What Are You Reading?

I'm always fascinated by what others are reading.

Right now I've just read or am reading Krishnamurti to Himself: His Last Journal; Schubert's Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession by Ian Bostridge; Out of Sheer Rage: In the Shadow of DH Lawrence by Geoff Dyer; Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities; and John Gray's Straw Dogs — an incredible, infuriating, outlook-changing book which will make all your ideas about religion and philosophy, science and 'progress', history and morality, humanism and anthropocentrism fall about your ears like a house of cards. It's essential, provocative reading, with the unmistakeable yet disconcerting ring of truth.

What are you reading at the moment?

Relationship and Illusion

I'm reading, and much enjoying, Krishnamurti to Himself: His Last Journal . . .

It is odd that we have so little relationship with nature, with the insects and the leaping frog and the owl that hoots among the hills calling for its mate. We never seem to have a feeling for all living things on the earth . . . Man has killed millions of whales and is still killing them. All that we derive from their slaughter can be had through other means. But apparently man loves to kill things, the fleeting deer, the marvellous gazelle and the great elephant. We love to kill each other. The killing of other human beings has never stopped throughout the history of man's life on this earth. If we could, and we must, establish a deep long abiding relationship with nature, with the actual trees, the bushes, the flowers, the grass and the fast moving clouds, then we would never slaughter another human being for any reason whatsoever. Organized murder is war, and though we demonstrate against a particular war, the nuclear, or any other kind of war, we have never demonstrated against war. We have never said that to kill another human being is the greatest sin on earth . . .

. . . We are always trying to identify ourselves with our race, our culture, with those things which we believe in, with some mystical figure, or some saviour, some kind of super authority. Identifying with something seems to be the nature of man . . . One wonders why this craving, longing, for identification exists. One can understand the identification with one's physical needs — the necessary things, clothes, food, shelter and so on. But inwardly, inside the skin as it were, we try to identify ourselves with the past, with tradition, with some fanciful romantic image, a symbol much cherished. And surely in this identification there is a sense of security, safety, a sense of being owned and of possessing. This gives great comfort. One takes comfort, security, in any form of illusion. And man apparently needs many illusions.

Jiddu Krishnamurti 1983

The River Of Words (4): Krishnamurti

I must have been around twenty years old when I discovered Krishnamurti and experienced one of those literary-spiritual shocks which are so transformative and life-changing. Here was a sensible, practical, calming and soul-nourishing philosophy that seemed to give a solution to all those religious, political, social and family issues I was struggling with at the time — though Krishnamurti himself would have rejected any notion of promoting a 'philosophy', just as he disowned any role as all-knowing sage or disciple-seeking guru. His teaching — gentle, simple, loving and humane — was centred on unity, wholeness and self-reliance. It helped you free yourself from the constricting bonds of ideology and received opinion, from the tyranny of both mind and body. Based on Eastern thought, his ideas were truly revolutionary in the West — but this was a peaceful revolution, a revolution of one's complete comprehension of and attitude to the world and how one lives in it. It is difficult to quote adequately from Krishnamurti without quoting whole pieces, as he is not given to attention-grabbing soundbites and hollow aphorisms (good, I say). However, in The Second Penguin Krishnamurti Reader he talks a lot about meditation, and these extracts are taken from the first few pages:

Meditation is not an escape from the world; it is not an isolating, self-enclosing activity, but rather the comprehension of the world and its ways. The world has little to offer apart from food, clothes and shelter, and pleasure with its great sorrows.

Meditation is wandering away from this world; one has to be a total outsider. Then the world has a meaning, and the beauty of the heavens and the earth is constant. Then love is not pleasure. From this all action begins that is not the outcome of tension, contradiction, the search for self-fulfilment or the conceit of power.

What is important in meditation is the quality of the mind and the heart. It is not what you achieve, or what you say you attain, but rather the quality of a mind that is innocent and vulnerable. Through negation there is the positive state. Merely to gather, or to live in, experience, denies the purity of meditation. Meditation is not a means to an end. It is both the means and the end. The mind can never be made innocent through experience. It is the negation of experience that brings about that positive state of innocency which cannot be cultivated by thought. Thought is never innocent. Meditation is the ending of thought, not by the meditator, for the meditator is the meditation. If there is no meditation, then you are like a bind man in a world of great beauty, light and colour.

