You just know, sometimes.

I have never heard of Jiddu Krishnamurthi until recently. And when I did, the rest of me that was still struggling to not reject my own insights, settled into peace. I found my peace, I found that my insights were not merely random and erratic, but a recollection and the continuation of a consciousness that has always existed within me as a child. I embraced my lack of conformity, I celebrated my rebellion. They are now eternally redefined. My unconformity is not an oddity,  but a clarity and puritanical approach to life, my life. My rebellion is not mere anger, protracted adolescence and damaged childhood; my rebellion was a defence to protect who I am until the day came when I can surrender who I really am to the being that was safe to Be itself. 

I cannot be accused of being a newbie or an impressionable convert to spirituality. Philosophy and my pursuit of its lineage and spin-offs has been in my veins for as long as I can remember. Nothing in my life, not school, achievements, ambition - has ever driven me as much as this spiritual quest has always. Everything else that I have ever done in my life has been a product of this spiritual quest, an experiment in experiencing the tools that would help me deepen my association with this innate drive, innate quest to spirituality. 

And then I discover Krishnamurthi - and it has been the first time in my life that I have achieved a feeling of transcendental presence through his words. I have also felt this way in my teens when coming across works from 19th century New England writers, whom I later discovered were known collectively as the Transcendentalists; Emily Dickinson, R.W. Emerson, especially, among others.

The difference between knowledge and insight is that, with knowledge, you read to absorb and comprehend and expand your knowledge base, you digest and ponder critically, you are fuelled with a desire to debate and articulate it. You mull over its significance and premise and try to quell your own doubts through rationalising and more cross-referencing. When you read for knowledge, you're absorbing and downloading other people's information, experiences and knowledge and then rebuilding them into your mental experiences and eventually, the things you have downloaded or stored away and who you are becomes inseparable. You are then an amalgamation and identified with the works and opinions and traditions of others as your own. 

Insight can come at anytime. Sometimes they appear so subtly that you cannot pinpoint a particular point in time when that insight appeared. In retrospect, they may or may not arrive according to a timeline. Then one day, it just washes over you, like something you've always known, from the beginning of time, except that you realized that, technically, you've only just known it, or managed to form a more or less complete articulation or expression of it. You might be watching something, or doing something or reading something and it is a feeling that you can understand it without thinking about it or making an effort to contemplate and understand it - unlike what you would be doing reading a textbook or watching a movie. It unfolds in you like something that has always, always been there. It is an understanding which does not require explanation and a contentment that does not require satisfaction. 

If you know this, you should also know that it is something that can never be found by seeking it. So many people like to ask, "How do you know? How do you get there? How do I know when I've found it?" Now I truly get why philosophers seem to talk in circles - they're not talking in circles, it's the others who cannot stop spinning in circles to understand the few words that expresses the completeness of the knowing. - We do not get answers by doing a set of exercises and routines or by following some rituals and lifestyles or reading a set of books. The scientific method and the schooling method are in themselves incomplete methods of fathoming the complete way of existence and life. The scientific method begins with a purpose; a set idea of what to look for and it eliminates everything else that does not fit into what it is looking for. The schooling system teaches you that the answers are a fixed variable and you'll get to it in the end, and the faster you master the content or become skilled in performing an exercise, the sooner you will arrive at a position to be able to answer everything. This sort of thinking sparks the destructive and neverending race to reach the top - the Top where everything else is at the bottom and becomes so obvious - the Top where exploiting anything for personal gain is now fully possible. 

