The Waiting Room....

A waiting room.…….full of passengers. Many passengers in there but there was no form visible. Yes, I vouch for that because I saw it clearly or rather not saw anything in there. No form at all…..absolutely sure about this. Gentlemen, let me introduce myself. I am eyes. I see but not think. I am free from that….that thing you call thinking. Place me in front of a mirror and you shall see nothing but I know I am eyes. I know it because I observe but I do not act.

Actually, I have not told you the truth. I am not eyes. I am actually free from all ‘I-amness’ but have to use ‘I’ to talk to you. You can choose not to hear me but I don’t think you will. It is your choiceless state that will make you hear me. No, I do not speak but in my presence you hear me. Just at this moment, a passenger was summoned and had to walk out of the waiting room. Please pay attention when I say ‘walk’. There is an issue here. I say ‘walk’ because the moment the passenger stepped out of the room, he had a form. So I extrapolate to say that he walked out of the room. You wonder who this passenger is… well, it is YOU.

Remember, the time you were born? Oh, you cannot but I talk about you when you were just born and a moment preceding it, when you were in the waiting room. Try to get this, you are the absurd surrealism that I see and I am the reality you do not. You are the reality that you see but that disables you to see me. So our realities differ because of the relativity of the observer. Allow me to indulge my fancy. You see, gentlemen, reason is an excellent thing, there’s no disputing that, but reason is nothing but reason and satisfies only the rational side of man’s nature, while I happen to be beyond reason and perception. You do not comprehend my manifestation because there is none. But can you overcome the dualism by reducing the existent into manifestations? No….you shall create a new dualism, that of finite and infinite. This new opposition, the "finite and the infinite," or better, "the infinite in the finite," replaces the dualism of being and appearance. What appears in fact is only an aspect of the object, and the object is altogether in that aspect and altogether outside of it.

Gentlemen, I am devoid of an ego and you are possessed and punished by it. I have no ego as I have no form and ego which is like a shadow of the body, therefore cannot exist. You see I didn’t kill it….it never existed. When you kill something, you imply its existence. You try to kill ego and can never do it as it is your shadow that follows you endlessly. I saw you……you renounced to be rid of it and ego manifested through your renunciation. You were trapped…..and the expansion of your ego was the easier path. Your nature is to avoid steep, long paths and so you made countries but ego didn’t leave you. Then cities and then cars and then computers, you tried shrinking but ego expanded. Now, I see you in despair. Well, gentlemen, do not label me a tyrant by arguing that why I didn’t save you……remember? I am eyes and I only see, not react or judge.

Now, you worry….worry about your ends and origins and not understand that you move in never ending circles. Leaving the Waiting Room to get back to the waiting room and then leaving again and you go on doing this. In the waiting room, you are nothing, no ‘I’ in you just like me but outside the waiting room, you exist in I-amness.

I hope you remember me…I am the eyes that have always watched you; whether you were in silence or chaos.

Reflections on J.Krishnamurti (part-2)

When the mind is like a pendulum swinging between surrealism and reality, then we board the wrong metro, drink decaf to keep the eyelids open in the office and wonder about ‘cogito ergo sum’ or ‘I think, therefore I am’. Now, Rene Descartes was no Salvador Dali, otherwise he would have claimed ‘I am, therefore I think’.

What has to be reversed by reflection is the selfconscious heart, which has to direct itself towards that point where the formative spirit is not yet manifest.

The thought is the manifest, the no-thought is the unmanifest. If your gestalt consists only of thoughts you will not know anything more than the ego. The ego is called “the self-conscious heart.” You remain nothing but a bundle of thoughts. That bundle of thoughts gives you a consciousness of the self, “I am.”

Descartes, the father of modern Western philosophy, says, “I think, therefore I am.” His own meaning is very different because he is not a meditator, but the statement is beautiful; in a totally different context it is beautiful. One can give it a different meaning. Yes, I am – only if I think. If thinking disappears, the I also disappears. “I think, therefore I am” – this I-amness, this self-conscious heart is nothing but a continuum of thoughts. It is not really an entity, it is a false entity, an illusion.

