Art of being oneself
In emotional excitement objectivity and reflexion alike tend to vanish, and subjectivity then approximates to immediacy. It is this that gives subjectivity its bad name; for few people know of any subjectivity beyond emotional immediacy. Their escape from emotion is towards objectivity, in the form of distractions, rather than towards reflexion, which is the more difficult way of self control. Goethe once described the advice 'Know Thyself' (inscribed in the temple of Apollo at Delphi) as 'a singular requisition with which no man complies, or indeed ever will comply: man is by all his senses and efforts directed to externals—to the world about him'.
***
You say that I am one
who thinks not only of other people but also of himself as 'they'. I see
what you mean and I will not deny it, but it needs stating differently.
Two paragraphs back I pointed out that it is inherently impossible to
see oneself (unless one is simply thinking of one's body) as one sees
another person (at least, not authentically), so I cannot be 'they' to
myself as others are 'they' to me. People, for the most part, live in
the objective-immediate mode (discussed earlier). This means that they
are totally absorbed in and identified with positive worldly interests
and projects, of which there is an unending variety. That is to say,
although they differ from one another in their individual natures, the contents of their respective positivities, they are all alike in being positive.
Thus, although the fundamental relation between positives is conflict
(on account of their individual differences), they apprehend one another
as all being in the same boat of positivity, and they think of men
generally in terms of human solidarity, and say 'we'.
But the person who lives in the subjective-reflexive mode is absorbed
in and identified with, not the positive world, but himself. The world,
of course, remains 'there' but he regards it as accidental (Husserl says
that he 'puts it in parentheses, between brackets'), and this means
that he dismisses whatever positive identification he may have as
irrelevant. He is no longer 'a politician' or 'a fisherman', but 'a
self'. But what we call a 'self', unless it receives positive
identification from outside, remains a void, in other words a negative.
A 'self', however, is positive in this respect—it seeks identification.
So a person who identifies himself with himself finds that his
positivity consists in negativity—not the confident 'I am this' or 'I am
that' of the positive, but a puzzled, perplexed, or even anguished,
'What am I?'. (This is where we meet the full force of Kierkegaard's
'concern and unrest'.) Eternal repetition of this eternally unanswerable
question is the beginning of wisdom (it is the beginning of
philosophy); but the temptation to provide oneself with a definite
answer is usually too strong, and one falls into a wrong view of one
kind or another. (It takes a Buddha to show the way out of this
impossible situation. For the sotāpanna, who has understood the
Buddha's essential Teaching, the question still arises, but he sees
that it is unanswerable and is not worried; for the arahat the question no longer arises at all, and this is final peace.)
This person, then, who has his centre of gravity in himself instead of
in the world (a situation that, though usually found as a congenital
feature, can be acquired by practice), far from seeing himself with the
clear solid objective definition with which other people can be seen,
hardly sees himself as anything definite at all: for himself he is, at
best, a 'What, if anything?'. It is precisely this lack of assured
self-identity that is the secret strength of his position—for him the
question-mark is the essential and his positive identity in the world is
accidental, and whatever happens to him in a positive sense the
question-mark still remains, which is all he really cares about. He is
distressed, certainly, when his familiar world begins to break up, as it
inevitably does, but unlike the positive he is able to fall back on
himself and avoid total despair. It is also this feature that worries
the positives; for they naturally assume that everybody else is a
positive and they are accustomed to grasp others by their positive
content, and when they happen to meet a negative they find nothing to
take hold of.
It quite often happens that a positive attributes to a negative various
strange secret motives, supposing that he has failed to understand him
(in a positive sense); but what he has failed to understand is that
there is actually nothing there to be understood. But a negative, being
(as you point out) a rare bird himself, is accustomed to positives, by
whom he is surrounded, and he does not mistake them for fellow
negatives. He understands (or at least senses) that the common factor of
positivity that welds them together in the 'we' of human solidarity
does not extend to him, and mankind for him is 'they'. When a negative
meets another negative they tend to coalesce with a kind of easy mutual
indifference. Unlike two positives, who have the differences in their
respective positivities to keep them apart, two negatives have nothing
to separate them, and one negative recognizes another by his peculiar
transparency—whereas a positive is opaque.
