Freedom from the desire for an answer
Jiddu Krishnamurti was a strange dude.
For more than half a century he told anyone who wanted to listen that the only way to find the truth is to look for it yourself. Subscribing to doctrines, performing rituals, practicing disciplines, obeying authorities were all a waste of time, because truth, he said, is “a pathless realm.”
There’s a YouTube clip of Krishnamurti being interviewed by Huston Smith. When Smith wonders just how one goes about doing what Krishnmurti suggests, Krishnamurti tells him that asking how is precisely what gets in the way of doing it.
If that leaves you feeling as perplexed as Smith apparently was, maybe something else Krishnmuri said will help: “Freedom from the desire for an answer is essential to the understanding of a problem.”
Well, maybe not. You ask a question because you want an answer. What’s wrong with that? Nothing, if it’s a simple question like, “What time is it?”
But a lot of questions aren’t that simple.
There’s another clip on YouTube where Krishnamurti considers a question put to him by one of the people in the audience. The question is, “Who are you?” Krishnamurti seems vaguely amused by it. “It’s very simple,” he says. “I’m nobody.” He then goes on to point out that the question the person in the audience ought to be asking is, “Who am I?”
That’s a tougher question than one about the time of day. It doesn’t admit of a quick and easy answer. Or maybe any answer at all. Who among us thinks he can be defined? (That, by the way, is a sentiment that puts the lie to simple-minded catch-phrases like “it’s all in your genes.”)
The commonest way of identifying somebody is to say what that person does for a living. I recently introduced Elmore Leonard at the Free Library. I identified myself by saying that I used to be the Philadelphia Inquirer‘s book editor. In other words, I’ve reached that dubious stage of life where I can identify myself not by what I actually do, but by what I used to do.
Of course, there are all sorts of other ways in which people habitually define themselves — by their ancestry, their ethnicity, their schooling, their politics, their religion. The problem is that, however you define yourself, doing so means limiting who you are. To define something means to enclose it within boundaries, which in turn means closing it off from what is outside those boundaries
Take the question “who am I” seriously, though, and you will immediately see what Krishnamurti was driving at when he suggested that if you want to understand a problem you’ll do well not to be too anxious for an answer.
The fact is, if you sit for a moment and wonder who you are, the question quickly opens out into a mystery without a horizon. Looked at from within, the self seems vaster than the world itself. Scary, too. As Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote:
O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne’er hung there.
Krishnamurti can go too far in his criticism of doctrine and ritual, sounding at times like a man who would counter pedantry by banning grammar. Doctrines and rituals help us wrap our minds around the mystery of being, a mystery that isn’t meant to be “solved,” but embraced. A Mass indifferently celebrated might just as will not be celebrated at all. But celebrated with a reverent attention to detail it can serve to transport worshippers to a higher plane of apprehension.
But indifference is commoner than attention to detail. Dan Brown uses the same English that Shakespeare did, though with less happy results. A commercial jingle selling cornflakes makes use of the same notes that can be found in Mozart’s “Jupiter” symphony. Maybe putting up with banalities is the price exacted for masterpieces.
But Krishnamurti is definitely right about one thing: We are too eager for answers to our questions and solutions to our problems, so eager that as often as not we settle for ones that are second-hand and second-rate. It’s the flip side of our uneasiness over uncertainty.
Nobody knows for sure what, if anything, life is all about. It may be a parenthetical interruption of oblivion — a passage from darkness to darkness — or a brief digression from eternity. The important thing to remember is that the words and concepts we use to interpret it are imperfect and approximate. The trick, as Krishnamurti makes plain, is to engage life deeply and passionately on its terms, not ours. It is life that should shape the phrases and ideas, not the other way around.
Latest posts by Frank Wilson (Posts)
- An illusion of precision - September 9, 2015
- Watching the passing scene - October 28, 2013
- To see like a child - June 26, 2013
- Riffing and digressions - January 21, 2013
- Life is a parenthesis between one darkness and another - September 13, 2012
Print This Post
Great post.
I love Krishnamurti’s answer, because it is the answer of someone who is enlightened in a way that I would one day hope to be, though I’m not sure I can ever let go of the questions. It is precisely the letting go, the acceptance of the fact of our “nothingness”, or put another way, the illusion that we are anything apart from what we construct with our minds — those frightful, sheer mountains that we cannot escape — that leads you to a more passionate embrace of whatever this life actually is.
‘the mystery of being, a mystery that isn’t meant to be “solved,” but embraced’
Beautiful and truthful.