THE NAUTILUS & THE OCEAN: A Perceptual Reframing of Life as Work & Social Change as a Struggle “Against All Odds.” OR: Some Small Gifts for the Hopeful & Serene Heart. Sometimes it seems like the weight of suffering in the world is so great, and that it is all bearing down on our small lives, crushing us. In this way, life often appears bleak, like little more than a challenge one must endure. We feel disabled, incapable. When life appears this way, the prospect of change seems to depend on arduous paths of endless work. We seem to be faced with confronting the totality of everything greater than ourselves, and even then we feel like any breach in our vigilance mission may open the floodgates to bring failure rushing in. We are literally living at crush depth: where every effort we make seems waged against all odds. When the world faces us in such a way we can imagine our living as the life of a nautilus shell at the bottom of the ocean. Like the chambered structure of the shell, the forms of our relationship to the world greatly influence what we feel capable to be or do. If we approach the shell as shelter from the crushing depths of the ocean we see separation, opposition, and division from the space of the ocean. We have created a duality. Fortunately, Krishnamurti’s vision in Inward Revolution shows us another way to read this experience of suffering & discouragement that opens the way for change without denying the painful challenges we so often face. On the contrary, Krishnamurti’s account reveals both an underlying grace in the seeming chaos of this reality and a basic unity connecting us with the larger principles of order at work in nature. Once we shift our perceptions, for example, to see the nautilus shell as naturally occurring within the ocean—i.e., as something that expressing or manifesting the larger order (“life”) of the ocean—we behold instead a vision of symbiosis, equilibrium, and balance. In this reflection, I will examine how Krishnamurti’s considerations of space, perception, and our own non-duality with the world suggests a sort of immanent divinity within each of us, along with the promise of more beautiful & life-affirming roles in the creation of our spiritual and social lives. NON-DUALITY & PERCEPTION: If you are looking at your life as an observer separate from your life, there is a division between the observer and the observed. Now, this division is the essence of all struggle, pain, fear, despair. Where there is division between human beings—of nationalities, of religions, socially—there must be conflict […] If you don’t understand this, you can’t go much further, because a mind that is in conflict cannot possibly ever understand what truth is. (100) As this excerpt suggests, we must liberate ourselves from the damaging habits of perception held dear in our minds when we view the world in a dualistic manner—built of the “me” and “not me,” or a variable cast of “us’s” and “them’s.” These habits wastefully dissipate our energies over the effort “to carry out what has been in the present or in the future,” while perpetuating division within and against ourselves (72, original emphasis). Simultaneously, this dualistic perception distracts us from: a) the world as it is; b) the practices necessary for cultivating space for an awareness of natural order; and c) a sense of attention to the ways in which actual truth is dynamic and appears chaotic to the mind that tries to grasp it positively—as a merely conceptual representation. The bedrock of Krishnamurti’s message, then, is about demystifying the ways we perpetuate illusory accounts of the world, often unwittingly hindering ourselves from actual understandings by wedging inscrutable “patternings” such as causal notions of time and arduous paths to truth between ourselves and our realizations of truth. In opposition to this norm, Krishnamurti makes it his vocation to jostle us from our comfortable yet misleading accounts of reality, providing instead the means for radical transformation. “Your life is disorder, but when you understand it, not intellectually but actually, out of that comes order […] It’s a living thing” (106-7). Moreover, the orderliness, which is forever ‘waiting in the wings’ to emerge, manifests through behavior that is distinctly “not habit,” “not practiced,” and “not the cultivation of some virtue” (107, emphasis added). Why? Because these are all things you cannot approach directly—not through intentionality, the prescriptive measures of a path, or the volition of the will. All such approaches rely upon the duality imposed by the will, as it imagines the world : what is desired is not present truth, but imagined states that in turn must be teased out of the world of possibilities by manipulating the strings of cause & effect. Instead Krishnamurti suggests that “through seeing what [things are] not, through negation, you come upon the positive” (107, emphasis added). Thus, we must practice “action without will,” thereby obliterating the presumable divide between what is and what needs to shift for us to understand how truth is already immanent (44). And this is true