***
The word 'inauthentic' is used by Heidegger to describe the ostrich-like attitude of the man who seeks to escape from his inescapable self-responsibility by becoming an anonymous member of a crowd. This is the normal attitude of nearly everybody. To be 'authentic' a man must be constantly and deliberately aware of his total responsibility for what he is. For example, a judge may disclaim personal responsibility for sentencing people to punishment. He will say that as a judge it is his duty to punish. In other words it is as an anonymous representative of the Judiciary that he punishes, and it is the Judiciary that must take the responsibility. This man is inauthentic. If he wishes to be authentic he must think to himself, whenever he sits on the Bench or draws his salary, 'Why do I punish? Because, as a judge, it is my duty to punish. Why am I a judge? Is it perhaps my duty to be a judge? No. I am a judge because I myself choose to be a judge. I choose to be one who punishes in the name of the Law. Can I, if I really wish, choose not to be a judge? Yes, I am absolutely free at any moment to stop being a judge, if I so choose. If this is so, when a guilty man comes up before me for sentence, do I have any alternative but to punish him? Yes, I can get up, walk out of the courtroom, and resign my job. Then if, instead, I punish him, am I responsible? I am totally responsible.' Nanavira Thera (from letters)
***
The word 'inauthentic' is used by Heidegger to describe the ostrich-like attitude of the man who seeks to escape from his inescapable self-responsibility by becoming an anonymous member of a crowd. This is the normal attitude of nearly everybody. To be 'authentic' a man must be constantly and deliberately aware of his total responsibility for what he is. For example, a judge may disclaim personal responsibility for sentencing people to punishment. He will say that as a judge it is his duty to punish. In other words it is as an anonymous representative of the Judiciary that he punishes, and it is the Judiciary that must take the responsibility. This man is inauthentic. If he wishes to be authentic he must think to himself, whenever he sits on the Bench or draws his salary, 'Why do I punish? Because, as a judge, it is my duty to punish. Why am I a judge? Is it perhaps my duty to be a judge? No. I am a judge because I myself choose to be a judge. I choose to be one who punishes in the name of the Law. Can I, if I really wish, choose not to be a judge? Yes, I am absolutely free at any moment to stop being a judge, if I so choose. If this is so, when a guilty man comes up before me for sentence, do I have any alternative but to punish him? Yes, I can get up, walk out of the courtroom, and resign my job. Then if, instead, I punish him, am I responsible? I am totally responsible.' Nanavira Thera (from letters)
Crime of existing
About Kafka's Trial, as I remarked on an earlier occasion, it seems to me that the crime with which K. is charged is that of existing, and that this is why the charge is never made explicit. Everybody exists, and it would be ridiculous to charge one man with this crime and not the next man as well. But not everybody feels guilty of existing; and even those who do are not always clear about what it is precisely that they feel guilty of, since they see that the rest of mankind, who also exist, go through life in a state of blissful innocence. The criminal charge of existing cannot be brought home to those who are satisfied of their innocence (since judicial censure is worse than futile unless the accused recognizes his guilt), and also it cannot be brought home to those who recognize their guilt but who are not satisfied that it is of existing that they are guilty (since judicial censure fails of its intended effect if the accused, though aware of guilt, believes that the charge against him has been wrongly framed). To secure a conviction, then, the charge must be one simply of guilt; and so, in fact, it is in The Trial.
'"Yes", said the Law-Court Attendant, "these are the accused men, all
of them are accused of guilt." "Indeed!" said K. "Then they're
colleagues of mine."' (pp. 73-4) And this charge of guilt, clearly
enough, can only be brought against those who are guilty of guilt, and
not against those who do not feel the guilt of existing. But who is it that feels the guilt of existing? Only he who, in an act of reflexion, begins to be aware
of his existence and to see that it is inherently unjustifiable. He
understands (obscurely, no doubt, at first) that, when he is challenged
to give an account of himself, he is unable to do so. But who is it that
challenges him to give an account of himself? In The Trial it
is the mysterious and partly corrupt hierarchical Court; in reality it
is he himself in his act of reflexion (which also is hierarchically
ordered). The Trial, then, represents the criminal case that a
man brings against himself when he asks himself 'Why do I exist?' But
the common run of people do not ask themselves this question;
they are quite content in their simple way to take things for granted
and not to distress themselves with unanswerable questions—questions,
indeed, that they are scarcely capable of asking. K.'s landlady, a
simple woman, discussing K.'s arrest with him, says
'You are under arrest, certainly, but not as a thief is under arrest. If one's arrested as a thief, that's a bad business, but as for this arrest—It gives me the feeling of something very learned, forgive me if what I say is stupid, it gives me the feeling of something abstract which I don't understand, but which I don't need to understand either.' (p. 27)So, then, K. is under arrest, but he has arrested himself. He has done this simply by adopting a reflexive attitude towards himself. He is perfectly free, if he so wishes, to set himself at liberty, merely by ceasing to reflect. 'The Court makes no claims upon you. It receives you when you come and it relinquishes you when you go.' (The priest on p. 244.) But is K. free to wish to set himself at liberty? Once a man has begun to reflect, to realize his guilt, is he still free to choose to return to his former state of grace? Once he has eaten the fruit of the tree of reflexive knowledge he has lost his innocence,[a] and he is expelled from the terrestrial paradise with its simple joys. Having tasted the guilty pleasures of knowledge can he ever want to return to innocence? Can he, in terms of The Trial, secure a 'definite acquittal' from guilt, or does his case have a fatal fascination for him?
