6. Systems and Experience

Systems, philosophical or political, are all about the denial of being. Systems are the rules to which a ‘becoming’ person must conform in order to achieve the wisdom that the system promises. It is the achievement of the adherent’s future, an ideal that he can attain by mastering the system’s directives.

‘Being,’ on the other hand, cannot be systemized; it has no form or structure. In order to experience being, man must face time stripped of things from the past, including the recipes and algorithms that make up a system of thought.

Systems, like all things that enclose, are barriers to which things are confined – boxes within which we must confine our thinking. Philosophical systems that we create in our minds are barriers for our minds, confining that great organ of adaptation that needs openness to exercise its full potential. Systems are replaced in time by new systems because all systems are barriers that put the mind in conflict with its experience. See p. 168, Being and the End of History.

“We think that we will be able to live happily, creatively, if we learn a method, a technique, a style, but creative happiness comes only when there is inward richness, it can never be attained through any system.”

J. Krishnamurti

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

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