Ego is perhaps the subtlest thing in the world. Like a shadow….we run away from the shadow and the shadow runs with us…..inseperable. But what if we go under the shade of a tree? The shadow disappears…..don’t run and the shadow disappears. This tree is the manifestation of meditation-no mind, no ergo. It is absurd to say that “I think, therefore I am” or “Cogito ergo Sum”……because it implies that if I don’t think then I am not. But that is false…..in my not thinking, in my state of no mind lies my being. It is the state in which no thoughts are floating inside yet we are alert……When thoughts disappear, you are but you don’t feel you are. The I disappears, the amness remains. Those intervals between two thoughts, atomic intervals when we are but cannot say “I am” is the state when being is but ego is not. People renounce all wealth, power privileges to shed ego but then ego appears from the austerity, the so called modesty….from the humbleness.

Our social and religious structure is based on the urge to become something, positively or negatively. Such a process is the very nourishment of the ego through name, family, achievement, through identification of the 'me' and 'mine', which is ever causing conflict and sorrow. We perceive the results of this way of life - strife, confusion, and antagonism - ever spreading, ever engulfing. For what are we striving? What is it that each one is seeking? Until we are aware of our separate pursuits, it is not possible to establish right relationship between us. One might be seeking fulfillment and success, another wealth and power, another fame and popularity; some may wish to accumulate and some to renounce; there might be some who are earnestly seeking to dissolve the ego, while others may wish merely to talk about it. Is it not important for us to find out what it is we are seeking? To extricate ourselves from the confusion and misery in and about us, we must be aware of our instinctive and cultivated desires and tendencies. We think and feel in terms of achievement, of gain and loss, and so there is constant strife; but there is a way of living, a state of being, in which conflict and sorrow have no place. So to make these discussions fruitful it is necessary, is it not, first to understand our own intentions. When we observe what is taking place in our lives and in the world, we perceive that most of us, in subtle or crude ways, are occupied with the expansion of the self. We crave self-expansion now or in the future; for us life is a process of the continuous expansion of the ego through power, wealth, asceticism, or the cultivation of virtue and so on. Not only for the individual but for the group, for the nation, this process signifies fulfilling, becoming, growing, and has ever led to great disasters and miseries. We are ever striving within the framework of the self, however much it may be enlarged and glorified.

Is it possible to be a light to oneself and not depend on a single person? You have to depend on the milkman, on the postman, on the policeman who keeps order at the crossroad. You depend on a surgeon, on a doctor. But inwardly, psychologically, one doesn't have to depend to think clearly for oneself, to observe one's own reactions and responses, if one can be completely a light to oneself. Do you understand what that means - to be a light to oneself? It is not self-confidence, not self-reliance. Self-confidence is part of selfishness. It is part of egotism. But to be a light to oneself requires great freedom, a very clear brain, not a conditioned brain. But to have an active brain, to challenge, to question, to doubt, that means to have energy. But when you depend on others, you lose energy.

Thoughts are the objects and you will have to become aware of them. This is the first awareness: 'awareness one'. Krishnamurti talks about this, he calls it 'choiceless awareness'. Don't choose. Don't judge whatsoever thought is passing by, just watch it, just see that it is moving. If you go on watching, one day, thoughts don't move that fast; their speed has slowed down. Then, some day, gaps start coming: one thought goes and another does not come for a long time. Then, after some time, thoughts simply disappear for hours... and the road is just empty of traffic.

J. Krishnamurti is totally different in his expression, very logical, very rational. The beginning of his work is always with the mind; then slowly slowly he leads you beyond the mind. Intelligence has no choice. That's why Krishnamurti goes on defining intelligence as choiceless awareness. You will have to become more watchful about the thoughts, dreams, memories, flicking by, moving around you. You will have to have more attention focused on the thoughts. His idea is “freedom from thinking not the freedom of thinking”.

Reflections on Jean Paul Sartre & Existentialism

Well, since the book we are reading in our book club these days is The Words by Sartre, I thought to pen down his views on existentialism.
Sartre's Existentialism can be seen as a rigorous attempt to work out the implications of man's individualism.He asks:

What is human freedom? What can the absolute freedom of absolute individuals mean?