'In definite acquittal the documents relating to the case are completely annulled, they simply vanish from sight, not only the charge but also the records of the case and even the acquittal are destroyed, everything is destroyed.' (pp. 175-6)
'Definite acquittal',
in other words, is a total forgetting not merely of one's actual past
reflexions but of the very fact that one ever reflected at all—it is a
complete forgetting of one's guilt. So long as one remembers having
reflected, one goes on reflecting, as with an addiction; and so long as
one continues to reflect, one holds one's guilt in view; for the
Court—one's reflexive inquisitor—, 'once it has brought a charge against
someone, is firmly convinced of the guilt of the accused', and 'never
in any case can the Court be dislodged from that conviction.' (p. 166)
To reflect at all is to discover one's guilt. So, then, is it possible to get a 'definite acquittal', to choose to unlearn to reflect?
'I have listened to countless cases in their most crucial stages, and
followed them as far as they could be followed, and yet—I must admit
it—I have never encountered one case of definite acquittal.' (Titorelli,
on p. 171.) No, whatever theory may say, in practice having once tasted guilt one cannot unlearn reflexion and return to the innocence of immediacy, the innocence of a child.
The best one can do to ward off the inexorable verdict—'Guilty, with no
extenuating circumstances'—is to seek either 'ostensible acquittal'
(p. 176), wherein awareness of one's essential guilt is temporarily
subdued by makeshift arguments but flares up from time to time in crises
of acute despair, or else 'indefinite postponement' (pp. 177-8),
wherein one adopts an attitude of bad faith towards oneself, that is to
say one regards one's guilt (of which one is perpetually aware) as being
'without significance', thereby refusing to accept responsibility for
it.
K., however, is not disposed to try either of these devices, and seems,
rather, to want to bring matters to a head. He dismisses his advocate
as useless—perhaps the advocate in The Trial represents the
world's professional philosophers—, and sets about organizing his own
defence. For this purpose he recruits, in particular, women helpers,
perhaps regarding them as the gateway to the Divine (if I remember
rightly, this is one of Denis's earlier views—in Crome Yellow—that makes life so complicated for him). This view is clearly mystical, and is denounced in The Trial.
'"You cast about too much for outside help," said the priest
disapprovingly, "especially from women. Don't you see that it isn't the
right kind of help?"' (p. 233)
In The Castle, on the other hand, K. uses women to get him entrance into the kingdom of heaven, and perhaps with some effect; but in The Castle
guilt is evidence of the existence of God, and the guiltier one is the
better chance one has of getting the favour of the Castle (thus Amalia
indignantly rejects the immoral proposals of one of the gentlemen from
the Castle and is promptly cut off from the Divine Grace, whereupon her
sister Olga prostitutes herself with the meanest Castle servants in the
hope of winning it back).
In The Trial
the task is to come to terms with oneself without relying on other
people; and although we may sympathize with K. and the other accused in
their efforts to acquit themselves before the Court, actually the Court
is in the right and K. and the others in the wrong. There are three
kinds of people in The Trial: (i) the innocent (i.e. ignorant)
mass of humanity, unable to reflect and thus become aware of their
guilt, (ii) the (self-)accused, who are guilty and obscurely aware of
the fact but who refuse to admit it to themselves and who will go to any
lengths to delay the inevitable verdict (the grovelling Herr Block of
Chapter VIII, for example, has no less than six advocates, and has
succeeded in protracting his case for five years), and (iii) the
(self-)condemned man, who, like K. in the final chapter, faces up to the
desolating truth and accepts the consequences.
