Daily Quote, Tuesday February 17, 2009
Bright and sunny in Halifax this morning if you're checking in from far away!
Today's quote is below under the bold type as usual.
Have you in yourself, as a feeling, feel now or have ever felt the contradiction between being who you are and who you want to be? It's an opportunity to go into yourself and experiment with Krishnamurti's negative approach that my comments yesterday where briefly outlining. For example, have you ever had a radical career change or left a long term relationship?
Today's quote takes up the points that Laureen and I were exploring in relation to yesterday's quote: where does effort come from?
Do join the conversation! Everyone from anywhere is welcome to comment. :-)
Self-contradiction is the cause of your ceaseless effort.
Self-contradiction does produce action, does it not? And the more determined you are in your self-contradiction, the more energy you pour into action. Do watch this process in yourself. The tension of self-contradiction produces its own action. If you are a clerk and you want to be the manager, or you want to become a famous artist or writer, or a great saint, in that state of self-contradiction you act most vigorously, and your action is praised by society, which is equally in a state of self-contradiction. You are this, which you dislike, and you want to become that, which you like. So, self-contradiction is the cause of your ceaseless effort. Don't say, 'How am I to get out of self-contradiction?' That is a most silly question to ask. Just see how completely you are caught up in self-contradiction. That is enough; because the moment you are fully aware of the contradiction in yourself, with all its implications, that very awareness creates the energy to be free of contradiction. Awareness of the fact, like awareness of a dangerous thing, creates its own energy, which in turn produces action not based on contradiction.
Collected Works, Vol. XI, - 262
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Today is the anniversary of JK's death. Here is a quote from his last talk.
ReplyDelete"...So, we are enquiring into what makes a bird. What is creation behind all this? Are you waiting for me to describe it, go into it? You want me to go into it? Why (From the audience: To understand what creation is[)]. Why do you ask that? Because I asked? No description can ever describe the origin. The origin is nameless; the origin is absolutely quiet, it's not whirring about making noise. Creation is something that is most holy, that's the most sacred thing in life, and if you have made a mess of your life, change it. Change it today, not tomorrow. If you are uncertain, find out why and be certain. If your thinking is not straight, think straight, logically. Unless all that is prepared, all that is settled, you can't enter into this world, into the world of creation."
Thanks for adding this!
ReplyDelete"No description can ever describe the origin. The origin is nameles."
It reminds me of a piece in Freud's Totem and Taboo that I used in my Ph.D. dissertation to deconstruct the relationship between the law and political representation. In this text, Frued describes the disorder of primitive tribal society where the jealous father chases off all his sons as they grow up so that he can have all the women for himself. Eventually, the son's wise up and band together and come back to the village and kill him. At the moment they experience profound sense of guilt for what they have done and establish the law from there to prevent future violent transitions of authority. As Freud points out, their feelings of guilt presupposed that the law that they had created in fact already existed.
Relating this to JK, you simply have to act now and not wait for a foundation or origin to be given to you. You can't presuppose anything. Look at the mess you've made of you life, feel it deeply within you, and the change will be there.
For JK everything is being created every second; that is why creation is the most holy.
JK refers to creation in the present, but isn't creation an artifact of the past? I have trouble separating the science from human relationships in the way that he refers to. I don't think they can exist separately.
ReplyDeleteI'm surprised at his use of the word 'holy' given his ideas about religion.
Hi Jackie,
ReplyDeleteHere are a few reflections that might bring some clarity and prompt more great questions.
It's not creation in the present. Notice the time interval present in the word "in." The present doesn't come first; there's no foundation to create from. It's that creation and the present are inseparable.
As it is used in the biblical sense, creation refers to evolution. Evolution for JK is an effort of the will stemming from the need to be better. The need to be better is our cultural way of dealing with hard issues that we want to avoid, where instead of exploring violence in ourselves as a way of transforming the world, we create a concept of what violence is not and try to progress towards it. The self-contradiction we then feel between what is and what should be manifests as more violence as we try to overcome everyone's violence but our own or just remain violent while we work at trying not to be violent. In reading this, it seems clear that science as technology again and again gets appropriated by our inability to observe ourselves and negate the negative. So I'm not sure that science and human relationships are always separate in JK's teachings.
Are you referring to him using the word holy or to his actual use of it? His actual use is consistent with his notion of a religious mind, which is a mind free of images. His comments on religious institutions, gurus, teachers, and the like are another matter!
You're probably noticing that a big part of what he's doing is problematising many of our common cultural understanding of certain words. Language is power and so to address the disorder and conflict that he sees around us, he has to bring back into question many of the key terms that are around the question of order and disorder.
These comments and conversations are terrific.