What is human flourishing or human happiness? What general ethic or way of life emerges when we take our individuality seriously?

What ought we to do? What ethics or code of action can emerge from a position that takes our individuality seriously.


When you think of it, each of us is alone in the world. Only we feel our pains, our pleasures, our hopes, and our fears immediately, subjectively, from the inside. Other people only see us from the outside, objectively, and, hard as we may try, we can only see them from the outside. No one else can feel what we feel, and we cannot feel what is going on in any one else's mind. Actually, when you think of it, the only thing we ever perceive immediately and directly is ourselves and the images and experiences in our mind. When we look at another person or object, we don't see it directly as it is; we see it only as it is represented in our own experience.hen you look at the person next to you do you really see them as they are on the inside or feel what they feel? You see only the image of them that is presented to your mind through your senses. This is easily demonstrated by considering how our senses deceive us in optical illusions, but one simple example will have to suffice here.

It seems, then, that we are minds trapped in bodies, only perceiving the images transmitted to us through our bodies and their senses. Each of us is trapped within our own mind, unable to feel anything but our own feelings and experiences. It is as if each of us is trapped in a dark room with no windows.

The Existentialist View--Sartre says that what all existentialists share in common "... is that they think that existence precedes essence, or, if you prefer, that subjectivity must be the starting point." Sartre explains what this means by contrasting it with the opposite slogan: ESSENCE PRECEDES EXISTENCE

He says "Let us consider some object that is manufactured, for example, a book or a paper-cutter: here is an object which has been made by an artisan whose inspiration came from a concept. He referred to the concept of what a paper-cutter is ... . Thus, the paper-cutter is at once an object produced in a certain way and, on the other hand, one having a specific use ... . Therefore, let us say that, for the paper-cutter, essence ... precedes existence."

Of course, the artisan in our case is God. Sartre continues: "When we conceive of God as the Creator, He is generally thought of as a superior sort of artisan. ... Thus the concept of man in the mind of God is comparable to the concept of the paper-cutter in the mind of the manufacturer... . Thus, the individual man is the realization of a certain concept in the divine intelligence."

On this view, the one Sartre is attacking, we get our nature from outside of us, from a being who created us with a preconceived idea of what we were to be and what we were to be good for. Our happiness and our fulfillment consist in our living up to the external standards that God had in mind in creating us. Both our nature and our value come from outside of us.

According to the existentialist, however, EXISTENCE PRECEDES ESSENCE. Sartre explains:

"What is meant here by saying that existence precedes essence? It means that first of all, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and, only afterwards, defines himself. ... Not only is man what he conceives himself to be, but he is also only what he wills himself to be after this thrust toward existence.
Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself"

Thus, there is no human nature which provides us with an external source of determination and value.

Sartre says:"If existence really does precede essence, there is no explaining things away by reference to a fixed and given human nature. In other words, there is no determinism, man is free, man is freedom."

Among the things we find on the mental tv screen, besides objects, other people, emotions, and desires, is ourselves. I see my body, and this thing I see is me. The human condition, for the Existentialist is a tension, a vertiginous imbalance, between the self that watches these images, standing apart from them, and the self that appears as an image. Just as I feel an imbalance upon walking into a department store and finding that one of the people on the video monitor is ME (caught by some unseen camera); or just as we feel a tension looking in the mirror wondering how the person in the glass can be ME if I am standing out here looking at it; so the self feels a tension between identifying itself with mind's eye behind the screen (standing apart from the give and take, the flux and flow, of our experience) and the images of us that appear as part of our experience (engaged in the world)

Thus, we all have the tendency to act in bad faith, to identify ourselves with one of the pictures we find on our mental TV screen, and to see ourselves as determined by one of the outside influences we find pictured there: our nature, our body, the physical world, or the expectations and pictures other people have of us. We are all familiar with the ways in which we try to excuse our actions by pretending that we are simply our bodies and are controlled by the forces that determine them. We have all said things like:



I can't talk to people, I just don't have that kind of personality.

