I was recently listening to a podcast from the Krishnamurti Foundation Trust on duality. It was part of the series called “The Urgency of Change”. I’ve always had a fondness of J. Krishnamurti, because he stood out in the crowd of Eastern ‘wise men’ that grew to great prominence in the 1960’s and 70’s. Jiddu rejected the guru culture and the religious and political doctrines pushed upon people, encouraging the listener to seek genuine personal liberation from the dogma of society and its organisations.
In his talks about the conundrums of duality, Jiddu sheds light on the fallacy of conceptual and symbolic thought and how it undermines our processing and understanding of very deeply rooted problems. ‘I am violent’ he utters, and superficially, the right answer to that is to say: “I must not be violent”, for that is the value-set of society, but in doing so conflict arises. Because one is fact – I am violent. The other is a non-fact, it’s an ideal, a dream and so ultimately a phantom. What he is hinting at here is how this inner separated ‘self’, the voice within, which he refers to as the ‘observer’ (a third party entity, created by our own mind), doesn’t actually know how to deal with the problems at hand. Instead of acknowledging the genuine state of things, the violence, suffering and pain, we invest a great deal of energy into moralising and justifying through the third-party 'observer' we've conjured up. The truth is that the right approach would be to accept the violent ways of man, and yourself, and really get to the root of it, to see it for what it truly is. And once stripped from its cultural, religious or political context, we will likely find that there’s really no reason at all to feel the way we do. But this does not happen when we constantly refer to the observer, which could be described as an internal coping mechanism. The problem is that us humans spend an awful lot of time in our heads trying to deal with these very complex matters, but when it gets too uncomfortable, we regress into justifying, rationalising and moralising. This I think is the easy way out, because a lot of issues in our society are rooted in systemic, organised forms of oppression which we’ve all absorbed and confused as our own conflict. In other words, we conflate ourselves with the brutal rigid systems of beliefs imposed upon us. Let's take for example the subject of war. Most of us acknowledge that war is at the very heart of man, we realise that we have waged wars, killed and pillaged for hundreds of years. We also understand, superficially, that it isn’t a good thing and we say “we are anti-war”. But still then we don’t want to really understand the problem on a deeper level, to get to the core of why it is that we kill and pillage, and the observer within, which is the product of our cultural, political and religious doctrine, naturally begins to justify and moralise, to skew the truth. We say ‘well, we had to do it because’ or 'we did it for a different reason' and so on and so forth. All of this is of course bogus. You’ve merely absorbed the rigid, soulless system and are regurgitating, and so long that we keep doing this, our experience of the world cannot be free and authentic.
This has become apparent to me when I was analysing my own trail of thought. I never thought of myself as someone that has been indoctrinated into thinking one way or another. But the truth is that, unbeknownst to me, I have internalised a lot of ways of thinking from my environment. These thoughts are culturally constrained, and as such not a real experience of the world. My thoughts are not my immediate reaction to the world around me, but a viewpoint formed by generations of people subjected to rigid schooling, alongside religious and political indoctrination. And when you see that, you also see how easy it is to cause great harm, because we are able to project the turmoil it causes unto a separate entity, away from ourselves. The ‘observer’ in the mind is a fragtment of my own conditioning and it takes away accountability. So, this separation makes you not only inattentive in life, forcing you to see life through the lens of your own past experiences and prejudices – or even more alien; the past experiences and prejudices of family or acquaintances, but it also gives you a free pass from seeing the grim, gritty truth for what it is. Like a turtle withdrawing into its shell. That can’t be good, right?