Wander by the seashore and let this meditative quality come upon you. If it does, don't pursue it. What you pursue will be the memory of what it was — and what was is the death of what is. Or when you wander among the hills, let everything tell you the beauty and the pain of life, so that you awaken to your own sorrow and to the ending of it. Meditation is the root, the plant, the flower and the fruit. It is words that divide the fruit, the flower, the plant and the root. In this separation action does not bring about goodness: virtue is the total perception.

Despite all the Oshos and Tolles and Kabat-Zinns, and the many other enlightened, spiritual, self-help facilitators of the world, I always come back to Krishnamurti in the end; for me, he said it the first and the best, the most humbly and the most beautifully. There is so much contained in the above few paragraphs; they alone could form the basis of a meditation which might last a hundred years.

Meditation is the root, the plant, the flower and the fruit. It is words that divide the fruit, the flower, the plant and the root. In this separation action does not bring about goodness: virtue is the total perception . . .

The Mastery Of Love

I'd heard of Don Miguel Ruiz for a while, but hadn't got round to reading any of his books. I'd known about his four agreements — (1) Be impeccable with your word (2) Don't take anything personally (3) Don't make assumptions (4) Always do your best (The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide To Personal Freedom) — but that was about it. Even though I'd been reading texts on ancient wisdom, self-discovery and spiritual enlightenment for some time — by Carlos Castaneda, Sogyal Rinpoche, Thomas Merton, Jon Kabat-Zinn, Stephen Batchelor, David Brazier, the Dalai Lama, Eckhart Tolle and Osho among others — Ruiz had passed me by.

However, last night I picked up his book, The Mastery Of Love, and it blew me away. I read half of it straight off at one sitting (or rather at one lying — I was in bed at the time). For me this simple but profound work is one of those immediately life-transforming, once-read-never-to-be-forgotten books you encounter all too rarely in life. (I remember also having this experience when I first came across Krishnamurti in my early twenties.)

I scribbled these notes while reading the book — the highlighted pieces are straight from the text, the rest are my own interpretations and summaries:

When a man meets a woman, he makes an image of her from his point of view, and the woman makes an image of the man from her point of view. Then he tries to make her fit the image he makes for her, and she tries to make him fit the image she makes for him. Now there are six images between them. Of course, they are lying to each other, even if they don't know they are lying. Their relationship is based on fear; it is based on lies. It is not based on truth, because they cannot see through all that fog.

Ruiz analyses our relationships, and shows how most of our love relationships are ones of control, of neediness, of manipulation, of possessiveness and of selfishness (oh, how Proust understood this — I've been reading In Search Of Lost Time recently).

It doesn't matter how much you love someone, you are never going to be what that person wants you to be.

We can't be responsible for another person's happiness or unhappiness; we create our own happiness or unhappiness from inside. If we make another person responsible for our happiness or unhappiness, we become dependent on that person. Then that person will have the sole power to increase our happiness or take our happiness away. Not good. Ruiz compares this kind of unequal relationship with the relationship of the provider and the drug addict. 

We never really know another person — what's in their mind, all their thoughts, feelings and fantasies — even in close relationships such as husband and wife, or parent and child.

Every human being has a personal dream of life, and that dream is completely different from anyone else's dream. Every dreamer is going to dream in his own way.

We can never dream the same dream as another, but we need to respect each other's dreams.

We may have many relationships in our lives and, when it comes down to it, each relationship is unique and one-to-one, a relationship formed by two dreamers with separate dreams, but whose dreams touch and commingle to some extent within that relationship.

If our physical bodies consist of cells, then our dream-bodies consist of emotions, and our core emotions are fear (emotions such as anger, jealousy and sadness are just masks for fear) and love. Ruiz  goes on to contrast love with fear, and shows how fear is lacking and divisive in every way. Unlike fear, love has no obligations or expectations. It is based on respect. Love does not pity, but has compassion (two very different things). Love is responsible. Love is kind. Love is generous and unconditional. Love has justice.

