Daily Quote, Wednesday August 19, 2009.
Good morning everyone,
My in-house themometer has, at last, dropped below 30 degrees! Hope you're doing ok. :-)
A ceaseless inquiry into every movement of thought.
You will have to find out for yourself, and that requires enormous investigation, hard work - much harder work than earning a livelihood, which is mere routine. It requires astonishing vigilance, constant watchfulness, a ceaseless inquiry into every movement of thought. And the moment you begin to inquire into the process of thinking, which is to isolate each thought and think it through to the end, you will see how arduous it is; it is not a lazy man's pleasure.
And it is essential to do this because it is only the mind that has emptied itself of all its old recognitions, its old distractions, its conflicts and self-contradictions - it is only such a mind that has the new, the creative impulse of reality. The mind then creates its own action; it brings into being a different activity altogether, without which mere social reform, however necessary, however beneficial, cannot possibly bring about a peaceful and happy world.
The Collected Works, Vol. X - 255
Here are my reflections.
Krishnamurti's comment that inquiry has to be ceaseless reminds me of Derrida's remark that the work of deconstruction is never ending. This is because the work of freedom is never ending. Thought is always of the past and so it excludes the present, and therefore excludes the new, the creative impulse, everything that is original in the original sense of being original: not a repeat, not a development, but wholly other than what was but which now is not.
This is the same with social or political reform. Reform never gets away from the past, from a reference point, and therefore is never original. For example, if a person or a society is violent, trying not to be violent doesn't change the violence; making a program for non-violence doesn't take away the violence. You are trying to be less violent but never non-violent. But you don't have to try to be non-violent. If you want to, you just stop being violent. The reform keeps the two tied together.
To be without violence, the mind has to be emptied of all thought, which includes the thought of violence, through inquiry into my violence and your violence by each of us. It is to isolate each thought and think it through to the end; this is deconstruction. As Krishnamurti shows, it has to be practiced on oneself, if there is to be change that is wholly original and not cosmetic.
Please feel free to add your cooments and questions and own reflections.
Best wishes
Robert
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So this is not about accumulation. The constancy of effort and vigilance is not about adding increments to the known, but about cultivating a different way of seeing, a different way of being, through repeated experimentation and practice.
ReplyDeleteReading the week's quotes, I've been trying to put together K's insistence, on the one hand, on going into things completely and on the other, on forgetting oneself completely. It would seem that the constant interrogation of one's thoughts is not about gradually refining or chiselling away at them, but is itself a practice of observation and questioning that could become a 'transformed' way of being oneself. The 'forgetting self' is unusually aware of thought, yet knows that her 'self' is neither dependent on nor defined by thoughts. Yeah? so what is a self? There seems to be something in K about the truly free self being the most able to act effectively...
Yes, I agree completely. It is the constant interrogation of oneself in thinking that is the forgetting oneself. This is what he calls learning; the forgetting must be there for learning to take place. He also talks about the flame of attention, so that to live with total attention to what is happening burns up anything that appears in the awareness; so there is no accummulation.
ReplyDeleteSo, yes, the forgetting self is not forgetful; it doesn't have bad memory. It is in a heightened state of awareness constantly. It experiences life existentially in each moment, not epistemologically. So it asks what am I, who am I?; not how can "I" (which I have pre-supposed by accummulating memory of my self) do this or that.
As you say, this existential self is the only self that can act effectively. It can see that the "I" is an illusion, the past projected to the present. It is beyond attachment by virtue of self-knowledge.
This takes us into Thursday's quote...