I began this column on May 12, the same date on which in 1895 J. Krishnamurti was born. I had chosen a quote from him for the “Thought for the Day” feature on my blog: “A consistent thinker is a thoughtless person, because he conforms to a pattern; he repeats phrases and thinks in a groove.”
I thought I might take that as my point of departure for the column I was planning for last Tuesday. But then I started looking at some other things Krishnamurti had said. I came upon a talk he gave in Bombay in 1948 in which he said that “ideas create only further ideas.” Later in that same talk, he says, “When do you have creative moments, a sense of joy and beauty? Only when the thinker is absent, when the thought process comes to an end. Then, in the interval between two thoughts, is creative joy.”
In other words, you can’t think your way to truth. Or, to put it another way, you can’t arrive at the truth by thinking about it. Krishnamurti goes even further: “Truth cannot be invited. It must come to you. To search for truth is to deny truth.”
I found all this singularly disconcerting. After all, what else was I doing, writing a column, other than countering ideas with other ideas, and seeking truth by thinking about it?
This proved to be more than something getting in the way of meeting a deadline. It really stopped me dead in my tracks. There didn’t seem to be anything I could do about it, and the one thing it seemed I ought not to do about it was think about it.
As it happens, I have a pretty good capacity for “sitting quietly, doing nothing,” as one Zen master phrased it. And that is pretty much what I did, along with puttering about in the garden, taking long, aimless strolls, and cooking.
I even read aimlessly. That first night, while straightening up my home office, I came upon a copy of the NYRB edition of R.J. Hollingdale’s selections from Lichtenberg’s The Waste Books [1]. I’ve never been that impressed by Lichtenberg, but I have to say I was taken by Item No. 3 on Page 1 of Notebook A:
With many a science the endeavor to discover a universal principle is perhaps often just as fruitless as would be the endeavor of a mineralogist to discover a primal universal substance out of which all minerals had arisen. Nature creates, not genera and species, but individua, and our shortsightedness has to seek out similarities so as to be able to retain in mind many things in the same time. These conceptions become more and more inaccurate the larger the families we invent for ourselves are.
This resonated with me because I have always thought that what makes this person or thing who or what he, she or it is is precisely what he, she or it does not have in common with anyone or anything else. Species, therefore, are categories of thought. Individuals are the genuine article.
I was, of course, thinking again. And what I was thinking was this: Suppose the proffered explanations of life and the world — religious, philosophical, scientific — are all, not so much wrong, as simply inadequate to the task. Some may be truer than others. Some may be completely wrong. One may be the best of the bunch, but still fall woefully short in all sorts of ways.
I found this somehow exhilarating. I found myself walking about looking at a world that had become newly and deeply mysterious, perhaps impenetrably so.
Then, over the weekend, my friend Dave Lull sent me a link to a post about Arts Education [2] on a blog called The Frontal Cortex. I posted the link on my blog and commented that I thought “the most obvious justification for arts education would be the glories of art.” Certainly, Anna Karenina, Mozart’s C Major Mass, or Michelangelo’s David need no neuroscientific justification. They are their own justification.
And that was that until a couple of days ago, when I was among some pedestrians crossing Vine Street at Broad. We were crossing against the light, but the only cars headed our way were pretty far down the pike on the other side of Broad Street. I was pulling up the rear and noticed that one of those cars was moving much faster than the others. It was in the middle lane and whizzed by me just after I stepped out of the left lane onto the sidewalk. The driver of the car had never slowed down a bit. I suddenly realized that, but for a matter of inches and seconds, I could easily have been punted down Vine Street across the goalpost of life.
This momentary frisson of fear was followed for some reason — or none — by a complete non sequitur. I suddenly realized that what I had said on my blog about art was also true of life. It is its own justification. Religion, philosophy and science do not explain life, because they are contained by life. They are among the many things that life, in its human dimension at least, does.
Life needs no explanation. Just as a poem means precisely what it says precisely the way it says it, so life means what it is just the way it happens.
This was, for me, a kind of satori. Not that I experienced any blazing sense of transcendence. No, it was quite matter-of-fact, actually. As another Zen master explained: Before you enter upon the way of Zen, a tree is just a tree. But once you enter upon the way, a tree is no longer a tree. Should you arrive at satori, a tree is just a tree.
But what a tree.
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Frank Wilson [5]
Latest posts by Frank Wilson (Posts [7])
- An illusion of precision [8] - September 9, 2015
- Watching the passing scene [9] - October 28, 2013
- To see like a child [10] - June 26, 2013
- Riffing and digressions [11] - January 21, 2013
- Life is a parenthesis between one darkness and another [12] - September 13, 2012