Krishnamurti's Theory of Creative Void, By Kailash Vajpeyi

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Krishnamurti's Theory of Creative Void, By Kailash Vajpeyi

The Times of India, Saturday, May 22, 1999

(Not for commercial use. Solely to be fairly used for the educational

purposes of research and open discussion.)

 

Why is the world afflicted by neurosis? Is aggression, which is another form

of self-pity, a permanent element of human existence? Is man, who has become

a tool of his tools, going to blow up this planet? Or is he going to listen

to the inner conscience and live in harmony with his environment? Can peace

prevail in the world, or is it only a dream entertained by poets,

philosophers and other such cranks.

 

These questions were discussed over and over again, during the last five

decades, by one person: Jiddu Krishnamurti. Who was Krishnamurti? A loner, a

teacher, a guide, a philosopher? He always denied such epithets, and does so

in the recent book, 'J Krishnamurti in Dialogue with Chogyam Rimpoche, David

Bohm, Rene Weber and Others'. Despite the fact that Krishnamurti lectured

in India and abroad for 50 years, people find him elusive or inconclusive.

As a disciple -- although Krishnamurti opposed the guru-chelaa business,

there were disciples -- once said: "What, after all, has Krishnamurti given

me? I know what he has taken away from me, but what has he given me except a

double-edged sword which, while it cuts others, cuts me also."

 

What Krishnamurti struggled against were the rigid, fixed reflexes of

humankind. People conditioned to accept half-truths fight for their religion,

which is nothing but an amalgam of convictions borrowed from the scriptures.

Even when there is much else to do, nations wage wars; only to sign peace

treaties in bad faith and resume hostilities. More wars, it seems, have been

fought in the name of religion than in that of love or universal

brotherhood. For Krishnamurti, there is no fixed path to truth;

therefore, there can be no definition of religion. Sorrow is a reality and it

will remain so as long as desire and ambition keep man competing with

others. Here one is reminded of Patanjali's Yog Sootr. Like Patanjali,

Krishnamurti condemns 'desire' as the root cause of unhappiness. The only

difference between Patanjali and Krishnamurti is that what Patanjali calls

'detachment', Krishnamurti calls 'choiceless awareness'. 'Detachment',

says Patanjali, "is the deliberate renunciation of desire for objects seen or

heard". The desire to become desireless, Patanjali explains, is no desire:

it is the affirmation of man's real nature.

 

Krishnamurti explains the havoc caused by desire somewhat differently:

"Pleasure is the guiding principle in our life. Pleasure is the thing that

we want most. Here in this world and in the spiritual world in heaven -- we

want pleasure in any form." And when the moment of excitement is over, the

event is recorded in the memory; thought wants it to be repeated. But the

trouble with pleasure is that it also nourishes fear, leads to conflict and

produces an unsound mind. "The element of conflict ceases when a person

realises that 'I', the observer, am the observed," notes Krishnamurti. His

experience of 'the silent mind' has its roots in the Bhagavad Gita, where

Shri Krshn tells Arjun: "One who is not disturbed in spite of threefold

miseries, who is not elated when there is happiness and who is free from

attachment, fear and anger, is called a sage of steady mind." Similarly,

for Krishnamurti, "a disciplined mind is never a free mind, nor can a mind

that has suppressed desire ever be free. It is only through understanding

the whole process of desire that the mind can be free.

 

The mind that is limited by envy, by the 'me', by the acquisitive desire for

things or for virtue, can never be a truly religious mind. The religious mind

is not a comparative mind. The religious mind sees and understands the full

significance of what is." In one of his talks, Krishnamurti says: "The

state of direct experiencing is attention without motive. When there is the

desire to achieve a result, there is experiencing with a motive which only

leads to further conditioning of the mind." Krishnamurti reaches the

conclusion that the problems created by the mind can never be solved by the

mind, divided as it is against itself.

 

Krishnamurti's theory of the creative void is not new to the student of

Indian philosophy either. Nagarjuna, while discussing the root of conflict

and suffering in his Mahaaprajnaparmita Shastr, emphasises the fact that

man's ultimate nature is his undivided being. As long as man is divided, he

is bound to feel isolated and fragmentary. Nagarjuna lays bare the

absurdities of life, as conceived by the imagination; he then describes the

conditionedness of the conditioned as void, shoonyataa.