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Readers are requested to
send us personal experiences and impressions with K and his teachings.
One cannot know what one has not experienced
Walter Witherspoon, NSW Australia.
Before the
oppressive pomposity implicit in that statement squeezes the
interest out of you, let me ask a science fiction question. What, for
example, does a man from Mars look like? If I had to describe him, I'd
say he has a cabbage-like head, with an aluminum body, and perhaps
fourteen radishes for eyes. What do you think?
Whatever it is, it is only an improbable congruity of things we know,
put together to make something we do not know. In the end, we do not
know what a man from Mars looks like, or, indeed, if such exists. What
we do know is the product of our own mind - an unconventional,
surprising, sublime or grotesque product, to be sure - that tricks us into the
common human conceit of our capacity to know the unknowable. And what
is the unknowable?
The unknowable is the good life, the best one can be, peace, happiness,
love, God, or whatever one wishes to call the Purpose of Life. Once
the Purpose of Life is understood, presumably one can undertake to go
forward, by his own lights, to arrive safely there in his lifetime. As we
strive to understand, we look around for an example of someone, anyone,
who appears to have arrived. Even if he or she has not arrived, we can
see, through the lights that emit from their lives and their
utterances, that they are farther along the path than we, and we can safely
follow.
But if we rely on our brains to seek, study, and work hard we shall
fail, because knowledge is frail and limited, although it is seductive.
In the West, the ancient Greeks pronounced "Know Thyself" as the code
that would unlock The Purpose of Life. The Romans, on the other hand,
worshipped at the altar of "Order" as the Via Pacem. The
Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition, which aggressively if imperfectly continues,
cries
out that we must "Know God," and therefore His will. For many people,
none of these worthy creeds delivers on its promise to establish
private, public, or eternal peace.
In the East, the pursuit of The Purpose of Life has taken different paths, some
different and some familiar in the West. One guide that is not much known
in theological or philosophical circles in the West - although he is gaining in
popularity - and one that is better known in the East - although he rigorously
disciplined and turns off the lazy - is Jiddu Krishnamurti.
I say "disciplined" not in the commonly accepted sense, but in the
sense, in his own words, that one has to find it through the understanding
of the contents of his own mind, through observation and not through
intellectual analysis or introspective dissection. That is a tall order,
because the "contents" of our minds are the random access memory, not
the hard drive, of the marvelous computers between our ears.
I began this note by asking a science fiction question. In our sad
world today, billions of people do not recognize the oxymoron inherent in
that happy phrase, "science fiction." Indeed, one need only to look
around to see that science, "the knowable," and fiction, "the creations
of our minds," is synonymous.
But when one understands that science and fiction are not the same, and
that fiction is merely what we think we know, a whole new path opens.
That is a path that leads us to the unknowable, and at its end is The
Purpose of Life.
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