Reading J.Krishnamurthi, I feel that I am right there as an omnipresent entity. Time and Space has collapsed and I understood the things I have always had a hunch about. With a lot of the dialogues he's had with people, I could sense his energy enveloping them. I could feel their self-created confusion, misery, struggles and all the other universal themes that define human suffering. And by the time I read the last few lines he tells them, I sense the dissipitation of their anxiety. How could he transform in a few minutes /  hours, the ignorance and clouded minds of the people he meets into the state of bliss, clarity and surrender by the end of his talk? He is doing the bluetooth thing I have been talking about - the ability to transfer clarity and insight beyond the audibility of words and visibility of gestures; to download what to another person would be years and  years worth of illustrations, insights and sequence into a few bits of clarity. His dialogues and talks would have been grossly edited to be able to give the appearance of that - but that would not make sense, for each title is begun with half the piece given to describing the day and the premise where the talk took place. No one would do such injustice to J.Krishnamurthi - by including so much narrative on the setting and grossly editing the contents of the conversation. So, it must be that he has this ability to bring calmness and clarity with his presence, that his audience can arrive into themselves in minutes and hours what would've taken them a lifetime. 

I think you can sense a true Guru, Channel or Spiritual Leader. The first clue would be that they denounce the need to be measured by their material possessions eventhough presently they may still be surrounded by material things offered by those who are appreciative of them. They would be doing and continue doing what they are doing with or without the success they are achieving and would be the exact same person with or without the comforts, privileges and acclaims. Second, they would not get offended even if a person critices or is sceptical of them. For what they are doing needs no approval nor benefits from devotion. So it doesn't matter or annoy them in any way if they are challenged. Third, you will feel a sense of familiarity and calm around them, like you have known them for a long time and you trust in them even without them asking you to suspend your faith in order to benefit from their teachings. 

I suppose if I did a search or looked up more books on J.Krishnamurthi, I will eventually uncover people who would describe this feeling of being surrounded by instant calm and peace in JK's presence. A feeling of Joy and surrender and aliveness. (And this is what I mean  by Knowledge vs. Insight. To experience something first before knowing or naming it.)

How Truth and Wisdom is never found

The world today is a ripe marketplace to manufacture a solutions-based philosophy about the meaning and purpose of life. No other time in history has there been so many literate people with disposable incomes and the technology to multiply and distribute that philosophy so quickly as it is today. The bridge between civilisation at its wits end and the next spiritual evolution is filled with enterprising people who understand systems and mass reaction peddling talismans and maps to that destination. How does one separate the genuine spiritual teachers from the con-jobs?

There are a few correlating themes which helped create this ignorant and destructive existence we're all in today. One of it is the addiction to quick-fixes and painless remedies. Preferably, these fixes will require little personal responsibility while imparting a false sense of superiority and spirituality in the process. These spiritual junkies are easily identifiable - by performing a set of rituals or chanting something in a tongue you don't speak, putting on some instrumental music, lighting incense or 'breathing' becomes a pursuit towards something - towards a goal. 

So many people believe that reading a book or a few hundred books and pursuing something religiously will enlighten them or bring them closer to a higher level of spirituality, a deeper meaning to their existence. My recent experience tells me that every pursuit arises from ambition. Every ambition arises from discontentment, dissatisfaction, incomplete understanding, vanity or dysfunctional behaviour. Coming from such a premise, how can anyone ever discover the truth? How can anyone discover the truth if you already have in your mind an idea of what you're looking for?

When you have an idea or question that you are pursuing, the mind will filter in the things which matches that belief system. If your need is to find security and salvation because you fear death and loneliness, your Truth will lead you to what is convenient. If your need is to distance yourself from the pain that growing up with certain traditions and values have caused you, you will flip to the other extreme and your Truth will emerge for you that way. If your need is to find consistency and security in what you already know, you carry on with the truths that your traditions have taught you. In almost every way, by seeking, we will never find the Truth. 

The sayings we hear that "Truth will prevail" already tells us what we need to know about Truth; that it is something that will go on existing even if you fight against it or even if you refuse to believe in it. It is something that will exist even if you deny it and it does not need your conviction of it to exist. The same way you do not need to believe in oxygen to breathe it and have it sustain your biological survival. Oxygen will still exist and your body will still know how to inhale when there's enough of it and suffocate when there isn't. 