I can't pass this course, I'm just don't have the brain for calculus.

I can't help the fact that I was born a man (or a woman); Certain things come naturally for certain types of people. (Says the man who can't take care of his children, or the woman who can't drive her car.)

I'm no good at this; I guess I just wasn't made to go to college.

I'm sorry I bit your head off yesterday. I must be premenstrual.

I don't know what happened. I guess the beer made me crazy.

In these cases, I am identifying myself with one of the pictures of me I find on my mental TV screen: I am my body, or my brain, or my personality, or my hormones. In each of these cases, I am deceiving myself. I am more than just these, and no matter how I try to avoid it, I am free.

I am not identical with any of the externally determined images on my mental TV screen. I am forever beyond the reach of their determinations within the island of my subjectivity.Even if I were a puppet, my body and its actions completely controlled by some malevolent master, what I am, my mind's eye would still be free and untouched. I could still be free to rebel against my master or make whatever I wished of the situation. They can do what they want to my body, manipulate the objects or pictures of me on my mental TV screen, but they can never touch or control the real me. The self within its island of subjectivity is radically free in virtue of its radical individuality.

Furthermore, I have control over the content of my TV screen as well. External circumstances may determine the objects that appear, how they appear, and when they appear, but I control how these various components will be put together into a coherent picture. Sartre compares the type of freedom we have to that of an artist. An artist cannot control the nature of the canvas, nor of the paints that she has to work with. Nor can she control the nature of the subjects she will paint. But she can control how she will view them, how she will put these various elements together into a unique whole. Likewise, we may not be able to control the various elements within our experience that come from outside us, but we can view them and combine them in any way we like. Our experience is not any one of these; it is the way in which we combine these into a unified whole. We have the power to edit the frames which constitute our experience into the film that is to be our life.

Summing up:

1) Our absolute individuality isolates our real self from the determining influences of the outside world; we can always rebel against its influence; and

(2) Even though the raw material that makes up our experience is determined by outside influences we are free to put these elements together into a unified whole; we must make ourselves anew at each moment, and what we shall make of ourselves is up to us.

Reflections on J.Krishnamurti

LIFE...LIVE...The ‘f’ in life renders it so many dimensions-failures, fears, fame, forlorn and on and on. LIVE is so uncomplicated, so within the moment, mindless, fleeting and atomic. The other day I was wondering, human mind is very well exemplified by a squirrel-restless, impatient and wandering.

As a species, we are a crisis in motion, aware of our diminutiveness to the whole and yet suffering from the syndrome to strive for identity. Why is anonymity such a sin? Why can’t I be nobody? Not identify with anything but emptiness and consequently not identify emptiness with negation and finiteness but with beauty and infiniteness.

It is always engrossing to hear J. Krishnamurti and read his commentaries and writings on living(not life!). His answer to the question ‘who are you or who am I’ was enquiring and penetrating. Are we the ‘story of mankind’? Product of imitations? If our education is not largely a pursuit of imitations of various kinds, then how is it that the self is so attached to the want of an identity? The self finds it impossible to be free from the clutches of identity....it cannot be anonymous. All our inner and outer activities become gratification of our self, to be made exclusive, to be recognised. The famous, the popular is pursued and the anonymity is deprecated. We strive.

Everyday is lived with a purpose, a goal. An achievement made and another to make. It gives gratification to self, a meaning to life. If one day you wake up and are told that life is meaningless, you will get depressed. But why? When only the finite has the meaning. A rose is totally meaningless. It is just there for no reason at all.....beautiful, infinite, mysterious.

The self makes all the effort to move away from what it is. Through renunciation or acquisition, either way it continues moving away from what it actually is. Apart from the name, the position, the profession, the attributes, the idiosyncrasies what is ‘the self’? Is there the ‘I’ when the very qualities are snatched away? Or is it the very fear of being totally poor that drives the self into constant activity; for it is nothing but emptiness. The emptiness that is beautiful like the rose and whose embrace brings about the transformation within. It is the experiencing of what is without naming it to get freedom from what is.