Limits of Thought

 The limits of thought is a series of conversations between Jiddu Krishnamurti and David Bohm. I remember being fascinated by this book two years ago, which made me stay up all night trying my hardest to grasp at the esoteric concepts being talked about. 

The topics of conversation seemed reachable, because of K's simplistic language, yet subtly out of reach. Like my mind had to be very attentive to try and grasp at what was being talked about. This desperation to grasp these forms of knowledge has guided me on my journey uptill this point, and perhaps will continue to guide it further, but today I realised while reading a passage from Savitri by Sri Aurobindo that this is still incomplete. 

Reminiscent of Kierkegard's question or anxiety about having faith, this question was encountered but at a much more subtle, much more real level. Our thought starts from epistemic axioms, lines so basic that without them you could not even begin parsing the content of your perceptions. Questioning these almost always requires an experience of altered states of consciousness, because the garble of our everyday language is propaganda against genuine internal discovery. 

There is no incentive to deconstructing and looking at your epistemic system in today's world. It leaves you more doubtful and unsure of everything in your life. Society prefers narcissists to those who have humility, for if you are concerned with yourself then I can please you periodically and not have you make me question the constructs of myself. Real revolution is to be radically genuine and to point out truth as you see. To not let that sense of viveka ever be diminished. 

But it does, in very subtle ways. For example, in something as simple as picking up the dead phrases of those around me to fit in better with them, I am now suddenly less present in my conversations. The truth really is that every conversation is new, fresh. Sometimes, I just do not have the words to continue on with the societal image that I have built. At some moments in conversation, being truly present is you not being there, letting the other's words act on you. 

Yet we change these into anxious social games; The way in which Kojeve taught the slave master dialectic has become so ingrained in us. To stand alone above that; That is perhaps true revolution. But it requires confronting your finitude. Paraphrasing again, a part of what I took from Savitri, true viveka has the tendency to reduce all that is finite to nothingness; what is not eternal is ephemeral. In the sense that Krishnamurti used it, it is dropping something completely as soon as you see the untruth in it. 

This is not as easy to do as it sounds. Or perhaps that is my societal conditioning revealing itself through my insistence on the difficulty of this. We stick somewhat to our conventions of success, money, attractivenss, or other methods of imposing judgement on ourselves and the like even after we see the untruth in them. Everyday we walk in the world, we get propagandized to stay in these rigid lines of thought. Is that enough justification for not having broken out? Because it is possible for us to break out in some other areas. 

All this is still within the sphere of thought. The divine feminine which I have pointed towards earlier and again do a disservice to by pointing it out with this name; is an unfathomable vastness. Relating what Aurobindo mentioned with the hegelian dialectic, we realise that the divine feminine, or chaos lies still much beyond. 

Thought is extinguished when it is reflected onto itself at the root. This linguistic description is a disgusting prescriptive marker for the sheer beauty of this process which you can observe in yourself. It is a disservice to draw a line around this process to capture its immensity, perhaps without writing a whole book for the exposition like Hegel did. That clear absolute knowledge one experiences when the foundation for their epistemic system is that pure self reflective dynamism; Even that does not begin to scratch the surface. 

There is a whole sea of truth beyond it, which is only experienced when waves arise in it which form the roots of thought and are observed again in the perfect container of self-reflexive awareness. Is that masculinity and feminity? Do those naive notions even hold weight as pointers in that realm, or are the archetypes they demonstrate perhaps enriched in those who enquire to that level, because of the sheer depth of the collective psyche they have dug into. 

Thought literally cannot enroach upon that which I call the divine feminine but is perhaps better termed as pure mysteriousness and chaos. In an allegory of the episode from Ramayana where Sita is inside the Laxman Rekha, as soon as any thought with even a hint of ego seeks to step close, it is burned alive in the brilliance of the truth. The ego is too heavy a stone to carry for the absolute sincerity the journey demands. It is also perhaps reminiscent of Anubis comparing one's life with a feather. Or the metaphor of the path to heaven being through the eye of a needle; "The middle path" is not just an empty prescription, or a metaphysical metaphor. It is literally a phenomenological orientation towards each moment.

Again, I am letting my thoughts fly but it is dishonest because they are still laced with an ego. But that is all I have to offer for today because I am an imperfect human. Thank you for reading.