Wisdom will always elude the fool who seeks it. Simply put, the more you think, act, behave and believe in things, traditions or views which you think will show you to be wise, the more foolish you will be. How can a person who already has an idea that he is wise ever open themselves to other things which may actually lead to wisdom unfolding? Wisdom can only unfold to the person who does not attempt to seek it out, usually out of a need to not seem foolish. 

To have is to make it necessary for others to be have-nots

I think we all take our 'reality' for granted. All it takes is to sit back and question 'reality' as it is to see that the majority of humans who run the show on this earth are insane. The average person wants, in usually the same order, education, money and prestige. I wonder if anyone realize that the only way to be successful in 'education' is if you know more than others and get paid for what you know and what you do with what you know. So, in order to be 'clever' you need every one else to be 'stupid'. To be 'intelligent' you need that the 'unintelligent' outnumber you, in order to achieve the other benefits that come with 'having a good education', i.e. money and prestige. 

If 'knowledge' is not the chosen path towards prestige and money, another path, business, can be taken. I suppose that is why there is an undercurrent of animosity between the academic and the business person. The academics think the corporate-types are corrupt and greedy and care little for ethics and values. The money-makers think that the intelligentsia are wasting a resource by not profitting from the fact that they are the gatekeepers of knowledge, sitting on a throne of power. Knowledge is power is money is power is knowledge. I myself have found that education and business makes a very poor marriage. 

To be successful in business requires that you have some kind of monopoly over the supply and pricing of the products and services you are selling. To be financially successful in business is to (a) convert the masses to consistently and incresingly desire your product / service so that you have economies of scale (b) inflate the price so as to burden to some extent, the majority. 

If solid, well-run business sells at a price that makes a profit but not a very big one, the general costs of living will eat into the profits making the business sustainable at best. This is usually the case with state-run services and non-profits. Unless the appetite for 'a better standard of living' does not corrupt the pool of people available to take up jobs to maintain these structures, these structures will eventually fail to attract the better/best talents and collapse under its own ideals. 

To be rich requires that other people are to be made poorer. If every single person in a society is highly productive and knowledgeable, they will charge each other for their goods and services in a way that makes everyone equal again in the end. You can only be rich if you charge /earn significantly higher than the going costs-of-living, which in turn means that for a group of people to be rich, a majority would have to be not-rich or poor. The only exception would be someone like Warren Buffet, who makes his money buying a resource when it is selling way lower than its capacity, and then to reap the benefits when market sentiments restores the company to its rightful value. Even the idea of making money from the already rich supports a system where the rich have to continue doing what makes them rich in order to afford the things sold to rich people. 

Now, if one possesses neither the faculties for academia nor entrepreneurship, the third path is prestige. The entertainment business together with 20th century media has spun a dimension which proliferates the opportunities for 'prestige' to be a marker of success. In order to be famous and have the prestige that comes with it requires a mass that believes that prestige and fame is highly-rewarding and even desirable that they will pay a person for the prestige and fame that they do not possess. If every person is well-known for what he/she does in a society, the allure of prestige and fame and the benefits that comes with it would seem like a ridiculous concept. 

All one has to do is to sit back to realize that the things we desire in order to be a 'success' really means denying others the same access to them. This sort of thinking encourages greed and selfishness in order to get ahead. This is a wrongful and destructive way of thinking. And the majority are driving in that direction. 

there should be balance - the world is in imbalance. we have not truly progressed. We have only progressed in our external form and in our material existence - and the separation of form and spirit has alienated us more and more from our spiritual cure and balance. That is why there is more and more suffering and imbalance.

the world is short-sighted. children see the entire purpose of life is to obtain more and more material status. it seems that nobody can see that material things cannot last. A brand new shiny car is an old car even before it is paid off for. a big house with an empty soul does not bring joy and happiness. there is nothing wrong with a bigger house per se if it is within one's means, but everything wrong if the desire for the house is motivated by a need to feel 'secure' or 'better than'. 