precisely because, in so doing, we leave ourselves open to the rawness that is simply there when we experience directly. As Ani DiFranco sings in the song “Up Up Up Up Up Up”: Half of learning how to play is learning what not to play; she’s learning the spaces she leaves have their own things to say; and she’s trying to sing just enough so that air around her moves; and make music like mercy that gives what it is and has nothing to prove… SPACE & MEDITATION: Closely related to the perceptual habits of duality and the liberation of consciousness through authentic & holistically living realizations of non-duality, is the issue of space and the practice of meditation. As Krishnamurti writes, Isolation creates a limited space. Isolation is a form of resistance, and where there is resistance there is a limited space. I resist a new idea, a new way of living; I resist any disparagement of tradition; I resist my beliefs. Within that resistance, within that wall, there is a very small limited space. Have you noticed it? The activity of thought as the “me” creates a very small space within itself… there is a duality, the “me” and the “not me” […] See […] how the mind is limited, small, enclosed within the action of a very small area and that as long as that area is very limited, there is no space and therefore there must be conflict. (43-4) What Krishnamurti is actually saying, then, is that we must get beyond the self and release ourselves into the all-immersive space of actuality (e.g.: the godhead), and in so doing we will also release ourselves from conflict. In other words, we must realize ourselves as pieces of the world still open to that which is ever-becoming. We can live like conduits of a larger life force, but only when we leave spaces in ourselves open to this. Yet how might we practice this? Meditation is one potential key insofar as it can facilitate our connection with a sort of open, serene, or non-habituated consciousness, allowing the uninhibited emergence/arising of the radically unknown. When meditation works for the whole being, it provides an example of awareness that can contrast with, and so, disrupt or teach us things about our typical habits of mind. When we are fortunate, it may also enable us to realize a brilliantly thriving & vibrant flow of direct awareness—once we still the noisy knowledge of cluttered ideas & cumbersome fixations with yesterday. PERCEPTUAL CHANGE: Krishnamurti’s wisdom rests in the recognition that liberation is always at hand, regardless of time, tradition, or any path circumscribed upon our experience from the outside. Given the “pressures” of the world—“all the confusion, the deterioration, the corruption, the division, the great suffering” (38)—all of which seems to bear down on us when we imagine changing the world, Krishnamurti challenges us to realize ourselves as already “equally intense” and “passionate” as any obstacle that confronts us (39). This means that in devoting “all our attention and, naturally, our passion” toward life as a radically free and open question (39). Thereby, we initiate “a psychological revolution” where “time doesn’t exist at all” because it is completely superfluous to our “means of achievement,” which depends solely on our perception (40). In my metaphor of nautilus shells and life in the realms of the ocean deep, this is equivalent to shifting our perceptions so that deep-sea creatures do not bear the weight of the world even though it is pressing down upon them. Rather, since these life forms are composed within the very same environment(s) within which they live, and (from a non-dual perspective) literally manifest another level of what the truth of the ocean is, the ocean we are accustomed to imagining is no longer a force of oppression but the very medium of space & physical context that enables life at all. This is why we may observe deep sea crabs, for example, which, in spite of the many tons of water pressure pushing down on every square inch of their bodies, still flutter gracefully along even the darkest sea floors in their almost lacy-fine telescoped shells. This “intensity” or “passion” on behalf of the deep-sea crab to manifest as a life form already presupposes the act of pressing back against the world. And in this sense, their existence is neither distinct from nor in conflict with their environment; they exist in non-dual equilibrium within the larger reality of “the ocean.” My point with this focus on tenacious life forms like the deep-sea crab is to suggest there is a certain divine immanence that radiates at some expansive frequency throughout the natural world. You can see this when you realize just how well life forms fill-in so much space with their living presence when there just as well could be emptiness. Moreover, this immanence of unity with the larger (non-individualistic) scale of the living world also recasts our very existence as a human life form with a broad base of creativity & power that is completely inalienable. A parallel way to frame this realization would be to say that the question “why are we here?”—e.g., on this planet, living sentient lives in this world, etc.