'The only thing for me to go on doing is to keep my intelligence calm and discriminating to the end. I always wanted to snatch at the world with twenty hands, and not for a very laudable motive either. That was wrong, and am I to show now that not even a whole year's struggling with my case has taught me anything? Am I to leave this world as a man who shies away from all conclusions?' (p. 247)For the reflexive man who retains his lucidity, there is only one verdict—'Guilty'—and only one sentence—death. K.'s death in The Trial is the death of worldly hope; it is the immediate consequence of the frank recognition that one's existence is guilty (that is to say, that it is unjustifiable); and this execution of the capital sentence upon hope is actually the inevitable conclusion to The Trial. I think you told me that you had found that K.'s death was an arbitrary and artificial ending to the book, which ought to have finished inconclusively. This would certainly have been true of Block, who clearly did not have the moral courage to face facts: Block would never have condemned himself to death (i.e. to a life without hope), and to have him executed by divine fiat would have been senseless. But with K. it was different: just as he had arrested himself by becoming reflexive, so he had to execute himself by admitting his guilt; and this is the furthest that anyone can go—in the direction of understanding, that is—without the Buddha's Teaching.
***
What I said in my last letter about K.'s reason for recruiting, in particular, women to help his case—namely, that he perhaps regarded them as the 'Gateway to the Divine'—is excessive. It is true enough of The Castle, where K. is seeking God's grace; but in The Trial K. is simply attempting to justify his own existence, and his relations with women do not go beyond this. Here is an illuminating passage from Sartre:
Whereas before being loved we were uneasy about that unjustified, unjustifiable protuberance which was our existence, whereas we felt ourselves "de trop," we now feel that our existence is taken up and willed even in its tiniest details by an absolute freedom [i.e. that of the one who loves us (N)] which at the same time our existence conditions [since it is our existence that fascinates our lover (N)] and which we ourselves will with our freedom. This is the basis for the joy of love when there is joy: we feel that our existence is justified. (B&N, p. 371)In The Trial, then, K. is seeking to use women to influence the susceptible Court ('Let the Examining Magistrate see a woman in the distance and he almost knocks down his desk and the defendant in his eagerness to get at her.'—p. 233). In other words, K. is trying to silence his self-accusations of guilt by helping himself to women (which does indeed have the effect—temporarily—of suppressing his guilt-feelings by making his existence seem justified). But K. is told—or rather, he tells himself—that this sort of defence is radically unsound (in Dr. Axel Munthe's opinion, a man's love comes to an end when he marries the girl). And, in fact, Sartre's detailed analysis of the love-relationship shows only too clearly its precarious and self-contradictory structure.
Nanavira Thera (from letters)
Footnote:
[68.a] Note the ambiguity, the ambivalence, of this word innocence, so close to ignorance, just as guilt and knowledge are sometimes almost synonymous. Adam and Eve, after eating the apple, knew that they were naked, and they were ashamed.*
*innocence: In an early letter (29 June 1958) to the Ven. Ñānamoli the author remarked: 'Avijjā is a primary structure of being, and it approximates to innocence, not to bad faith, which is a reflexive structure, far less fundamental. Is it not odd that, existentially, avijjā would be translated alternatively by "guilt"—Kafka, Kierkegaard—and "innocence"—Camus, Sartre? Innocence and guilt, both are nescience.'
Addiction
Let me also tell you of the researches of Dr. Klar when he was in Persia shortly after the war. Dr. Klar, besides being a physician, is also interested in psychology; and he had with him in Persia an ingenious device for reading a person's character and state of mind. (This consists of a number of cards each with about eight pairs of coloured squares pasted on them. The subject is simply required to indicate which colour in each pair he prefers. He 'read' us all at the Hermitage, with devastatingly accurate results that did not really please all of us. But this is a digression.) He told us that eighty percent of all Persians over the age of thirty-five (I think he said) take opium (and also that all Persians tell lies on principle—but this is another digression), and with such a wealth of material to hand he was able to do some research. He would give each addict two readings, one before taking opium and one after. The readings all said the same thing: before the opium the mental state of the addict was abnormal and disorganized; after the opium the mental state was normal and organized. The effect of the opium on the addict was not, as one might think, to disintegrate the personality; on the contrary, the effect was to integrate a disintegrated personality. The opium was necessary to restore the addict to normal. (I have heard similar observations from another doctor who was for many years a medical missionary in China: if you want to do business with an opium addict, drive your bargain when the effect of his last dose is wearing off.)