all things decay. all shiny things fade. why is the pursuit of life a need for symbolisms of success? why cannot material success be a by-product of self-actualization. it is not the ownership of nice things itself, it is the speed and rush at which we are pursuing these material things that has negated the development of other aspects of our Being. it is this speed and rush in everything to make 'money' that causes secondary forms of suffering; inflation must come with recession, growth must come with stagnation, economic bubbles  that grow must burst., etc

i think it is a very funny thing that we, create man-made institutions and systems that inflict suffering upon ourselves. we consider the world as it is, as it is our reality, without realizing that we inherited a world made up of systems and institutions thought-up by dysfunctional minds or greedy hearts. 

the power of now is powerful because if you were to simply concentrate on the present moment, all past dissolves and all future problems do not exist. worry and fear will be diluted because we don't give thought energy to the future. regret and pain will dissolve because we don't give thought energy to the past. What remains is, if not clarity, at least temporary sanity. 

the school of thought that not worrying is irresponsible can be argued with a new thought that worrying about something that is not real is counter-productive. Living in the now also helps avoid taking actions that can lead to greater harm to oneself and others. 

we are only poor because greedy people have put a price on nature and resources; land, oil, food, shelter. there is a claim legitimate claim for profit but who can say that this is the case? Profit has turned to profiteering. A person can only be rich if others are poor. 

Sensitivity

The worse quality to lose is the quality of being sensitive. Whether my realization is a product of Jiddu Krishnamurthi's central ideology that sensitivity is the highest form of intelligence or just my repulsion towards insensitivity, I am not sure. It is such a terrible thing when a parent loses their sensitivity towards their child. There is a sort of unhelpful disengagement in the way an insensitive parent relates to a child. A fainting spell is dismissed as insignificant and is blamed on the child's irregular eating habits or irregular sleeping hours. 

To sensitive parents, it is unimaginable for a mother to dismiss a child fainting as something unimportant and insignificant. But it is not so surprising if you know that this same parent completely ignores signs of severe and crippling depression and suicidal tendencies in two of her 4 children. 

How does a parent reach this point where they become so uncaring and insensitive? They have shed off qualities of love, kindness and sensitivity and descended into a world which holds little joy and wonder. It takes a truly sensitive person to be aware of the insensitivy of others. 

The Trinity of Suffering and the 3-step salvation

It is really so silly that the whole problem of our world hinges upon money, power and fame. People go hungry, wars flare up, people lose their loved ones, are oppressed, are rejected, are denied - in short, are in so much pain because of man-made systems that favour the top few percent. 

The trinity of suffering, that's my name for them. I find it so hard to put it into words that mass hallucination and suffering descending upon ourselves because of our obssession with the Trinity of Suffering. 

Step 1, live a productive life. Discover your talents and God's gifts in you and use that in a creative way that allows you to exchange that value with someone else. That way you don't have to create everything you need to live the life you want, on your own. Money facilitates this exchange of products and services. That is all there is to money - a symbolism of the creativity and solutions you have created with your life energy and ability. 

This step solves all the major headaches of modern day. We could even get rid of the entire, expensive schooling system that is supposed to prepare us for 'jobs' to get a 'good salary' and replace it with a community facility which lets people come in and discover and develop their innate gifts. When we get rid of schooling, we get rid of all the other implications and repercussions of schooling. One very obvious one is, we're saving resources from needing to have standardised curriculums, exams, reports, etc and we would stop throwing humans into the grinding system as teachers to fuel the machinery. We would free people who are otherwise shackled into the system as teachers because a more creative and productive society has a more diverse economy. And if schooling was not such a burgeoning administrative undertaking, it would need less teachers. And poof, all the stress caused by schooling and the exploitation of learning by the tuition industry goes away.

Ahh, we argue that the workbook making and tuition drilling industry is a significant economy. We can simply replace them with more productive and creative economies. We tend to think of an economy as a physical matter - something that is not arbitrary. - Hello?

