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by Prof. P. Krishna
Friends,
In this talk I wish to revisit a question that was posed by Krishnamurti way back
in 1929, when he dissolved the Star of the East in Holland. I want to revisit it
because it is in exploring a question afresh, without agreeing or disagreeing with
any past conclusions, that we grow in our understanding and our own wisdom. If
we merely say, " Yes, I agree ,there is no path to truth" or "I disagree, there is a
path to truth", in both cases we only take sides with an opinion and remain
ignorant ourselves. So this evening , if I may, I would like to investigate this
question from first principles without assuming prior knowledge and starting
afresh from observation.
WHAT IS TRUTH ?
In order to explore this question we must ask ourselves what we mean by the
truth. Normally, in society, in the commonly accepted sense and parlance, we
mean by truth a statement which is an accurate description of something that
actually happened or is a fact. We also use the word truth in another sense, when
it describes a law in Nature or a certain cause and effect relationship. We say for
instance that the law of gravity is a great truth about Nature. It is an accurate
statement which is verifiable and which holds true as the cause and effect
relationship in the phenomena that take place all around us. So, that is another
sense in which we talk of the truth. Scholars often talk about truth as a rational
conclusion. They will check the truth or falsity of a statement by applying logic
and reason to it and if they can deduce something which is obviously absurd, they
will conclude that the original premise is not true. All these meanings of truth
have their own legitimate significance in the sphere in which we talk about them.
But truth has a totally different meaning in the religious quest.
In the religious quest, a truth is not merely an accurate description of a fact. It lies
at the level of perception, not at the level of ideation. For instance, I can read all
that the Buddha said and all that has been said by various people about what the
Buddha said and I could become a scholar of Buddhist philosophy but the
Professor of Buddhist philosophy is not the Buddha. The difference is not in the
lectures that he can give. The Professor may even be able to speak better than the
Buddha and explain various points better than the Buddha could explain.The
difference lies in the fact that his consciousness is not the Buddha consciousness
and unless there is a transformation of consciousness, there is no wisdom , there is
only knowledge. Knowledge may transform ideas in the mind but knowledge does
not transform consciousness.
THE PATH
There is a path to knowledge. The scholar has it. There is also the
analytical path to arriving at conclusions. So, there are many paths
but do they lead to religious truths is the question ? Truth is not a
matter of agreement or disagreement. All that lies in the plane of
knowledge, thought and analysis, and there is a lot which lies in this
field. Our daily life is in that field of thinking , planning ,imagination
and efforts and in that field there are paths. But there is another
plane of our existence, which is the plane of awareness, of wisdom,
of vision, of silence, of perception, all of which are not thought
based faculties. We are often unaware of the value of this plane. But
I think that religious truths lie in this plane, because they are at the
level of perception and not at the level of ideation. Truth lies in this
plane and the paths which we follow in our every day life, none of
those lead to this plane.
How does an illusion end? After all we grow up with it. I may grow
up in a family which says you must punish children otherwise they
get spoiled. I see my brothers and sisters being punished, I see my
neighbour doing it, I see other people do it ; so I grow up with this
idea that children must be regularly punished otherwise they will get
spoiled.Therefore, to me, that appears to be true. There are many
such illusions in the mind, at various levels. At the very superficial
level they are in the nature of superstitions. Superstitions can go
away even with intellectual enquiry and with the study of science.
Then there are the cultural illusions which we acquire from our
particular culture -- casteism, our attitude towards women,religious
divisions and so on. All those are cultural illusions which we
acquire from our environment and which we have not examined. We
take them to be true and we act on that basis. So there is a lot of
falsehood from where we are responding. Then there are the
psychological illusions -- the hurt that one has accumulated,the
prejudices, the enmities, the fears,the suspicions, the flattery.
Psychologists talk about psychological complexes which come from
a deep sorrowful experience. Sorrow does not always teach us what
the truth is. We also acquire prejudices from sorrow. All that
conditions the mind as all those illusions are held in the
memory.Finally, may be it is also an illusion that we are separate
individuals.The sages have pointed that out to be an illusion. It does
not seem true to us that we are not separate individuals, but as we
said, illusions are things which we take to be true which may not be
true.
There are also other kind of illusions which arise because we regard
something as tremendously important, when it may not be so
important.The importance our mind gives to money,to success ,to
fame ,to skills belongs to this category. Again, most probably the
importance is acquired from our culture, so they are in the nature of
cultural illusions. Anyway the point is that our mind has got all
kinds of illusions and from these illusions it is interpreting all its
experiences and the phenomena which it observes. So what will
ensure that I pick up the truth from an experience and not a fresh
prejudice ? We all know how knowledge grows but how does
wisdom grow ? If it did not grow then there would be only born
fools and born wise people ! It is not true that that either there are
fools or there are wise sages.You do find people who are wiser than
other people. So, surely there is such a thing as growth in wisdom.
How does that growth in wisdom take place ?
