is Krishnamurti really too negative? am I too negative? are you?

vic shayne
author
the self is a belief: the idea that causes suffering

A couple of people who are close to me have hinted that I am too focused on the negative. After I published my book, The Enduring Myth of the Buddha, one of these wonderful people asked me what it was about. I explained that life is suffering and, on his way to becoming the Buddha, Siddhartha wanted to find out how to end the suffering and find something transformative. I explained what I meant, as well as what the Buddha meant, by suffering. She asked me why I focus so much on suffering when life has so many wonderful things to offer. Do I?

suffering leads to something deeper
Despite the criticism of my personal worldview, I thought I was asked a valuable question worthy of consideration and introspection. Nevertheless, I offered a quick answer: Undeniably, I suggested, it is suffering alone that leads us to look for something deeper, something richer and more rewarding than the superficial or some way to distract ourselves from the obvious problems that we all inherit and experience on a daily basis. Suffering may lead to some sort of transcendence.

Suffering, as Siddhartha knew all too well, doesn’t have to be related to finances, interpersonal relationships, the horrific treatment of animals, or even social issues, although these are real and pressing issues. Still, such things are symptoms and not causes. Suffering is often rooted in a certain feeling that there must be more to life, something deeper and profound. Or it may begin with an uneasiness that leads to the question of who you are at the core — something beyond the image that everyone, including you, thinks is the real you. Suffering comes from the sense of self, which is the image of who you are to yourself and to others.

The self creates suffering because it’s trying to change what it cannot change due to its ignorance of what it immutably is.

krishnamurti was not mired in the negative
A week later I read an online post condemning Jiddu Krishnamurti as a hopelessly negative person. It made me consider how the human mind, including my own, thinks and reacts. It is the negative and the suffering that confronts us on a constant basis throughout our lives. Should we pretend that it does not exist and just try our best to ignore and distract ourselves from it? Should we delude ourselves and pretend — or force ourselves to believe — that the negativity, violence, struggle, conflict, and woes of life do not exist for us? Of course many people do just this, including people who teach about manifesting good things and being eternally positive and optimistic. But this is delusional thinking borne of not knowing what we really are or what life is.

observing the totality of what we are
Jiddu Krishnamurti was a world teacher unlike any other. With his intelligence and insight he was able to take inordinate amounts of time to peel away the layers of dross that has been built up in the mind and get to the root of our psychological suffering. He suggested, over and over again, to just look at the whole of our problems. We don’t have time to move through each problem and difficulty, piece by piece. There aren’t enough hours in a lifetime to approach our overall difficulties by means of fragmentation. The self is already a perceived fragment, believing it is apart from the whole, and we must observe the totality of what we are all at once so we can see what it is, which is a singular system full of emotions, thoughts, fears, memories, and so on.

observation is not criticism
There is a big difference between observing what we are, with all our faults and absurd beliefs, versus criticizing ourselves for such thoughts. This isn’t about psychoanalysis, judgment, or criticism; it is about an honest appraisal so that we can see what we are. In doing so we see why we suffer, as well as why we seek to escape suffering. And, perhaps more importantly, why the conditioned mind of the self is the wrong tool to see past the suffering.

But we have to look at what we label negative; there is no way around this when we seriously observe the whole of what we take ourselves to be. After all, if we want to commune with nature, we come across all sorts of things and not just pretty flowers, majestic trees, tinkling creeks, and singing birds. We also find snakes swallowing mice, fish eating worms, birds battering trees, and bears fighting for domination. Nature is the whole thing, not just the parts we find positive and appealing. Why can’t we appraise our selves the same way?

life is suffering as well as joyful
Is life really suffering as the Buddha suggested? Sure it is, and that never stops in our world. Being eaten by a bigger animal is nothing but suffering for the prey. Losing one’s mother to death is suffering, and so is losing the love of one’s life. We suffer from ideas, the weather, and the actions of others. But we also take delight in a great many things, such as when our home team wins a game, when we get to help a friend, or when a tyrannical ruler is ousted. Yet even the good never fully replaces the bad; not permanently. That’s the way life works. The real question, then, is whether we can find some way to see the totality of what we are, including our suffering, without choosing good or bad so that we are not buffeted and bothered by the winds of life’s inevitable movement and change. Seeing things for what they are brings about a clear mind.