11. Knowledge

“Knowledge is not comparable with intelligence, knowledge is not wisdom.”

J. Krishnamurti

Philosophy in the West, at least since the time of Plato, has been all about knowledge and the static, inflexible world where knowledge works. Plato believed that true knowledge could only be about things that did not change (and therefore could not be of this world). In this regard, Plato’s shadow has been cast over Western philosophy down to the present. Alfred North Whitehead was correct in his observation that all Western philosophy is but a footnote to Plato. The philosophy of Plato and the West is about knowledge and therefore does not allow for change.

Each perspective on knowledge in the West branches into its own “school” of rigid believers willing to commit themselves to conflict and wars for the “rightness” of their truths. Philosophy in the West is the wisdom of knowledge about eternal truths, and, since wisdom and intelligence are of the moment and not eternal, Western philosophy fails to give us wisdom and intelligence. Instead, the knowledge of Western philosophy causes conflict and suffering between the knower and his world.

Knowledge is all about “becoming,” the making of war on the “being” of the present. Absolute knowledge, like all absolutes, is an authority that we must follow and conform to.

8. Death Wish

“The dilemma is escaped only by those willing to discard personality.”
Norman O. Brown

Thanotos, Freud’s death instinct, is the creator of the ego. It alienates man from nature and his own natural self by giving him the sense of being special. Specialness, in turn, exempts man from the laws of change that dominate all of nature, giving man the hope for an individualistic immortality. The trees and rocks of nature may come and go because of their lack of specialness, but historical man will live on because he has a special self – the ego that was ironically generated by his will to die.

The specialness in man’s ego allows him to transcend the boundaries of space and time. Man has a body that belongs to nature, obeying its laws of growth and decay in time, but man’s individual ego is separate from his vulnerable body, existing unchanged as his body ages and becomes frail. The ego of man is immortal and ageless because it is special, being exempt from nature and her laws.

However, man’s sense of specialness is the product of thanatos, his destructive wish to kill his natural self. The sense of being something apart is really alienation, the nightmare of isolation, fear, and guilt. Because he is special, man experiences a sense of regret for a past that shouldn’t have been and a fear of the future that might be. Because he is special and the father of himself, he must bear the responsibility for a guilty past and a fearful future.

See p. 127, Being and the End of History.

5. Self-less Man

The Self-less man has achieved a utopia, a paradise on earth where there can be no conflict and where the emotions of guilt and fear are never experienced. Beyond his inner experience, the world may appear like a hell-on-earth, filled with terrorists, wars created by rigid dogmas and doctrines, and the pervasive selfishness of the people of character and personality; however, to the Self-less man, these are just a part of the experience of the moment and this experience can be observed without the conflict, hate, guilt, and fear that overwhelms the lives of the well-defined selves.

The Self-less man has returned to the Garden of Eden the only way that anyone can – by letting go of his Self with its history and promise and its guilt and fears. Man’s place in paradise is where “becoming” has ended and all he has left and all he needs is “being.” See p. 233, Being and the End of History.

“Dissolve me into ecstasies.”
John Milton, Il Penseroso

4. Fears of Time

The present is an atom of time between the past and the future. It is so infinitely brief in duration that it seems to many of us to not exist at all. The present is simply the interface between the two extensions of time that do exist in our minds, the past and the future. The present is just how the future with all of its fears becomes the past with all of its feelings of guilt. In fact, for those who believe in the reality of the past and the future, the present is a fiction that we use to convert fear into guilt through the process that is known as time. See p. 239, Being and the End of History.

For those who believe in the present, the past and the future are just two fictions that we use to shelter ourselves from the guiltlessness of now.

"As long as the mind spawns its own fears of time, it is incapable of understanding that which is timeless."
J. Krishnamurti

1. Separation Anxiety

The sense of being separate from his world, with an individual identity that is the product of a life history, pervades man’s existence, leading to his propensity for violence and his constant state of anxiety. Man’s history is his neurosis, and it is only by his transcending his sense of himself as a continuous object in time that man can become reunited with his world.

Anxiety is the experience of “becoming” while ecstasy is the experience of “being.” The struggle to “become” something different than what you are seduces you into a sense of self-loathing and regret, leading you to feel guilty for what you “have been” in the past and afraid of what you might “become” in the future. The sacredness of what you are “being” is lost in the illusion that you should “become” something else.

To be integrally intelligent means to be without the self.

J. Krishnamurti

So egotism has as its root in the cardinal necessity by which each individual persists to be what he is.

Ralph Waldo Emerson