Daily Quote, Tuesday March 3, 2009
Good morning everyone,
Well, I never thought I'd be writing that it's rather hot and humid here in Halifax this morning, yet it is!
Here are my reflections on today's quote and I'm also exploring Mara's comment on yesterdays quote. The question today is whether the observer is his reaction to the observed. There is the observed as an example of what is and there is all of the hundreds or more years or history, culture, and conditioning that this involves that is the observer. The observer can therefore only ever be the observation of the observed. In the normal run of this we never get to the observed at all. The observer can only see the observed by observing his reaction, which is the place from which he sees that he doesn't see. If you can observe this in yourself, this whole process of thought and knowing as the movement of the past, then only the present would be left and you would see what is.
There is no need to analyse if you want to see what is, if you want to see the other. Analysis will always happen from the past. So don't try to figure out someone's problems or try to help them. Look at all of the time interval that this analysis entails during which we are still the observed. Simply observe your reaction, how you see, and let that observation widen and deepen, so that you see with intelligence rather than knowledge, so that your response to the other is appropriate to what is as opposed to a reaction to what was. Then rather than helping them you'll want to work with them. There will be co-operation.
When you have intelligence (which doesn't mean that you were once stupid of course!) then you can see the facts of the other person's life. Then images of them will no longer prevent you from loving them (not in the traditional sense of sex) and you can have affection, which is to feel your awareness moving towards them. Krishnamurti says that compassion is passion for another. I take this to mean that you don't let sentiment get in the way, as sentiment is always the past. We like to analyse because expanding the field of the known is expanding the observer, something from which we generally take endless pleasure. This sort of brings us back to the beginning!
Robert
Here is todays' quote:
If you can look . . . without the observer, a totally different action takes place.
Questioner: If we are all that background, the past, who is the observer who is looking at the past? How do we separate the past and the entity who says, 'I am looking at it'?
Krishnamurti: Who is the entity, the observer that is looking at the past? Who is the entity, the thought, the being - whatever you call it - who says, 'I am looking at the unconscious'?
There is a separation between the observer and the observed. Is that so? Is not the observer the observed? Therefore, there is no separation at all! Go slowly into this. If you could understand this one thing it would be the most extraordinary phenomenon that could take place. Do you understand the question? There is the unconscious as well as the conscious, and I say that I must know all about it; I must know the content and also the state of consciousness when there is no content, which is a step further, which we will go into if we have time.
I am looking at it. I say, the observer says, that the unconscious is the past; the unconscious is the race into which I was born, the tradition - not only the tradition of society but of the family, the name, the residue of the whole Indian culture, the residue of all of humanity with all its problems, anxieties, guilt, and so on. I am all that, and that is the unconscious, which is the result of time, of many thousands of yesterdays, and there is the 'me' who is observing it. Now, who is the observer? Again, find out for yourself; discover who the observer is! Don't wait for me to tell you!
Collected Works, Vol. XVI - 199
When the observer becomes the observed, even for a moment, does it dissolve the desire to possess? As the need to possess come from past traditions, from a culture of scarcity, of loss.
ReplyDeleteIt reminds me of a quote that said that you should be able to burn your own house down. As if you could do that you will have no attachments to your possessions.
I just wanted to pick up on one point here. It might be a tiny point but it might also be quite useful.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure if the observer "becomes" the observed. Psychologically, all we do is stop looking at the observed from our own conditioning and just see what is, the facts of the matter, rather than what we are looking for.
I don't think the idea is that we get "absorbed" into the other when we are not looking through images. It's not that you loose your sense of self; you just get incredibly sensitive to every small movement of it - to every small movement of thought about the self.
What you say about the house reminds of something in the other direction. There is a book called One-Dimensional Man (the author's name escapes me just now), where there is the true story of a man in the US who shot himself dead because he crashed his car.
For burning down the house, I think what you're saying is that it's not burning the house down that matters but how you feel afterwards or as you do it, how you react. Correct?
Thanks for clearing up the observer point. This feels very similar to the prakriti(seen) and parusha(seer) discussions in the yoga sutras.
ReplyDeleteI keep seeing things through the JK lexicon. I came across this quote from the late Peter Drucker where he is giving clear advice to companies on how to basically stop suffering.
"The late Peter Drucker identified the key management challenge of the 21st century as leading change and believed that the first question to ask is: “What should we abandon?" He realized abandoning yesterday is excruciatingly difficult. Modern organizations must be capable of change. Indeed, they must be able to initiate change, that is, innovation. Drucker observed:
"Maintaining yesterday is difficult and time-consuming and therefore always commits the institution's scarcest and most valuable resources—and above all, its ablest people—to non-results...organizational inertia always pushes for continuing what we are already doing"
PS. I believe the author of the One-Dimensional Man was Marcuse?
I’m not sure on the prakriti and purusha point; I might have to go and reread it closely. My sense in the Yoga Sutras is that they are separate and that practice (tapas) is to move us from prakriti to purusha; or to the place where the purusha is waiting to reveal itself.
ReplyDeleteNow from my reading of Derrida and now Krishnamurti, I would say that the outside to representation (the Purusha) always appears from within the act of representation (the prakriti) itself. (The “within” is the key point here.) In other words, the observer reaches the immeasurable by observing his own reactions (representations as images, prejudices, etc) of the observed, not by working towards (which is effort, will, etc.) an idea of God, etc. which is outside representation through any kind of program (The Yoga Sutras, the 10 Commandments, etc.).
The point is that this is how Derrida and Krishnamurti switch the entire source of agency for radical transformation back into the hands of human beings without recourse to violence and will. This, for me, is why they are both incredibly important. They show us how it’s possible.