We are not responsible for others, for the other halves of our relationships.

We don't have the right to change anyone else, and no one has the right to change us.

You cannot change other people. They are what they are. Love them for what they are. Love yourself for what you are, warts and all.

I've been shocked by reading this book into realising how much I've tried to control some relationships in my own life, tried to influence and change other people, to make them conform to some predetermined image. No, no, no! You can't do it! It just brings misery and frustration. It's all through fear, really — fear of the autonomy and unique mystery of the other person, fear of what they might think of you, fear of what they might do to you,  Fear and insecurity! Time to move on. I feel such relief.

Books Which Change Your Life

I like to think of mindfulness simply as the art of conscious living. You don't have to be a Buddhist or a yogi to practice it. In fact, if you know anything about Buddhism, you will know that the most important point is to be yourself and not try to become anything that you are not already. Buddhism is fundamentally about being in touch with your own deepest nature and leting it flow out of you unimpeded. It has to do with waking up and seeing things as they are. In fact, the word 'Buddha' simply means one who has awakened to his or her true nature. JON KABAT-ZINN Wherever You Go, There You Are

That's the last of my quotes from Jon Kabat-Zinn. It's time to move on to other things. My recent readings of his books Coming To Our Senses and Wherever You Go, There You Are came at just the right time in my life and have affected me deeply. It's strange how sometimes exactly the right book is 'gifted' to us at exactly the right moment in our lives - a book which may quickly become a landmark book, influencing us, rescuing us, inspiring us in profound, often life-changing ways.

When I was in my late teens I read The Penguin Krishnamurti Reader and The Second Penguin Krishnamurti Reader and these books fired a life-long interest in Zen Buddhism and were mind-blowing for me at the time. They affected absolutely the way I thought and the way I lived. Other books which have done this to me are Thoreau's Walden, the novels of Hermann Hesse and John Fowles, and (this may surprise you) the novels of Henry Miller. I read all of these writers in my twenties.

I wonder how many of you have totemic books you read at a critical time in your lives - books which altered your mindset? The power of the written word can be truly astonishing.

Only that day dawns to which we are awake. THOREAU

Right Relationship

Forest Wisdom has just been musing in his blog about whether we can ever fully get to know and understand another person - online or offline - and this has provoked a fascinating string of comments.

I don't think we ever can. To do that we must be that other person. And we can't be that because we are uniquely ourselves. It's an inescapable fact of human life that we are isolated one from another within our own physical bodies and within our own private minds. However this existential state need not be a depressing thing. For we do have relationships.

I thought I'd turn to see what one of my favourite philosophical and spiritual thinkers, Krishnamurti, had to say on the subject of Relationship and Isolation. In The Problems Of Living he writes that Life is relationship, which is expressed through contact with things, with people and with ideas. In understanding relationship we shall have capacity to meet life fully, adequately... Relationship, surely, is the mirror in which you discover yourself. Without relationship you are not; to be is to be related; to be related is existence.

Examining our relationships, Krishnamurti recognises that many of our relationships are isolating because they are based on a desire for power and self-gratification, whether individually, racially or nationally:

Now if we examine our life, our relationship with another, we shall see that it is a process of isolation. We are really not concerned with another; though we talk a great deal about it, actually we are not concerned. We are related to someone only so long as that relationship gives us a refuge, so long as it satisfies us. But the moment there is a disturbance in the relationship which produces discomfort in ourselves, we discard that relationship. In other words, there is a relationship only so long as we are gratified. This may sound harsh, but if you really examine your life very closely you will see it is a fact; and to avoid a fact is to live in ignorance, which can never produce right relationship. If we look into our lives and observe relationship, we see that it is a process of building resistance against each other, a wall over which we look and observe the other; but we always retain the wall and remain behind it, whether it be a psychological wall, a material wall, an economic wall, or a national wall.

After forcing us to consider these uncomfortable truths, Krishnamurti then asks: Can one live in the world without the desire for power, for position, for authority? and replies to his own question like this: Obviously one can. One does it when one does not identify oneself with something greater (my italics). This identification with something greater - the party, the country, the race, the religion, God - is the search for power. Because you in yourself are empty, dull, weak, you like to identify yourself with something greater. That desire to identify yourself with something greater is the desire for power.