What can we conclude from all this? We conclude that, unlike a 'normal'
person who may take a drug once in a way for the novelty or pleasure of
the effect, and who at that time becomes 'abnormal', the confirmed
addict is 'normal' only when he has taken the drug, and becomes
'abnormal' when he is deprived of it. The addict reverses the usual
situation and is dependent upon the drug to keep him in his normal
integrated state. (This does not mean, of course, that the addict
derives pleasure from occasional deprivation as the abstainer
does from occasional intoxication; quite the contrary: in both cases the
drugged state is more pleasant, but for the one it is normal and for
the other it is abnormal.) The addict can only do his work efficiently
and perform his normal functions if he takes the drug, and it is in this
condition that he will make plans for the future. (If he cannot take
the drug the only plan he makes is to obtain another dose as quickly as
possible.) If he decides that he must give up his addiction to the drug
(it is too expensive; it is ruining his reputation or his career; it is
undermining his health; and so on) he will make the decision only when
he is in a fit state to consider the matter, that is to say when he is drugged; and it is from this (for him, normal) point of view that he will envisage the future. (Thus, it was as a smoker
that I decided to give up smoking.) But as soon as the addict puts his
decisions into effect and stops taking the drug he ceases to be normal,
and decisions taken when he was normal now appear in quite a different
light—and this will include his decision to stop taking the drug. Either,
then, he abandons the decision as invalid ('How could I possibly have
decided to do such a thing? I must have been off my head') and returns
to his drug-taking, or (though he approves the decision) he
feels it urgently necessary to return to the state in which he
originally took the decision (which was when he was drugged) in order to make the decision seem valid again.
(And so it was that I felt the urgent need of a cigarette to confirm my
decision to give them up.) In both cases the result is the same—a
return to the drug. And so long as the addict takes his 'normal' drugged
state for granted at its face value—i.e. as normal—, the same thing will happen whenever he tries to give up his addiction.
Not only is the drug addict in a vicious circle—the more he takes the
more he wants, the more he wants the more he takes --, but until he
learns to take an outside view of his situation, and is able to see the nature
of drug-addiction, he will find that all his attempts to force a way
out of the vicious circle simply lead him back in again. (A vicious
circle is thus a closed system in stable equilibrium.) It is only when
the addict understands addiction, and holds fast to the right
view that—in spite of all appearances, in spite of all temptations to
think otherwise—his 'normal' drugged state is not normal, that
he will be able to put up with the temporary discomfort of deprivation
and eventually get free from his addiction. In brief, then, an addict
decides to give up drugs, and he supposes that in order to do so all
that is necessary is to give them up (which would certainly be a glimpse
of the obvious were it not that he is profoundly deceiving himself, as
he very soon finds out). No sooner does he start giving them up than he
discovers (if he is very unintelligent) that he is mistaken and has made
the wrong decision, or (if he is less unintelligent) that though the
decision is right he is wrong about the method, and that in order to give up drugs it is necessary to take them.
It is only the intelligent man who understands (against all
appearances) that both the decision and the method are right; and it is
only he that succeeds. For the intelligent man, then, the instruction
'to give up drugs it is necessary to give them up', far from being a
glimpse of the obvious, is a profound truth revealing the nature of
addiction and leading to escape from it.
I would ask you to pause before dismissing this account as fanciful;
this same theme—the vicious circle and the escape from it by way of
understanding and in spite of appearances—is the very essence of the
Buddha's Teaching. The example discussed above—drug-addiction—is on a
coarse level, but you will find the theme repeated again and again right
down to the finest level, that of the four noble truths. It will, I
think, be worthwhile to illustrate this from the Suttas.
In the 75th Sutta of the
Majjhima Nikāya (M.i,506-8) the Buddha shows the vicious circle of
sensual desire and its gratification in the simile of a man with a skin
disease (kutthi—a leper?). Imagine a man with a fiercely
itching skin disease who, to relieve the itching, scratches himself with
his nails and roasts himself near a brazier. The more he does this the
worse becomes his condition, but this scratching and roasting give him a
certain satisfaction. In the same way, a man with finely itching
sensual desire seeks relief from it in sensual gratification. The more
he gratifies it the stronger becomes his desire, but in the
gratification of his desire he finds a certain pleasure. Suppose, now,
that the skin disease were cured; would that man continue to find
satisfaction in scratching and roasting himself? By no means. So, too, a
man who is cured of sensual desire (an arahat) will find no more pleasure in sensual gratification.