Step 1 also eliminates the stress of dead-end jobs, time-marking occupations and mirages that shackle you to a job title. It frees everyone to be productive and creative and to discover and answer the question : "Why am I here?"

Step 2, throw away the notion that we can only exist in an autocratic hierarchy or any form of authority. Where there is a collective agreement to surrender freedom to an authority,that is the bedrock that breeds fear. And almost every other crime which stems from, greed, envy, underachievement, murder, is an extension of Fear. Authorities that we uphold today are the government, traditions, customs, the school, our parents, our elders. Everybody is entitled the freedom to discover their true potential and not be shackled and have their life energy employed for another's profit. 

Step 3, understand that there is no need to have an identity of, "Who am I?". All of us are in a constant state of flux. Who we are is directly connected to the information we filter and process. As we change direction in this state of flux, 'who we are' changes too. There is no ultimate single identity; there is only the form or shape we have taken as a vessel in letting a Higher Love flow through us as we create a new world, a new collective, a new civilisation/existence through our creative self, our sensitive self. 

The Twin fears of Greedy People

I cannot understand people's greed. "There is enough in the world for our need, but not for our greed". I seriously cannot understand the concept of greed. We need a certain amount of money to run our lives in a way where we have the freedom of not having to produce everything we need, enough money to facilitate our lives so we have more free time, we have our basic needs met and we have money to multiply money so we can exist in a world of growth and advancement, where money helps the cycle to grow other people and ourselves. 

The whole point of having money is not the money itself but the gratification of becoming the type of productive, intelligent, resourceful, creative person in that process. What is money? It is not paper and numbers. Money is a symbolism of the value generated by an individual, a collective group, a society, a country, an economy. It is Economics 101. Any high schooler should know this. 

So it goes to mean that in order to have more money, you simply become a person who generates more real economic value with the resources you possess. To have more money, you help more people, says T.Harv Ecker. And then when you have more money, you help even more people. You do this through your creative use of your resources and the resources around you. For sustainable wealth, you must also use resources in ways that does not diminish their numbers in an unreplenishable way.  That sounds like a plan to me. 

This being the case, it is absolutely not necessary to practise corruption or wasting taxpayers' money. Why should there be a need to be greedy and to impoverish others for  your own vulgar accumulation of money? Fear? Fear that you can't get into an "inner ring", fear that your kids can't afford to go to college, fear of losing your job? 

Well, it isn't written in  blood that you have to go to college. You go to college for the love of learning and challenges and to gain from other people's experiences and expertise, not for a piece of paper that said you attended for a set amount of time and somehow managed to pass a set number of exams. 

And, like C.S. Lewis says, the "inner ring" is an illussion, a circle of people we want to belong to in order to feel important. Well, if you understand that this need to be "in" is simply a manifestation of preconceived ideas of importance (i.e. Ego) and choose to simply Be instead of "being in", then there is no need to need to belong to an inner-ring, which C.S.Lewis describes as an onion -  you get through one layer, there's another, then another...until you are alone and find nothing there that matters. 

Or maybe you want to feel safe; but if you've robbed so many people of the life they deserve, how can you possibly feel safe even in your gated community? All that needs to happen is a revolution that takes apart the systems you have put in place to repress others. 

What is wealth if you eat alone because no one respects you as a person? Or you eat with associates you know want to see you fall so they can take over? We fool ourselves that money is the solution to everything, that it will bring us complete power and that a life of decadence is desirable. Has not history shown us the foolishness of this notion?

Money cannot buy the most important things : faith, loyalty, trust, love, friendships, solidarity, virtue, honour. So why covet it?

Money is supposed to be an enabler to bring more intellect, health and prosperity to others. That is why I cannot understand this concept of greed. Money is supposed to connect us more, not separate us from the rest. Wealth is used to educate, bring progress, bring health, bring unity, bring beauty and preservation. To own all these things as an exclusive group that is unproductive but drains the resources of the more productive groups in order to finance these ideals is futile. It is futile because all these things are not supposed to be exclusive. 

