Ridiculous the waste sad time
Stretching before and after.
—TS Eliot, Burnt Norton
There is an old Irish story. In ancient days a certain clan was beset by a wasting sickness. It was not only physical but the very souls of the people were afflicted. A young man was tasked with finding the solution. He was told by the wise old woman that he had to go to the other world and drink from the waters of the well. This well is the source of all wells and of all rivers, visible and invisible. The difficulty was he didn’t know the way. He couldn’t see the road to the otherworld. There is no path, no way to that country.
He didn’t have the eye to see. Our hero dreamt of a young woman, hair black like a raven’s wing, lips blood red, face white as snow. In the dream she gives him a silver branch. He awakes holding the branch. But it vanishes in the morning light. He knows that is what he needs to enter the otherworld. Neither fact-finding mission nor scientific analysis will help our friend, only a change in the seer himself and the eye that sees. He needs the silver branch, silver branch seeing.
Thus began his long journey to recover the silver branch. A sea voyage and a sea change, a dangerous voyage not unlike Ulysses, ‘the man of twists and turns’, returning home, who relied on the navigator’s skill, perceptive subtlety, acute listening and watching.
Now Krishnamurti might say to our hero, as he has said to us:
We are entering upon an uncharted sea, and each one has to be his own captain, pilot and sailor. He has to be everything himself. There is no guide, and that is the beauty of existence. If you have companions and guides, you never take the journey alone, therefore you are not taking the journey at all. The journey is a process of self-discovery, and as you begin to understand it, you will see what an immense relationship it has to your present existence.
—Madras, 3rd Public Talk, 13 December 1956
Like the hero in the tale, we too have a problem with seeing. The world is blind, humanity is blind, we are blind. Our world is afflicted with a deadly wasting sickness. The individual and the world suffer breakdown, stagnation, depression, and addiction. It is true of persons as well as public systems, and governments. Even buildings can be anorexic, tall, thin, glassy and remote, or aggressive like military fortresses designed to terrify the customer. Cities are obese, junked out, choked on traffic and rubbish. Businesses are paranoid and delusional. There are national obsessions with endless growth. The economy has to be continually expanding, requiring more and more consumption. Both economies and persons become manic consumers. Mother Earth is left a waste land. The new monotheistic god is the economy.
The causes of our malaise, as Krishnamurti has pointed out, are not only the obvious destructive forces roaming and ruling the earth, but human consciousness itself. Consciousness as it manifests in our time is fundamentally ignorant. Not able to see clearly and not capable of seeing, so that action is always blighted. The fault is in the very eye that looks at the world. The world is seen as a Cartesian ‘thing’ out there, objective, brute and mute. The world, as an economic opportunity to be used and exploited. Before the axe has cut the tree down, it is already destroyed by the eye.
Furthermore, the problem is bound up with the deceptive play of the dualistic mind which constructs the world out of its own habits, then accords it a reality it doesn’t have. The dualism of subject/object, of thinker and thought, of observer and observed, of me and you, seems so real.
Krishnamurti tells us:
A bird flying across the sky tells you a great deal, if you know how to look (emphasis added), which is not romanticism which is not sentimentalism, but the capacity to look, to look, and not immediately translate it into a poem or into something romantic. But merely to observe with quiet beatitude and affection.
—From the film: The Seer Who Walks Alone
‘If you know how to look’. See things as they are. It sounds so simple. Perhaps it is. But we are not so simple. We are complex and our seeing is occluded. We do not see with ‘the true dharma eye and subtle mind of nirvana’. For those who listen to Krishnamurti’s call, there is a journey to be taken. He invites us to start from ‘the other shore’.
How? What kind of boat? What provisions? Where is our port of departure? What date? Is it a voyage of a lifetime? Is there a before and after or are past and future cut off? Is there a destination? What is that other shore?
Krishnamurti says there is no ‘how’. There is no path. Once we go the way of ‘how’, we are caught in method and strategy and we move away from the living situation.
But there is the sea, the ocean of samsara as the Buddhists call it and we are adrift, holding a broken oar, holding a book, holding words.
Zen master Dogēn says:
To study the way is to study the self,
To study the self is to forget the self,
To forget the self is to be illuminated by all things.—Genjōkōan
We usually think we read or study something objective called the teachings. The subject ‘I’ wants to understand it. According to Dogen, this is a mistaken way of thinking and a basic problem that keeps us from seeing reality as it is. Self is studying self, and the act of studying is also the self.
There is no such thing as a seer that is separate from seeing. There is no division between the seer and the seen, the observer and observed. This is how it is, but it appears otherwise to dualistic consciousness.
What do we do?
Neither ecological movements, climate change protests, feminism, personal growth, mindfulness nor yoga can save the world from the catastrophe inherent in our very idea of the world. We are already adrift on the waters between birth and death. But we can attend to what is there, like the Ancient Greek therapeutes, ‘those who care for the gods’, those ‘who attend to anything’ (Greek-English Lexicon, Oxford 1968). We could attend naturally and affectionately to the winds, to the ebb and flow of the tide, to the currents and undercurrents, to the ‘white-maned seahorses, champing, bright wind-bridled’. Attending, where ‘I’ has lost its grip on itself and the world. Free to look.
“Observe with quiet beatitude”, says Krishnaji. Perhaps it is the caring eye, the kind eye that blesses and is blessed, bringing the divine face of ‘things’ into visibility?
What is the first step? Which is the last step.
We cannot say. Perhaps there is no step; only the life that is given to us.
And K tells us to open our eyes and look. Then he suggests that the bird flying in the sky will tell us a great deal.
Krishnamurti is no longer among us. But the presence does not depend on his visibility; the invisible Krishnamurti is among us. Because of him the basis of the work has already been done. It is for us to take the journey, to venture on the uncharted sea.
Now our hero finds himself at home. He never left it.
He holds the silver branch.
Stepping “Through the unknown, remembered gate”.1
Seeing the place for the first time.
… “Costing not less than everything”.2
Endnotes
1 TS Eliot, Four Quartets
2. Ibid.