Let us extend the simile a little. You, as a doctor, know very well
that to cure an itching skin disease the first thing to do is to prevent
the patient from scratching and making it worse. Unless this can be
done there is no hope of successfully treating the condition. But the
patient will not forego the satisfaction of scratching unless he is made
to understand that scratching aggravates the condition, and that there
can be no cure unless he voluntarily restrains his desire to scratch,
and puts up with the temporarily increased discomfort of unrelieved
itching. And similarly, a person who desires a permanent cure from the
torment of sensual desire must first be made to understand that he must
put up with the temporarily increased discomfort of celibacy (as a bhikkhu)
if the Buddha's treatment is to be successful. Here, again, the way out
of the vicious circle is through an understanding of it and through
disregard of the apparent worsening of the condition consequent upon
self-restraint.
Consider, now, the four noble truths. The fourth of these truths is,
'This is the way leading to the cessation of suffering, that is to say,
the noble eight-factored path'; and the first factor of this path is
'right view', which is defined as knowledge of the four noble truths.
But, as before, the fourth truth is the way leading to cessation of
suffering. So we come to the proposition, 'The way leading to cessation
of suffering is knowledge of the way leading to the cessation of
suffering', or 'To put an end to suffering one must understand the way
to put an end to suffering'. And what is this but a repetition, at the
most fundamental level, of our original theme, 'To give up drugs one
must understand the way to give up drugs'?*
Not everybody is addicted to morphia, but most people are addicted to sensual gratification, and all except the ariyasāvakas are addicted to their own personality (sakkāyaditthi)**, and even the ariyasāvakas, with the exception of the arahat, still have a subtle addiction, the conceit 'I am' (asmimāna). The arahat
has put an end to all addiction whatsoever. There is thus no form of
addiction that the Buddha's Teaching will not cure, provided the addict
is intelligent and willing to make the necessary effort.
*The rationalist, who would not for a moment dream of practising the
Buddha's Teaching, can never understand that this is anything else than a
glimpse of the obvious. Arthur Koestler, on first meeting the Buddha's
Teaching, exclaimed 'But it's all tautologous, for Heaven's sake!'
**Below this point, though the essential structure of addiction remains
the same, it is no longer possible to get an outside view of it by
voluntary effort. In other words, one cannot give up sakkāyaditthi (and become sotāpanna)
as simply as one can give up tobacco, merely by deciding to do so and
sticking to the decision. Indeed, it is so difficult that it takes a
Buddha to find out about it and tell others. Nanavira Thera (from letter)
It is the merit of the existentialist philosophers that they do in fact bring the problem to light in this way. What happens is this: the thinker examines and describes his own thinking in an act of reflexion, obstinately refusing to tolerate non-identities, contradictions, and excluded middles; at a certain point he comes up against a contradiction that he cannot resolve and that appears to be inherent in his very act of thinking. This contradiction is the existence of the thinker himself (as subject).
Obviously, of these three attitudes, the first two evade the problem
either by arbitrarily denying its existence or by arbitrarily denying
the Laws of Thought upon which it depends. Only the third attitude
asserts the Laws of Thought and asserts the existence of the problem.
Though the puthujjana does not see the solution of the problem, he ought at least to see that to evade the problem (either by denying its existence or by denying the Laws of Thought on which it depends) is not to solve
it. He will therefore choose to endure the discomfort of the third
attitude until help comes from outside in the form of the Buddha's
Teaching, or he himself finds the way out by becoming a Buddha. Nanavira Thera (from letter)
Laws of Thought
It is the merit of the existentialist philosophers that they do in fact bring the problem to light in this way. What happens is this: the thinker examines and describes his own thinking in an act of reflexion, obstinately refusing to tolerate non-identities, contradictions, and excluded middles; at a certain point he comes up against a contradiction that he cannot resolve and that appears to be inherent in his very act of thinking. This contradiction is the existence of the thinker himself (as subject).
You will find this contradiction illustrated in the passage from Camus in NIBBĀNA [a],
but it is more concisely presented in the later part of the Mahā Nidāna
Suttanta (D. 15: ii,66-8), where the Buddha says that a man who
identifies his 'self' with feeling should be asked which kind
of feeling, pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral, he regards as his 'self'.
