Daily Quote, Friday August 21, 2009.
Good morning everyone! Looks like sun after a hazy start. :-)
Here is todays' quote:
Does the search for experience lead to reality?
Experience nearly always forms a hardened centre in the mind, as the self, which is a deteriorating factor. Most of us are seeking experience. We may be tired of the worldly experiences of fame, notoriety, wealth, sex, and so on, but we all want greater, wider experience of some kind, especially those of us who are attempting to reach a so-called spiritual state. Being tired of worldly things, we want a more extensive, a wider, deeper experience; and to arrive at such an experience, we suppress, we control, we dominate ourselves, hoping thereby to achieve a full realization of God, or what you will.
We think the pursuit of experience is the right way of life in order to attain greater vision, and I question whether that is so.
Does this search for experience, which is really a demand for greater, fuller sensation, lead to reality? Or is it a factor which cripples the mind?
The Collected Works, Vol. X - 16
Here are my relections.
At one level Krishnamurti is saying that the more we accummulate experience, the more we sediment the accummulator, the self, the experiencer. This has been his theme this week.
At a second level, he asks if this can lead to a spiritual life? It's hard to see this as anything other than impossible, as the sedimenting of the experiencer establishes a stronger and taller wall between this experiencer, the self, you or me, and the world, the other, between you and me. So the more we search for the experience that will give us that spiritual moment, the more we get away from it. More and more images crystalise in the mind, and the centre of that experience gets more and more established.
Then there is another level where the self is created in remembered pleasure, where the desire to repeat that pleasure leads to a craving for more experience, and so the search for new experience goes on and on; beyond sex, wealth, fame, into spiritual life. This is what some have called spiritual materialism; spirituality brought within the material framework and reduced to accummulation.
So what is a truly spiritual experience? Maybe this will be taken up in the next quote...
Best wishes
Robert
Mmm. Is the act of inquiry different from the search for experience? In the examples of seeking fame, wealth, sex, etc. it's easy to see the acquisitive aspect of seeking, but what's the subtlety that saves inquiry from being yet another search for some kind of acquisition or tangible experience? Is it because the real cannot be in any way accumulated or possessed that the honest search for reality is essentially different? Thus, the truly spiritual experience is that in which we fully participate in reality!
ReplyDeleteOn the question of the search for reality and what saves it from being another search for experience:
ReplyDeleteIt's interesting to question whether it is in the nature of the object that it must elude representation, as in Derrida's notion of 'play' that he describes in his essay Difference. Here 'undecidability' is seen to be built into the structure of the object, an original and aporetic differing within itself, which, because it is within itself, makes any act of saying what it is arbitrary, forced, and unjustifiable.
Krishnamurti, on the other hand, would say that the search for reality is different because of inquiry, which is self-observation in the act of all representational activity.
Both are surely possible? We observe ourselves and in so doing see that, apart from this self-identifying process of accumulating experience, reality is just play.
To observe play in the world, in Derrida's sense of the word, would be like experiencing love in Krishnamurti's terms; except perhaps that undecidability and oneness are a little different. One is perhaps quite political and the other seeks an end to politics. One sees conflict as not necessarily a bad thing, one abhors it.
Sometimes I find myself more drawn to Derrida than Krishnamurti but in truth the reading to the two together is the most productive thing maybe?