10. Repression

The essence of repression is conflict. By repressing a part of the universe that is not to his liking, man creates a worldview that is at odds with the real world as well as the worldview of his fellow repressing individuals.

His repressed version is under threat of contradiction from the other realities that differ from it, and he must use conflict as a means of protecting his personal illusion. Conflict may come in the form of overt force, various manipulations, passive aggressive victimhood, or other techniques that are destructive to the world that the repressing man feels alienated from.

Repression is the ego’s way of creating a fictional history that further binds man into a cycle of more repressing and being repressed. Repression is self-perpetuating and requires more repression to keep the repressing ego alive. The repressed man is not able to see the world independently of his ego, and his dependence upon that ego forces him to produce more repression.

In the end, repression creates nothing but victims. For his ego to coexist with others, man must repress those outside of himself, either overtly through force or covertly through his passiveness. But those victims of repression are only the outward manifestation of the ultimate victim of repression – the repressing man who can never be peace with his own nature. See page 42, Being and the End of History.

“We never see that we are the total environment because there are several entities in us, all resolving around the ‘me,’ the self … This separation is the beginning of conflict, inward and outward.”
J. Krishnamurti

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.

3. Therefore I Am

I think, therefore I am.
Rene Descartes

Modern philosophy was born with the human ego being advanced as the true judge of all things. Rene Descartes, with his famous deification of the mind, became known as the “father of modern philosophy.” The absolute truth that was once the possession of the gods of Plato was replaced by the absolute truth that was the possession of the thinking man. The goal of philosophy remained absolute knowledge, but the primary issue of philosophy became epistemology, the study of what absolute truths were knowable by man. Descartes introduced the modern era by making the mind of man, the invisible component behind the human brain, the center of the world.

Thought is a process and is more than something about change – thought is change. The organism wherein a thought is centered is changed by thought, regardless of whether it is identified as the same organism after the thought has finished. A thought may be conceptualized as a series of pictures that are interrelated or as a series of connected sub-thoughts, but regardless of the conceptualization, it is a flow that is ordered through space and time rather than a static thing that is possessed and controlled by an unchanging ego.

Thought occurs in nature and man gives his ego credit for being the thinker. See p. 195, 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

History as Necrophilia

The distinction between prehistoric man and his historic successors is that prehistoric man escaped from nature by turning within the tribe or group that he belongs to, while man from the historic era uses his individual ego to isolate him from nature. Prehistoric man did not need an historical identity as a fixed definition that made him separate and special because prehistoric man had a special place within a tribe that, in turn, had a special place in the universe. His life might ebb and flow, but the specialness of his group and his contribution to that specialness survived by promising him an island of immortality in the swirling sea of flowing time.

The man without a nation, clan, family, tribe, or individual ego is isolated from everything but nature, and, faced with the terror of the all-destroying nature, must either join one of these units in their war on the universe or he must have the courage to accept his role in the flow, finding his immortality in being part of the flow itself. For all but the few, perhaps an occasional Lao Tzu, Buddha, or Jesus, men have needed to belong and acquire a history.

While nature, with its dynamic flow, is immortal, the man of the prehistoric tribe or the historic memory creates only mortal death.