The man cannot identify his 'self' with all three kinds of feeling at
once, since only one of the three kinds is present at a time: if he does
make this identification, therefore, he must do it with the three
different kinds of feeling in succession. His 'self', of course, he takes for granted as self-identical—'A is A'—that is to say as the same 'self' on each occasion. This he proceeds to identify in turn with the three different
feelings: B, C, and D. A is therefore both B and C (not to mention D);
and C, being different from B, is not B: so A is both B and not B—a
violation of the Law of Contradiction. But whether or not it is with
feeling that the puthujjana is identifying his 'self', he is always identifying it with something—and it is a different something on each occasion. The puthujjana takes his existence for granted—cogito ergo sum
(which, as Sartre says, is apodictic reflexive evidence of the
thinker's existence)—and is in a perpetual state of contradiction.
So
we have the following situation. Assuming the validity of the Laws of
Thought, the thinker discovers that the whole of his thinking depends
upon an irreducible violation of the Laws of Thought, namely the
contradictory existence of the thinker. And this itself is a
contradiction. If he tolerates this contradiction he denies the validity
of the Laws of Thought whose validity he assumed when he established
the contradiction in the first place; there is therefore no
contradiction for him to tolerate, and consequently he is not denying
the Laws of Thought; the contradiction therefore exists and he tolerates
it.... Or he may refuse to tolerate the contradiction; but if he does
so, it is in the name of the Law of Contradiction that he does so, and
refusal to tolerate the contradiction requires him to deny the validity
of the Laws of Thought by which the contradiction was originally
established; he has therefore no reason to refuse to tolerate the
contradiction, which, if the Laws of Thought are invalid, is
inoffensive; he therefore does not deny the validity of the Laws of
Thought, and the contradiction is offensive and he refuses to
tolerate it.... Or perhaps he neither tolerates the contradiction nor
refuses to tolerate it, in which case he violates the Law of Excluded
Middle.... Most certainly the problem exists!
How is it dealt with? (i) The rationalist,
by remaining on the level of reason and refusing to look at his
premises, asserts the validity of the Laws of Thought, and successfully
blinds himself to the standing violation of the Laws of Thought—his own
existence. (ii) The mystic endorses the standing violation of
the Laws of Thought by asserting their invalidity on principle. This
obliges him to attribute their apparent validity to blindness or
ignorance and to assert a Reality behind appearances that is to be
reached by developing a mode of thinking based on the three Laws: 'A is
not A'; 'A is both B and not B'; 'A is neither B nor not B'. (iii) The existentialist
says: 'Contradiction is the truth, which is a contradiction, and
therefore the truth. This is the situation, and I don't like it; but I
can see no way out of it'. To maintain this equivocal attitude for a
long time is exhausting, and existentialists tend to seek relief in
either rationalism or mysticism; but since they find it easier to
endorse their personal existence than to ignore it they are more
inclined to be mystical than rational.
Death - A Great Act of Purgation
Death is something not only mysterious but a great act of
purgation. That which continues in a repetitive pattern is
degeneration. The pattern may vary according to country, according
to climate, according to circumstance, but it is a pattern. Moving
in any pattern brings about a continuity and that continuity is part
of the degenerating process of man. When there is an ending of
continuity, something new can take place. One can understand it
instantly if one has understood the whole movement of thought, of
fear, hate, love - then one can grasp the significance, instantly,
of what death is.
What is death? When one asks that question, thought has many answers. Thought says: "I do not want to go into all the miserable explanations of death." Every human being has an answer to it, according to his conditioning, according to his desire, his hope. Thought always has an answer. The answer will invariably be intellectual, verbally put together by thought. But one is examining, without having an answer, something totally unknown, totally mysterious - death is a tremendous thing.
One realizes that the organism, the body, dies and the brain - having in life been misused in various forms of self-indulgence, contradiction, effort, constant struggle, wearing itself out mechanically, for it is a mechanism - also dies. The brain is the repository of memory; memory as experience, as knowledge. From that experience and knowledge, stored up in the cells of the brain, as memory, thought arises. When the organism comes to an end, the brain also comes to an end, and so thought comes to an end. Thought is a material process - thought is nothing spiritual - it is a material process based on memory held in the cells of the brain; when the organism dies, thought dies. Thought creates the whole structure of the me - the me that wants this, the me that does not want that, the me that is fearful, anxious, despairing, longing, lonely - fearful of dying. And thought says: "What is the value, what is the significance of life for a human being who has struggled, experienced, acquired, lived in such an ugly, stupid, miserable way and then for it to end?" So, thought then says: "No, this is not the end, there is another world." But that other world is still merely the movement of thought.
