| Subject: Krishnamurti's take on Freedom |
Author:
Sandra Alzona
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Date Posted: 19:23:28 08/04/04 Wed
It all started when I remembered something I was thinking about while stuck in traffic a last year. I thought I was imagining things again, going on another virtual reality trip because whatelse is there to do when you're stuck in traffic, right? I was thinking about freedom, using my relationships as a springboard to theorize on freedom. So I began to question myself about my thoughts on being
free because I'd say stuff to myself like, ahhh, I'm free from this person, I'm free from that situation, I'm free from whatever hell meant at that certain time and place… Then, in that traffic jam, "FREE FROM" suddenly felt strange. Did it really mean being free? Is there such a thing as a "FREE FROM" syndrome that doesn't mean being free? I wanted to know what that meant, what were the
implications of that, consciousness-wise. I thought that this would ultimately lead to informing myself about what about self I'm not allowing myself to express and what about life's wonders I'm denying from myself.
Also, I noticed something about friends who became OFWs or got a green card. The ones who left because they didn't like our country weren't that happy. They still felt compromised. A LOT. Those whose thoughts about being in another country for a love that didn't oppose something else enjoyed themselves, were so happy about that
move. As if the highway to happiness was so wide and they didn't struggle at all.
Then I got my affirmation in a Krishnamurti booklet just this year which has three chapters - Freedom, Pleasure and A Dialogue with Oneself.
I'm quoting the first part of the long chapter on Freedom:
"So it is for each one to decide whether or not we want to be completely free. If we say we do, then we must understand the nature and structure of freedom.
Is it freedom when you are free from something-free from pain, free from some kind of anxiety? Or is freedom itself something entirely different? You can be free from jealousy, say, but isn't that freedom a reaction and therefore not freedom at all? You can be free from dogma very easily, by analyzing it, by kicking it out, but the
motive for that freedom from dogma has its own reaction because the desire to be free from a dogma may be that it is no longer fashionable or convenient. Or you can be free from nationalism because you believe in internationalism or because you feel it is no longer economically necessary to cling to this silly nationalistic dogma with its flag and all that rubbish. You can easily put that away. Or you may react against some spiritual or political leader who has promised you freedom as a result of discipline or revolt.
But has such rationalism, such logical conclusion, anything to do with freedom?
[this was actually my question to myself last year]
If you say you are free from something, it is a reaction which will then become another reaction which will bring about another conformity, another form of domination. In this way you can have a chain of reactions and accept each reaction as freedom. But it is not freedom; it is merely a continuity of a modified past which the mind clings to.
The youth of today, like all youth, are in revolt against society, and that is a good thing in itself, but revolt is not freedom because when you revolt it is a reaction and that reaction sets its own pattern and you get caught in that pattern. You think it is something new. It is not; it is the old in a different mould. Any social or political revolt will inevitably revert to the good old bourgeios mentality.
[In Walsch's The New Revelations, he discusses how the youth are the most oppressed because adults send them to wars adults created calling it a lofty mission. They are automatically put into a pattern they wouldn't choose if they only understood fully what it was about and what in love and life they would be deprived of.]
Freedom comes only when you see and act, never through revolt. The seeing is the acting and such action is as instantaneous as when you see danger. Then there is no celebration, no discussion or hesitation; the danger itself compels the act, and therefore to see is to act and to be free.
Freedom is a state of mind-not a freedom from something but a sense of freedom, a freedom to doubt and question everything and therefore so intense, active and vigorous that it throws away every form of dependence, slavery, conformity and acceptance. Such freedom implies being completely alone. But can the mind brought up in a culture so dependent on environment and its own tendencies ever find that freedom which is complete solitude and in which there is no leadership, no tradition and no authority?
This solitude is an inward state of mind which is not dependent on any stimulus or any knowledge and is not the result of any experience or conclusion. Most of us, inwardly, are never alone. There is a difference between isolation, cutting oneself off, and aloneness, solitude. We all know what it is to be isolated-building a wall around oneself in order never to be hurt, never to be vulnerable, or cultivating detachment which is another form of agony, or living in some dreamy ivory tower of ideology. Aloneness is something quite different.
[another take on personal boundaries and as having a very great influence on freedom]
You are never alone because you are full of all the memories, all the conditioning, all the mutterings of yesterday; your mind is never clear of all the rubbish it has accumulated. To be alone you must die to the past. When you are alone, totally alone, not belonging to any family, any nation, any culture, any particular continent, there
is that sense of being an outsider. The man who is completely alone in this way is innocent and it is this innocence that frees the mind from sorrow.
We carry about with us the burden of what thousands of people have said the memories of all our misfortunes. To abandon all that totally is to be alone, and the mind that is alone is not only innocent but young-not in time or age, but young, innocent, alive at whatever age-and only such a mind can see that which is truth and that which is not measureable by words.
In this solitude you will begin to understand the necessity of living with yourself as you are, not as you think you should be or as you have been. See if you can look at yourself without any tremor, any false modesty, any fear, any justification or condemnation-just live with yourself as you actually are.
~J.Krishnamurti
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