Daily Quote, Monday September 28, 2009.

Good morning everyone,

I'm finding right now that my weekends are getting quite busy with teaching, and so if you're ok with this, I'm going to pots blog entreies here from Monday - Friday.

The weather is unmentionable right now!

Here is today's quote:

The dualistic process.

Apart from obvious duality as man and woman, black and white, there is an inward psychological duality as the observer and the observed, the one who experiences and the thing experienced. In this division, in which time and space are involved, is the whole process of conflict; you can observe it in yourself. You are violent, that is a fact and you also have the ideological concept of non-violence, so there is duality.

Now the observer says “I must become non-violent” and the attempt to become non-violent is conflict, which is a waste of energy; whereas if the observer is totally aware of that violence—without the ideological concept of non-violence—then he is able to deal with it immediately. One must observe this dualistic process at work within oneself—this division of the “I” and the “not-I”, the observer and the observed.

Talks with American Students, p 111.

Here is my reflection.

As you will have gathered, so much of what Krishnamurti is doing all the time is examining the nature of thinking as a psychological process of 'othering'. This means creating distance, not just between ourselves and other people, but also within ourselves. Both are sources of conflict. Anything that involves thinking involves creating time and space; the act of memory, which is how thought arises, is a movement of time, and the thought itself as an image creates spacial distance.

The basis of all this is the need to know ourselves; so we attach labels to people and things. If you have just met me and you don't know anything about me except for one small thing maybe, you will create an image in your mind about that one thing, maybe it's my occupation, or my hairstyle, or how I dress. In not knowing me, you feel anxious about yourself, who you are; the dualistic process seems to not be working for a few months, so you throw out a label, in an anxious or aggressive way, and that makes you feel better. The other person is 'othered' and now you feel better about who you are. It's very subtle; sometimes it comes over as a joke, but it is really this dualistic process in full operation. This goes on all the time.

Try looking at it in yourself when you meet new people and see. Go into yourself and look at how this unknown person is making you feel. Do you feel some loss of control, a loss of power? You have to look very deeply and be quite humble, otherwise you'll miss it.

Best wishes

Robert