—ought not to be imagined as an insurmountable burden of evidence, where we must answer sufficiently (i.e., with the mind, through introspection, etc.) before proceeding with life; rather, the answer can be as simple as “because we’re here,” in which case we have only to get on with living & “rolling the bones.” Regardless of which example makes more sense, each suggests that the reality of the world is always on the tip of the tongue of the universe—where we are each its taste buds—feeling uniquely yet “sharing together […] the movement from what is to what should be” (40). When we give up on our addictions to habitual struggle, we free ourselves from the burden of the world’s problems. And, as Krishnamurti reminds us, dissolving this state of conflict with the world can come about simply. The world is only stiflingly grave when we perceive it as such. By addressing the movement of “psychological time,” “the very seeing of which is instant action,” we can simultaneously free ourselves from our own entrenchment while setting new courses for the world through the differences we embody (41, 42). In other words, to realize this transformation “not intellectually but actually” (107) is to: a) Bypass the temporal & causal barriers between oneself and the apprehension of truth; b) To see through paths that have been “placed [as] an idea to be achieved” before the psyche; and c) To disregard all prescriptive requirements “involv[ing] effort”—which Krishnamurti indicts as just another means of maintaining truth just beyond the scopes of our collective imagination, and out of reach for personal realization (41). IMMANENT ASSURANCE & THE POWER OF REALIZING LOVE FOR THE WORLD: So just what does this have to do with assurance in going about living & conducting social change? One common thread I have tried to weave throughout this reflection is a perspective that reminds us how to love the world as well as the self (our “self”) that struggles with the weight of the world. When we see the world as beautiful, and see ourselves as part of this beauty, we both affirm and amplify the divinity immanent in our lives. Furthermore, through realizing this serenity in the heart that is open, beating for oneself and the world alike, we bristle with the energies and passions of an order far greater than we are capable in separation. Simultaneously, the flickering flames of revolution within each of us find the fuel to grow brighter through resonance with an order from which we are inseparable (except by our own perception), unleashing great ripples of change across a unified world. Our proper roles in the world are as living conduits & conductors for the proliferation of beauty in the world. Like the gracefulness of life we behold beyond our habitual senses of self, render in isolation—from the luminescent jellyfish, gently oscillating and illuminating the darkest depths to the lacy-thin shelled crabs of the deep ocean, gliding and fluttering under what appears to the mind as an immense burden—it is all weightless. There is no work to be done. This is the perceptual shift. All the work is already done. We are here to live, and here to do what we will. “If you don’t do it now, you won’t do it later” (100). We have to see and feel how the skeptical disposition and its questions can hinder the realization of truth that is raw and natural; how it may disable us, obscuring the ways in which we are already liberated and free to be any way we please. So when Krishnamurti says, “when you see what your life is, in which there is no love, no beauty, no freedom, you ought to shed tears,” it is not because we must “withdraw,” “deny,” or “escape from [the world]” (105). Rather, it is a call to shed the familiar shelter of our shells (as a border & barrier from the world); to embrace the brilliance of our marvelous existence, meeting the world in its full scope of complexity, pain, and dynamism; to shift and see the whole world with eyes wide open: the graceful order of the nautilus spiral emanating from our own lives; and in so doing, realizing the divinity immanent within the only “concert” at which we ever truly have the front row seat—the concert between ourselves and the world, every moment: “And are you seeing that looking from a conclusion prevents you from looking at it directly, being in contact with it?” (100). As a final note, I feel likewise that this is exactly the message of love immanent in DiFranco’s words as she sings: She crawls out on a limb And begins to build her home And it’s enough to just to look around and know that she’s not alone up up up up up up points the spire of the steeple but god’s work isn’t done by god [removed and abstracted] it’s done by people [in concert with divinity] REFERENCES CITED: Ani DiFranco. “Up up up up up up.” Up up up up up up. Righteous Babe Records: 1999. Barbara Kingsolver. The Poisonwood Bible. London: HarperCollins, 1999. J. Krishnamurti. Inward Revolution: Bringing About Radical Change in the World. Boston: Shambhala, 2006. Rush. “Roll the Bones.” Roll the Bones. Atlantic Records/WEA, 1991.
Posted on: Thu, 03 Jul 2014 20:13:08 +0000