Thoughts on Krishnamurti Foundation Retreat (28-31July)

 Hello everyone, welcome back to another unfiltered rant, this time at a more reasonable time as I attempt to fix my sleep cycle in college. I recently had the opportunity to visit the Krishnamurti study center in Chennai for a weekend retreat and have enlightening (i.e. discomforting) conversations with people who had been following K's ideas for much longer than me, but more importantly, people who were actually open to seriously inquiring about life and the human condition in contrast to many people in society today. Being on the beautiful campus was a great experience for me, though my definition of great also involves questioning everything I know about myself and society and going through existential crises. Once I came back into 'the real world' so to speak, specifically my college, I've been feeling as though something is off though there are perhaps more factors associated with that feeling than just the experiences. Here, I just want to talk about random things which are on my mind and feelings which came to the fore when I visited the center. 

Firstly, I met a lot of people at the study centre who were quite successful outwardly but had a totally barren internal landscape so as to speak. On the first day of the retreat, I remember a person standing up and saying that "I've worked in corporate for 35 years of my life and made a lot of money, achieved a lot of success, but it only feels like I've woken up and started living my life now." This was a stark wake-up call for me, and it jolted me into realizing that this person must have also been a smart and energetic person at one point in time who devoted everything to material success. I saw how many of my friends are going down this path, and I too might end up going on a similar path if I do not remain aware.  

The second, and perhaps even more interesting types of people I met there were people who had gone the opposite route; they had engaged in inquiry into the self through various methods, such as psychoanalysis, western philosophy, Advaita, zen buddhism etc. These are all disciplines whose teachings quite resonate with me so it was disconcerting for me to meet someone who had been on this path for 27 years and still continuing. I remembered the quality of emotion or 'Ras' as poets would probably say in a hindi poem I read in 9th grade called "vaakh" by Lalyad. There is a spiritual seeker who seeks god in various forms throughout her life but at the end she realises that she remained trapped in illusions and ended up spending most of her life in nothing short of intellectual masturbation with these spiritual ideas. I felt scared at some level of having the same fate, and it is still a lingering concern. What is there (if anything) worth attaining in a spiritual pursuit (disgusting way of characterizing it) that is worth turning away from the experience of beauty, novelty and complexity of everyday life for. 

However, it was fun talking to this person as we had the same interests. We had a discussion about ADHD and they told me it was an aspect of their psyche they had come to grips with only recently. We talked about how it is an increasing problem and I suggested how there is an alternate perspective developing in society where instead of seeing it as a mental illness, it may be characterized as an entirely different interface with reality which might have the possibility to enrich the perspectives "normal" people have. We discussed some ideas from Dr. K i.e. Alok Kanojia, wherein for being "high-functioning" with ADHD,  it may be good to let yourself go in the curiosity-driven hyperfocus learning sprees and develop motivation or compassion towards yourself to plan around the dips which also invariably come.  

Another thing we talked about was experiences such as 'Dzogchen' or the flow of consciousness Krishnamurti tries to describe when he says 'the observer is the observed'. The person told me how he had had these experiences at one point in time, however, he then went back into the world and resumed his self-centered activity which made him 'lose' the realizations he had had. In dialogue, we talked about how the recognition of the experience, which indicated a sort of anxiety to have that experience or fear of not repeating it was itself serving as a barrier to the experience. Thought is constantly seeking to convert things into the known, in the form of memories, experiences etc. And there is always some degree of fear at the root of it. This now reminds me of a quote I read somewhere, though I don't remember the source now- " We behave as though there is something very sinister out there which we do not want to confront". This naturally reminds me of what Bernardo Kastrup quotes to prove that our perception is just an interface with reality and not the Kantian noumenon i.e. the experiments in evolutionary biology which prove that when a fitness function is maximized the probability that we're observing the true world goes to 0, and also perhaps more powerfully the idea that we are localized negative entropy extractors and we mirror the environment in some sense, so if we perceived everything outside truly, we would turn into primordial soup, just because of the amount of information required to create an accurate model. This is chaos or the ever new, ever creative, ever dynamic feminine I suppose, and if our center drops out, which has created a model of the world from the limited things we know it spontaneously starts blossoming more and more. In one of the talks we listened to there, Krishnamurti uses a beautiful phrase, in relating how this can happen if we truly observe the deep hurts our limited models of the world were causing- "The urgency of perception would itself dissolve any distortions". As we were talking about this reification, specifically in relation to a talk where K gave the classic example of "Can you look at a tree without naming it" and "the word is not the thing", it came up in dialogue that there is a tendency in thought to even try to recognize the experience of the blooming of this spontaneous creativity and joy. In this respect, the person quoted a beautiful line from a poem by William Blake "He who kisses a joy as it flies, lives in eternity's sunrise". 

Another interesting thing that came up in group dialogues was how language can twist our perceptions. We were talking about insecurity. There is a lot of normativity and dependence built into our language. As we were discussing, we realized how worthless it is to set up ideals and chase them, such as wanting to become non-violent or humble. If you want to "become" humble, you just want to get away from the truth that you are not humble. In recognizing the fact that you are not humble, there is a spontaneous movement towards humility. So naturally the question arises, how can you become continously aware of all your 'vasanas' as hindus would say. But the moment you say 'how' you are asking for prescriptions, or normative statements to guide you. As soon as you say continously, time, and hence fear enter the picture. Why do you want to be continuously aware? Because there is some degree of fear which we have of not being aware. so we are just left with "Can you become aware of your psychological predispositions and the emotions they're causing". But again here, when I pose this question to 'you' there is an implicit assumption that there is a you separate from these emotions. But as someone pointed out in discussion, there simply isn't a you separate from all the memories and the 'emotional charges' associated with these memories you've stored. 'You' are nothing but the story you tell yourself to make sense of your experiences. So we are stuck again if I pose this question to you, and here we begin to realise the perfect use of language Krishnamurti had, almost like a zen buddhist koan pointing to a specific movement of consciousness. He says "Can thought become aware of itself". This is not so much a statement which requires an immediate yes or no answer, but rather something which starts a process in your cognition. K has many statements like these, e.g. the one mentioned earlier "can you look at a tree without the name, can you look at your wife as if it is afresh, for the first time, can consciousness empty itself completely etc." These are extremely precise statements which can jolt you into inquiring into yourself. But of course, even the statements can become a crutch which brings me to the last of the things I want to talk about and want to internalize as much as possible. I mean this in a very penetrating sense but also the best way possible, take of it what you will, and thank you for reading. 

Nobody can help you.