You see, to be present in life means to be there as it unfolds and this leaves no room for convenience, to be really attentive and present is to be there in full, with all your spirit at any given moment. For it is only then that you can make an impact, when you see what is happening in front of you, clearly, unclouded by biases and idealisations. It is important to recognise that nothing is ever as black and white as we make it, and so when we are chained by the observer, we are severely limited in our perception, always forced to tackle issues without nuance and consideration. You can see this clearly in the more authoritarian layers of our society, like the police, who due to their programming perceive the world as a miserable place of good and bad. Their naive categorising of people into victims and perpetrators, and their complete disinterest in the person and their circumstance, means that they’re really quite incompetent at preventing crime. Because if we actually wanted to get to the core of criminal activity, we’d have to start deconstructing society as a whole to see the bigger picture. But you see that’s not what police are for, they’re merely symbolic of the power that the state holds, their monopoly on violence and force, not a solution to anything. So, if we cannot police away the human brutality with rules, laws and force - where does that leave us? On that note I wish to segway into the following question:
I think the easy answer to this question is no, as all it takes is a quick peek at our history. There’s rarely been a time where we weren’t violent. And there’s no getting around it, violence is an integral part of life. It’s certainly a reality for all the other species. But their violence is different than ours, it serves a purpose in ensuring the natural homeostasis by controlling population numbers, preventing overconsumption of resources and lessening sickness. But to the human this is somewhat alien, and it is part of what sets us apart from the other animals on this earth, our unimaginable cognitive capability. One could imagine that our ability to grasp things, to see the impact of our actions in such a complex way, with empathy and understanding, should have made it an easy feat for us to stop needless harm, destruction and suffering. But if anything it has likely increased it. It is crucial to recognise how the cognitive development of the human mind, our intellect, has led to the formation of systems that divide and isolate us just as it has given us the capability to write the most beautiful proses of love and solidarity. Civilization with its borders and nation-states are products of human cognition, and with our intellect comes great capacity to differentiate, categorize, and control. So, as capable as our brain is of compassion and understanding, it is equally competent at excluding and exploiting. I would argue that part of the problem is exactly what Jiddu has so neatly presented to us; we just cannot see beyond our own social conditioning and past experiences. If the observer in our mind is a manifestation of the past and the rigid, rule-laden systems that we live under, then it serves as an internal authoritarian power that prevents us from using our brains to the fullest. I could only imagine how different the world would be if we started seeing the absurdity and naivity of so many of our actions, realising how we’ve consistently moralised and justified actions which have done nothing but drive wedges between each other, man and nature and even ourselves. I’ll ask this: If you don’t serve a system, a nation or a people – what reason have you to kill and maim, to hoard and steal, to conquer and claim? None. Genuine liberation comes, first and foremost, from freeing each individual from the constraints of their own mind, so they can perceive the world as beautiful or ugly as it may be, and then – only then – can we do something about it. It is unfathomable to me that we live in this modern world, with all these wondrous technologies and still most people are struggling and unhappy. It was first thought that the machine would lessen the burden for man, being one step in the direction of eliminating toil and strife. But it never did, and so many fantastic inventions and ideas have come and gone, but never changed things. Why is that? I think it is down to the fact that the many great minds of this world have never been able to go beyond their own constricted view of the world. They were always operating, often subconsciously, within the boundaries of the system and its teachings.
I realise that what I am writing could come across as me suggesting that what needs to happen is a mere change in value-set of the human mind. This could not be further from the case. I am not advocating for mindless do-gooding, this moralising is part of why we’re in this mess in the first place. Saying ‘I must be a better person’ does absolutely nothing. It’s, as mentioned earlier, an ideal and not a fact. Instead what I believe in is that as we strip ourselves of the conditioning, liberating our mind from the crusty chains of the ‘thinker’ or ‘observer’, we will have great capacity to finally see one another in a different light. Once we rid ourselves of all the past contexts and socially conditioned values, I don’t see how we could have any reason to hate and hurt. I don’t see how we could continue playing this silly game of one-upmanship unless we’ve got the many lavish promises of the system, which rewards this sort of nonsense. I will use a very real example here, which is a rather tragic but also very telling. Whenever there has been a natural disaster somewhere, what you will find is that most of society crumbles – sometimes for a long time, sometimes only briefly. But during those times something quite extraordinary happens, which is that the dividing factors of society begin to fade and in the face of great unimaginable despair, you begin to see others as they truly are, as scared and lost as you. And that commonality goes beyond the conditioning, it crushes it, suddenly it is in your interest to be compassionate and empathetic. Because you see the true extent of another’s suffering to the point where it becomes yours. This cannot happen so long that our brains operate in caste to a system of division. Now, what I am saying here isn’t that there will be no more violent humans, that everything will be lovey-dovey and that suffering will end. Yes, there will still be anger, pain and violence. But what I am saying is that if we can truly understand these sides of us, and really – and I mean deeply – analyse them without superficial justification or explanation, then we can actually get to the root of our feelings and see clearly what makes us act in one way or another. This, I believe, will pave the road towards peaceful co-existence with one another and our environment, provided we are able to be at peace with ourselves first. The greatest brutalities of man have happened not because of one persons hateful ways, but because of the thousands that followed them.