He concludes: Relationship is a process of self-revelation, and, without knowing oneself, the ways of one's own mind and heart, merely to establish an outward order, a system, a cunning formula has very little meaning. What is important is to understand oneself in relationship with another. Then relationship becomes not a process of isolation but a movement in which you discover your own motives, your own thoughts, your own pursuits; and that very discovery is the beginning of liberation, the beginning of transformation.

You may think we're deviating a long way from talk about how one individual can communicate with and get to know another individual, to ideas about power struggles and religious, national and political identity. But relationship is relationship, and we're talking essentially about the same relationship here - the individual one-to-one personal relationship being a microcosm of all the other more global, more abstract relationships.

The technique Krishnamurti uses in the above "argument" is typical of his reasoning; and, I think, typical of certain kind of Buddhist mode of thought.

I've written about relationship before in my post We Are Stardust, We Are Golden.

Self-Knowledge Is An Endless River

The more you know yourself, the more clarity there is. Self-knowledge has no end - you don't come to an achievement, you don't come to a conclusion. It is an endless river. As one studies it, as one goes into it more and more, one finds peace. Only when the mind is tranquil - through self-knowledge and not through imposed self-discipline - only then, in that tranquility, in that silence, can reality come into being. It is only then that there can be bliss, that there can be creative action. And it seems to me that without this understanding, without this experience, merely to read books, to attend talks, to do propaganda, is so infantile - just an activity without much meaning; whereas if one is able to understand oneself, and thereby bring about that creative happiness, that experiencing of something that is not of the mind, then perhaps there can be a transformation in the immediate relationship about us and so in the world in which we live.

The Problems Of Living from The Penguin Krishnamurti Reader

Truth Is A Pathless Land

Don't follow leaders/Watch the parkin' meters Subterranean Homesick Blues BOB DYLAN

In half a lifetime's reading the 2 books which have affected me the most profoundly and have influenced me the most strongly are the collections The Penguin Krishnamurti Reader and The Second Penguin Krishnamurti Reader published by Penguin in the early 1970s. I remember vividly the incredible, life-changing impact these books had on me in my late teens/early 20s. Here was a writer and spiritual thinker who positively encouraged you to think for yourself, who rejected all gurus and teachers, and jettisoned any allegiance to nationality, caste, and religious and philosophical systems - regarding them all as man-made, mind-made constructs.

Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895-1986) was born in India, and in his early years had been groomed by Annie Besant of the rather batty Theosophical Society for the role of World Teacher and bodhisattva, that is an Enlightened One who could teach the dharma to the rest of us (dharma being the teachings of the Buddha, or in a wider sense the Truth, or The Way Things Are, a concept akin to the Christian Logos or the Chinese Tao). After undergoing a profound spiritual crisis, Krishnamurti repudiated entirely this role, and spent the rest of his life speaking to groups around the world about his own revolutionary philosophy. Except he would not call it a 'Philosophy'. And he would not call himself a 'Teacher' of it. He saw that all theologies, philosophies and ideologies were intellectual houses of cards, comfort blankets created out of our own insecurities. He realised that all leaders, gurus and teachers brought about a dependency in their disciples and followers which was a block to gaining true self-awareness and freedom.

I can't possibly summarize all his thoughts and ideas here - you'll have to read his works - but if you 'get' what he is talking about, I assure you your life will never be the same again. At the age of 90 Krishnamurti addressed the UN on World Peace, and in 1984 was awarded the UN Peace Medal. In 1929 he made this statement:

Truth is a pathless land. Man cannot come to it through any organization, through any creed, through any dogma, priest or ritual, nor through any philosophical knowledge or psychological technique. He has to find it through the mirror of relationship, through the understanding of the contents of his own mind, through observation, and not through intellectual analysis or introspective dissection. Man has built in himself images as a sense of security - religious, political, personal. These manifest as symbols, ideas and beliefs. The burden of these dominates man's thinking, relationships and his daily life. These are the causes of our problems for they divide man from man in every relationship.