

For the past few years, I have been aware of Jiddu Krishnamurti, but I never felt that it was time to dive into his works. It seems that it is finally time, so I am proceeding slowly and gladly. He is challenging and refreshing, and requires time to really flesh out what he is saying. What strikes me most about him is how little he refers to traditional religious or philosophical systems, sages, or saints, and the importance he places on one's own individual approach to truth.

The above passage reminded me of the viewpoint offered by the "new physics" in the first decades of the twentieth century. The traditional scientific attitude of an objective subject observing, objectively, processes in nature, gave way to the discovery that, at deeper levels of physics, the foundation of objective truth in our culture, what is being observed is affected by the observer (summarized in mathematical terms as the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle). Ken Wilber summarizes (from The Spectrum of Consciousness (1977)):

The quantum revolution was so cataclysmic because it attacked not one or two conclusions of classical physics but its very cornerstone, the foundation upon which the whole edifice was erected, and that was the subject-object dualism. That which was Real was supposed to be that which could be objectively observed and measured, yet these "ultimate realities" could not themselves be totally observed or measured under any circumstances, and that is, to say the least, a sloppy form of Reality. . . . As Sullivan put it, "We cannot observe the course of nature without disturbing it" . . . It was abundantly clear to these physicists that objective measurement and verification could no longer be the mark of absolute reality, because the measured object could never be completely separated from the measuring subject--the measured and the measurer, the verified and the verifier, at this level, are one and the same.

 The assumption that underlay the Cartesian and Newtonian scientific models, that objective nature was waiting to be analyzed, discovered, and "figured out" by human subjects is akin to the assumption Krishnamurti is exposing above, that truth is somehow stable or static, and is able to be discovered or sought, as if it were separate from the one discovering and the one seeking.

"The Worm's Waking"

This is how a human being can change:
there's a worm addicted to eating
grape leaves.
Suddenly. He wakes up,
call it grace, whatever, something
wakes him, and he's no longer
a worm.
He's the entire vineyard,
and the orchard too, the fruit, the trunks,
a growing wisdom and joy
that doesn't need
to devour.

--Rumi

Emancipatory writing

I am re-reading Ken Wilber's One Taste, a "philosophical journal," he kept during the year of 1997. The format of the book, I realized as I began reading, is very similar to the format of this blog, especially in the content, which Wilber describes as "ideas that orbit the sun of the perennial philosophy (or the common core of the world's great wisdom traditions)."

One topic he discusses early on is emancipatory writing--writing, whether theoretical, spiritual, literary, etc. that helps to liberate the reader from a range of subtle ills, like feelings of meaninglessness, shallowness, narrow-minded-ness, the list goes on. In an entry on the life of the late novelist Christopher Isherwood, himself a liberator for Wilber, he lists similar figures like Jiddu Krishnamurti, Aldous Huxley, Gerald Heard, and Thomas Mann (all of whom were connected with the Los Angeles branch of the Vedanta Society in the mid-20th century.

Reading Wilber himself has been and still is liberating, for many reasons. An important one is that he has provided me, and many others, with a theoretical framework of the world's knowledge and experience that is profoundly embracing. In the words of Jack Crittenden, in his lucid foreword to Wilber's Eye of Spirit (1997):

The general idea [of Wilber's philosophical system] is straightforward. It is not which theorist is right and which is wrong. His idea is that everyone is basically right, and he wants to figure out how that can be so. "I don't believe," Wilber says, "that any human mind is capable of 100 percent error. So instead of asking which approach is right and which is wrong, we assume each approach is true but partial, and then try to figure out how to fit these partial truths together, how to integrate them--not how to pick one and get rid of the others."

Philosophy's true purpose is to improve one's way of living, and the philosophical attitude Wilber adopts has improved not only my critical and theoretical capacities, but my everyday living. Taking the attitude that "everyone is right" has opened me up to the world in so many ways, and has instilled in me a commitment to finding the truth in every voice, no matter how offensive or inferior I consider a particular perspective or point of view. It also supports my conviction that truth can be found in human voices from anywhere and anywhen, from the ancients to today. Conversely, and this is important for me because my critical faculties have always been on the weak side, I am able to criticize in a more penetrating manner, by acknowledging that every perspective is partial. So from this fundamental attitude, Wilber has outlined a vast yet cogent system in his books, from 1977 to the present, and each one I read further opens my mind and soul, and liberates me in ways that I sometimes don't even think about consciously, but which I notice after reading and digesting his works.