I shall summarize greed as this : Unproductive people who want other people's cake and eat it. If you're creative and productive, you will not feel a need to exploit others and deny them their share in order to increase your own. 

Two streams.

Simple in virtue. Steadfast in duty. 

Simplicity has now become synonymous with stupidity. Whoever coined the term 'simple-minded' to refer to ignorant red-necks or a segment of a populace that refuses to think with their capacities has done an injustice to the principle of simplicity. 

I wrote about what's wrong with having the simplicity of a child's thinking. Children have such clarity and have their priorities about life spot-on. Then I imagine people saying, 'The whole point of growing up is to not be like a child anymore.' Ok, but has anyone challenged that notion? Is that the whole point of growing up? I just realized that we live in a society that is anti-children. We treat children as incomplete people when technically, they are closer to The Light than we are, having had less programming from our misrepresented,highly delusional, collective 'reality'. 

Now, seriously - is there really anything wrong in never owning a car, a big house with a pool and a membership to an exclusive country club? These are just extensions of the imagination and toys we had as a child. Wouldn't it be OK to continue just playing the toy versions instead of covetting the above? Aren't we spending too much time fleshing out our material fantasies instead of answering the questions we asked a child? i.e. "Why did I come to this world?", "How can i make the world a better place?"

I have been torn between the material stream and my spiritual pursuits. Making a lot of money can necessitate a lot of things - but without purpose and vision behind those actions, they will not amount to anything. It is a fact that no amount of money or material things we amass, we can bring with us after we pass by this world. Yet it is also a fact that our deeds, thoughts and actions, impact the world long after we have passed by this world. 

So, how do I choose? Can I taste the fruit that is out of my reach? Didn't Buddha say, wealth, if used properly, is like a pristine lake where everyone can drink from?

What is it with being an adult?

When I was young, I heard stories about how terrible a Depression is and that many people killed themselves when they lost money in the sharemarket, their lives ruined. I couldn't understand all that, because life still went on for me. The sun still rose and life went on. That is because I had the simplicity of a child's mind. And if we think about it carefully, a child's mind is really what we need to not get ourselves caught up in our own drama. 

What if a child had no mortgage or rental to worry about, because the child had no home? The child would live like a vagabond and still find wonder in walking down streets and breathing in the air. Even if one has no home - life does not stop automatically. We are still alive! Yet an adult would feel a terrible sense of degradation.

What if a child had no money to buy things? He just learns that in not having things, we don't stop breathing. The flowers don't change their colour when we pass by just because we don't have shiny, new things. The air does not run away to create a vacuum we suffocate in. The sun does not hide behind a cloud just to cast a shadow over every step we take. An adult loses their pride and self-esteem.

What if a child had no job or school to go to or any status in society? The child, as is a given, learns naturally, with or without a school. The child learns out of necessity. If it was necessary to wear both sides of his shoes to walk down a rocky path, he would be able to count if one side of his shoe was missing. If 2 teaspoons of salt makes his porridge yucky, he would know how to reduce the amount, whether or not he was taught. If hot metal burns his skin, he realizes quickly enough what conducts heat. He listens to stories and opinions of others, and these color and shape his mind in a complex web of stimulus. His street-programming is the same as the programming schoolings offer, the mental learning is similar, only the process is different. The street-cred is a process gained through observation, inquisition, necessity and in freedom, while the academic-cred is a process that is dictated to, compelled to regardless of aptitutde and learned within rigid restrictions. An adult cheats or drive themselves to near insanity in order to obtain an academic certification.

What if a child loses his precious collection of bottle caps and empty bottles and cans which he used to build his castles and construct his armies? He cries for a bit and then resolves to start another collection. 

But what of an adult who loses the things he collects? A home with a mortgage, furniture and cars bought on hire-purchase, shares, etc? The adult wallows in self-destruction, blames or plots revenge, contemplates and carries out suicide or murder. 

What is it with us adults that we make life so difficult for ourselves?