Chathan's Space

Feedom From The Known

“For centuries we have been spoon-fed by our teachers, by our authorities, by our books, our saints. We say, 'Tell me all about it - what lies beyond the hills and the mountains and the earth?' and we are satisfied with their descriptions, which means that we live on words and our life is shallow and empty. We are secondhand people. We have lived on what we have been told, either guided by our inclinations, our tendencies, or compelled to accept by circumstances and environment. We are the result of all kinds of influences and there is nothing new in us, nothing that we have discovered for ourselves; nothing original, pristine, clear”

I was reading the famous book by J KrishnaMurthy Freedom from the known . Essence of the book is be always your own guru. Don’t expect other Guru’s to guide you. They can only guide themselves.

In this book he discuss about conditioning, Fear, Filters, awareness, joy and all other feelings in depth.

“It is the same with sexual desire or any other form of desire. There is nothing wrong with desire. To react is perfectly normal. If you stick a pin in me I shall react unless I am paralysed. But then thought steps in and chews over the delight and turns it into pleasure. Thought wants to repeat the experience, and the more you repeat, the more mechanical it becomes”.

Krishnamurthy is asking us to live in the present not in past or future. This is fantastic book when I read it 10 years back. Even when I re-read it it excites me with the depth of ideas. This is must read book for anyone.

Krishnamurthy talks about awareness which is nothing but a deep understanding of things. Be aware about your conditioning which prevents you from knowing things. When you identify a tree by name you are satisfied that the tree is a Banyan tree. But still you don’t know anything about the tree, how the leaves are ,how the branches originates how its flowers and fruits look like how the trunk is and how it roots go into the soil etc. The name of the tree prevents you from understanding the tree.

These conditioning and filters prevents you understanding things. When you are aware of your conditioning and see beyond that you will start seeing and feeling the world.

This concept is same as the concept used in research to identify the hidden assumptions used in a theory to understand the theory completely. Krishnamurthy came to my mind when Shashi mented Navier stokes Equations and how mechanical engineers using it. We chemical engineers always start from the complete equation simplify the equation using all assumptions. Where as mechanical engineers use a simplified version of the equation in most of the cases. Most of them use the simplified version without understanding the assumptions behind.

posted by Chathan @ 9:39 AM