One asks what happens after death. Now ask quite a different question: What is before death? - not what is after death. What is before death, which is one's life. What is one's life? Go to school, to college, university, get a job, man and woman live together, he goes off to the office for 50 years, she goes off earning more money, they have children, pain, anxiety, each fighting. Living such a miserable life one wants to know what is after death - about which volumes have been written, all produced by thought, all saying, "Believe". So, if one puts all that aside, literally, actually, puts it all aside, then what is one faced with? - the actual fact that oneself who is put together by thought, comes to an end - all one's anxieties, all one's longings come to an end. When one is living, as one is living now, with vigour, with energy, with all the travail of life, can one live meeting death now? I am living in all vigour, energy and capacity, and death means an ending to that living. Now, can I live with death all the time? That is: I am attached to you; end that attachment, which is death - is it not? One is greedy and when one dies, one cannot carry greed with one; so end the greed, not in a week's time, or ten days' time - end it, now. So one is living a life full of vigour, energy, capacity, observation, seeing the beauty of the earth and also the ending of that instantly, which is death. So to live before death is to live with death; which means that one is living in a timeless world. One is living a life in which everything that one acquires is constantly ending, so that there is always a tremendous movement, one is not fixed in a certain place. This is not a concept. When one invites death, which means the ending of everything that one holds, dying to it, each day, each minute, then one will find - not "one" there is then no oneself finding it, because one has gone - then there is that state of a timeless dimension in which the movement we know as time, is not. It means the emptying of the content of one's consciousness so that there is no time; time comes to an end, which is death.
Krishnamurti from Wholness of life
What is death? When one asks that question, thought has many answers. Thought says: "I do not want to go into all the miserable explanations of death." Every human being has an answer to it, according to his conditioning, according to his desire, his hope. Thought always has an answer. The answer will invariably be intellectual, verbally put together by thought. But one is examining, without having an answer, something totally unknown, totally mysterious - death is a tremendous thing.
One realizes that the organism, the body, dies and the brain - having in life been misused in various forms of self-indulgence, contradiction, effort, constant struggle, wearing itself out mechanically, for it is a mechanism - also dies. The brain is the repository of memory; memory as experience, as knowledge. From that experience and knowledge, stored up in the cells of the brain, as memory, thought arises. When the organism comes to an end, the brain also comes to an end, and so thought comes to an end. Thought is a material process - thought is nothing spiritual - it is a material process based on memory held in the cells of the brain; when the organism dies, thought dies. Thought creates the whole structure of the me - the me that wants this, the me that does not want that, the me that is fearful, anxious, despairing, longing, lonely - fearful of dying. And thought says: "What is the value, what is the significance of life for a human being who has struggled, experienced, acquired, lived in such an ugly, stupid, miserable way and then for it to end?" So, thought then says: "No, this is not the end, there is another world." But that other world is still merely the movement of thought.
One asks what happens after death. Now ask quite a different question: What is before death? - not what is after death. What is before death, which is one's life. What is one's life? Go to school, to college, university, get a job, man and woman live together, he goes off to the office for 50 years, she goes off earning more money, they have children, pain, anxiety, each fighting. Living such a miserable life one wants to know what is after death - about which volumes have been written, all produced by thought, all saying, "Believe". So, if one puts all that aside, literally, actually, puts it all aside, then what is one faced with? - the actual fact that oneself who is put together by thought, comes to an end - all one's anxieties, all one's longings come to an end. When one is living, as one is living now, with vigour, with energy, with all the travail of life, can one live meeting death now? I am living in all vigour, energy and capacity, and death means an ending to that living. Now, can I live with death all the time? That is: I am attached to you; end that attachment, which is death - is it not? One is greedy and when one dies, one cannot carry greed with one; so end the greed, not in a week's time, or ten days' time - end it, now. So one is living a life full of vigour, energy, capacity, observation, seeing the beauty of the earth and also the ending of that instantly, which is death. So to live before death is to live with death; which means that one is living in a timeless world. One is living a life in which everything that one acquires is constantly ending, so that there is always a tremendous movement, one is not fixed in a certain place. This is not a concept. When one invites death, which means the ending of everything that one holds, dying to it, each day, each minute, then one will find - not "one" there is then no oneself finding it, because one has gone - then there is that state of a timeless dimension in which the movement we know as time, is not. It means the emptying of the content of one's consciousness so that there is no time; time comes to an end, which is death.
Krishnamurti from Wholness of life
