Half Way Up

Half Way Up

A journal (The Link), circulated among those who have been influenced by Krishnamurti, contained this (unsigned) account, abridged here:

“It was clear to the intellect, that it had to surrender…a state not unlike total abandonment…every inner movement came to an end…. I no longer felt any sense of separation…at the same time, it was completely normal…everything was wonderfully harmonized, and daringly simple and transparent. A new dimension was making itself manifest…it was an ecstasy of clarity, a plunging into the essence of things, into the plain straightforwardness of truth…

“This transformation came as a total surprise; I hadn’t planned it…. The uncommon—where there is no longer any conflict of the opposites—became the companion of my days…that singular sense of being surfaced, at its strongest in quiet moments—when it also demanded the most attention, and revealed its fathomless profundity…. One was living (it seems to me), to the thousandth of a second, exactly in the present moment…as if all the screws, angle-irons and nails—which would normally hold the I-thought together—had simply fallen away…total insecurity and absolute security—that is, emptiness and fullness—were one and the same…which, naturally, goes beyond logic and normal understanding…not to revert to the power-seeking, or routine-type activities of the mind—but to be single and free of the chains of the past, and one with the Immensity of the moving present.”

This certainly sounds like what might be called the “typical enlightenment experience.” However, what follows does not sound atypical either.

“…over the years, this revelatory experience has disappeared completely, into the unconscious… conventional life took over…the pressure toward fanciful projection (on which the world, and one’s own brain, are built) could no longer be diverted… the (nosy) intellect gave its assent, with three cheers— saying how good it was to be snuggled up again in a mediocre, narrow, straight life…the old…triumphed again over the new…some ten years later, I am writing this report.”

Enlightenment is not merely a wholly different way of seeing, Krishnamurti might have said, but a wholly different way of living. It was after Krishnamurti’s realization (a new way of seeing) that he took the action of dissolving the Order of the Star, and embarked on a freshly new way of living—rather than snuggling up again in a mediocre life. And for him this revelatory experience did not disappear under the pressures of conventional life, which he had forsaken. Krishnamurti sometimes pointed out that mediocre means “half way up the mountain.”