Digestion, pt. 2

Some additional thoughts related to this post:

From Ken Wilber's Spectrum of Consciousness (1977):

Freud built his entire psychoanalytic system around . . . the insight that men and women have needs or motivations of which they are unconscious. Now because these needs or instincts are unconscious, we are not fully aware of them, and thus we can never act upon them to gain satisfaction. In short, humans don't know what they want; their real desires are unconscious and therefore never adequately satisfied. Neuroses and "mental illness" result, just as if you were completely unconscious of your desire to eat, you would never know you were hungry, and consequently you would never eat, which would indeed make you quite ill. Now this is a superlative idea, the essence of which has been confirmed again and again in clinical observations. The problem, however, is that although everybody agrees that humans have unconscious needs, nobody agrees as to what these needs are.

1.  Again, the usefulness of comparing the psychology to physiology--the mechanisms of hunger, in this case. I often think that the typical human situation is that one's physiology operates fairly harmoniously--one's body generally knows how to digest, and one can correctly interpret the body's signals when there is a problem with digestion--but one's psychology lacks this smoothness and integrity. The various forms of psychotherapy can be seen as seeking this wholeness, bringing one's psyche to the same attunement as one's muscular or digestive systems.

2. The importance of interpretation. When my stomach growls and my head feels light, I know that I am hungry. How do I know? I interpret my body's signals accurately. The system works properly--signal leads to correct interpretation leads to corresponding action (feeding myself). The process is more complex with the psyche (as Wilber points out, there are many opinions as to what our needs are), and the wide range of pathologies are often connected with some glitch in the process of interpreting signals from the psyche. Again, the process of projection, as I mentioned briefly here. A feeling of intense envy is the signal, but my interpretation is one of contempt for the people I envy, so the corresponding action is a disdain for those people, and a feeling of dissatisfaction (just as if I were hungry but I chose to go for a walk instead of feeding myself). The envy is unsatisfied, and my contempt remains and worsens, eventually leading to an increasingly negative psychological state.

Where is my soul?

"As an unintelligent man seeks for the abode of music in the body of the lute, so does he look for a soul within the skandhas (the material and psychic aggregates, of which the individual mind-body is composed)."

--quoted in Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy (1945), perhaps Gautama Buddha?

One view of the ego

The conventional "self" or "person" is composed mainly of a history consisting of selected memories, and beginning from the moment of parturition. According to convention, I am not simply what I am doing now. I am also what I have done, and my conventionally edited version of my past is made to seem almost the more real "me" than what I am at this moment. For what I am seems so fleeting and intangible, but what I was is fixed and final. It is the firm basis for predictions of what I will be in the future, and so it comes about that I am more closely identified with what no longer exists than with what actually is!

--Alan Watts, The Way of Zen (1957)

Spiritual experiments

Nothing in our every-day experience gives us any reason for supposing that water is made up of hydrogen and oxygen; and yet when we subject water to certain rather drastic treatments, the nature of its constituent elements becomes manifest. Similarly nothing in our every-day experience gives us much reason for supposing that the mind of the average sensual man has as one of its constituents, something resembling, or identical with, the Reality substantial to the manifold world; and yet, when the mind is subjected to certain rather drastic treatments, the divine element, of which it is in part at least composed, becomes manifest, not only to the mind itself, but also, by its reflection in its external behavior, to other minds. It is only by making physical experiments that we can discover the intimate nature of matter and its potentialities. And it is only by making psychological and moral experiments that we can discover the intimate nature of mind and its potentialities. In the ordinary circumstances of average sensual life, these potentialities of the mind remain latent and unmanifested. If we would realize them, we must fulfill certain conditions and obey certain rules, which experience has shown empirically to be valid.

--Aldous Huxley, Introduction to The Perennial Philosophy (1962)

Huxley's analogy between discovering the nature of water and the nature of the human being seems far-fetched at first, but upon further reflection his point is well taken.

1. This is a useful analogy for the idea that just because something is not revealed or apparent in the ordinary state of consciousness does not mean that it is false or invalid.

2. Also useful in understanding the many ways of altering consciousness that have been used for religious purposes--fasting, chanting, asceticism, drumming, meditating, etc.

3. He also notes an important connection between science and religion--the empirical validity of certain "experiments" that lead to a certain knowledge of the human being. Ken Wilber discusses this in detail, particularly in The Marriage of Soul and Sense: Integrating Science and Religion. The principle is that the scientific method is not just applicable to physical science, or even psychological science. It is applicable to spiritual matters, in that humans have developed empirically verifiable methods (not unlike the methods necessary to deduce that water is composed of oxygen and hydrogen) over time to discover or realize the true nature of the human being.