Now one of the factors that blocks insight and seriously distorts
perception is of course what we call the ego. So we need to
understand this thing called the ego which blocks. How does it arise
? How does it operate ? What does it do to my life ? The sages have
said the ego is an illusion. It is not something that exists in our
body like our heart or our kidneys or our lungs. It is not something
that is put there by Nature.. There is no ego in Nature anywhere. The
trees do not have ego; storms blow, cyclones come, but there is no
motivation in them to destroy. Therefore there is no ego. The ego is
only in human consciousness, which means I create it Nature has
not created it . I create it with the faculties I have received through
biological evolution as the capacity to think, to remember and to
imagine. So I must find out if I have not learned to use these
capacities rightly, and therefore I am myself creating the ego and
blocking my own learning. It may be the greatest block between me
and the perception of truth. The ego is not something very distant,
something very philosophical. It is something that all of us know
and perceive in our life. When we tell children about the sportsman
spirit, we tell them that it is important to play a game for the joy of it,
to excel in the game for the joy of it and not give tremendous
importance to winning or losing. What we are essentially asking
them to do is not to play the game egotistically. Of course it is
possible to play a game for the joy of it, for the love of it and not
worry too much about the end result of it. The Gita has talked about
it too that our concern is not with the reward or the end result but
only with the correctness of the action we are performing.. So
obviously, if that is possible in a game, why is it not possible in our
daily life ?
So, how do we perceive the danger of the ego ? I can give you an
intellectual explanation but that will not be perception. Take it as a
question. It is a question for me too and I speak to you only as a
fellow-enquirer on the path, a friend sharing his own experiences,
his own thoughts, his own dilemmas. Take any virtue, any simple
thing and and add the ego to it and you will see that it turns into a
vice. Take love, add ego to it and it becomes attachment, it becomes
possessiveness.Take a wish, which is an innocent thing, add the
ego to it and it turns into desire, it turns into addiction, it turns into
compulsion.Take humility and add the ego to it and it turns into
servility,inferiority.I am just pointing out to you that the real enemy
of all of us is the ego and that is simply in the approach we have
towards life. If only Bush and Bin Laden could realize that ! If Bush
could realize that Bin Laden is not his real enemy but that his own
ego is his real enemy, and if Bin Laden realized that Bush is not his
enemy, but his own ego is his enemy, then they would be friends is
it not ? They would say we have the same problem, let us talk it
over, let us deal with our common enemy !.
The path is very subtle. There is no fixed mechanical path. The fixed
mechanical path lies in the first plane, which is the ego plane in
which we live. The perception of truth does not lie in that plane. It
comes from the second plane, the plane of observation, of attention
Now, often a path implies that it is a journey which will take time. Is
the ending of the ego something that is helped by time ? As I
pointed out, the ego is in the approach and the possibility of
learning is there because we can approach things non- egotistically
. Since it is only my approach that determines whether there is the
ego or not in my relationship, in my observation, there is always the
possibility of an insight, free from the obstacle of the ego, taking
place. The ego is not something pre-existent there and we are not
creating it all the time. Not all our actions and observations are
egotistic. So, I have the possibility of watching the operation of the
ego within myself, and in so watching discovering for myself the
danger and the fact that I am myself creating that danger and I am
myself blocking wisdom. The day you perceive that actually, the
egotistic approach will drop away. It cannot drop away through
effort, because effort itself is towards an achievement, and that is
the essence of the ego.So, if I am through effort doing yoga,
through effort meditating, the ego itself is attached to that activity. If
I create a path, the ego can get attached to that path, to becoming,
to going down further on the path. You can watch yogis who do
yoga, fantastic yoga, but they can be as egoistic about their yoga as
artists often are about their art. It can just become another talent,
another achievement. The ego is very subtle , therefore, there is no
path to really end the ego. It is only perception which can end the
ego, and that perception requires a learning mind.
So the problem is not what I believe in and what I do not believe in;
the problem is superficiality. The problem is not whether one is
Buddhist or Christian or Hindu. The problem is that one is
superficially Buddhist, one is superficially Hindu; one is
superficially a theosophist. Take one of the objects of the
Theosophical Society, the Universal Brotherhood of Man. Is it just a
noble idea that we should all think of each other as brothers, that we
believe each other to be brothers, or is that the truth, is that the fact
? Which is the fact and which is the idea ? Is the division between
human beings arising out of illusion or is the brotherhood an
illusion, an ideal ? Krishnamurti said the truth is that the other man
is yourself and it is illusions that produce division. The idea of a
separate you and me is coming from illusions. So the universal
brotherhood of man is not an ideal to be achieved, it is a truth to be
perceived. So long as we have not perceived it for ourselves, we
cannot decide to be brotherly. If I decide to be brotherly, it becomes
something hypocritical, like deciding to love. We cannot decide,
these are not things which are voluntary, where decisions work.
So it is all very subtle, which is also the beauty of it. That is the
challenge life poses before a human being. The animal is not
capable of it, it does not require it either because Nature has limited
both its possibilities and its destructiveness. But in the human
consciousness there are enormous possibilities and there is also an
enormous capacity to be egotistic, destructive. That is why this
whole question of what is right living, the question of what is moral
and what is not moral arises only for the human being. And the
religious quest is to discover what it means to live with a
consciousness which is in harmony with the order of Nature.We are
a part of Nature and the whole of Nature has tremendous order.
Surely that order must extend within our consciousness too.We
destroy that order in our consciousness through a wrong use of the
faculty of imagination. Can I learn not to do that, can I end the
disorder in my consciousness ? Then there is the order which is not
created by me. It is Nature's order. So the religious quest is also the
quest for discovering what it means to live with a consciousness
which is part of Nature's order .