NEGATION, A QUIET CELEBRATION


By Swami Chidananda

We are attracted to a hundred things outside of us, dreaming of possessing them and becoming special by virtue of them. We know at the same time that the richest man in the world has his own problems. Our standard of living may rise by leaps and bounds but the quality of life remains as great a challenge as ever before. By quality is meant, among many aspects, the sense of love that we may experience in our heart.



Are we able to love the people whom we meet on a daily basis? Do we feel loved by people around us? If the fragrance of love does not permeate our day, is it of much use to have fancy possessions, positions, name and fame?



What do we do? Work harder? Run faster? Think more?



Why not an ‘out of the box’ approach? Shift your attention from doing something new to just examining whatever you have been doing, with no specific plan to change it in some way. There is a lot beneath the surface, when you examine your actions, words and thoughts. Much is exposed. Hidden desires, vague fears, irrelevant beliefs, outdated conclusions and subtle schemes are operating all the time within you. They shape what you do, what you say and what you think.



There is urgency in this matter. Life is not long. Do this job, before you follow those who have gone, like Steve Jobs. (Steve, by the way, could not work much on exploring the holistic beauty of life. They say he went to India to meet a guru he fancied, Neem Karoli Baba, but upon finding the latter had passed already, shifted his focus. He made remarkable contributions and became famous, no doubt. How nice it would have been if his intelligence had helped him enrich himself with human values like sensitivity towards the deeper needs of humanity and compassion towards the suffering of the poor and of the rich.)



Examining our entire way of life has urgency about it. Our house is on fire. It is not the time to sing or play the piano. We have been racing, perhaps quite efficiently, in the wrong direction. We have been chasing illusions. Leave alone the false glitter and glamour of our goals, our sense of ‘Who I am’ is itself a deceptive foundation on which stands the edifice of our life’s major activities. Imagine, for example, that somebody mistakes his identity for being a homeless person and goes around the town asking for help. In reality he is a prince and could be a generous giver, rather than a beggar.



Examining the way our thought works can lead to radical change in us. Here it is neither substitution of thoughts nor improvement in the way we think. No specific plan is suggested as to what to think or how to think. Being aware of the movement of thought is the suggestion being made here. In this awareness, junk gets exposed and eliminated. You will lose all that does not really belong to you. A lot of stuff had made your mind their home. In the process, you lost your true identity. The ego therefore is called an imposter in related literature. This imposter takes to his heels. The self gets negated. The Self emerges (to use the language of the Vedanta. The Buddha talked of just negation of the self and kept silent on the Self, the Atma.) The negation of the false – false identity, false values, and false pursuits etc – is a silent affair. There is no ‘doing’ here. The wisdom here expresses itself as ‘ceasing to do’ rather than doing. The relief therefore is quiet celebration.



Swami Chidananda, Varanasi

Thursday, October 13, 2011



Director, Rajghat Education Centre,

Krishnamurti Foundation India, Varanasi 221 001 India
Tel: Home 91 542 244 0722, Work: 91 542 244 1160 and Mobile: 91 98392 70579

Email: chidananda9@yahoo.com Website: www.j-krishnamurti.org






To see what is... transforms what is. - J Krishnamurti