SOPHIA | Jiddu Krishnamurti & Freedom from Technology
Murielle Mobengo • janv. 18, 2021
Updated Aug 8, 2021
SOPHIA
Technology, emotional intensity,
and the fear of death
and the fear of death
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We are concerned with the transformation, with the total psychological revolution of this consciousness and to explore it, you need great energy and that energy comes into being when there is no dissipation of energy.
Jiddu Krishnamurti, "A mind that is free"
Extract from Public Talk 4, Brockwood Park, UK, 1976
This is not Heidegger. This is better.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
is the philosopher in spiritual residence at {R}#3. We honor his clarity, intellectual intensity, and philosophy of absolute emancipation.
While Heidegger elucidates technology and predicts what it has in store for us in the short essay The Question Concerning Technology, Krishnamurti liberates us from our hypermodern (that is, vain) neuroses.
Welcome back, Jiddu.
Last time we checked, the Western philosopher who gave us a plausible and original explanation of the mechanics of existence is Martin Heidegger (some of us think it’s Foucault or Spinoza, but at the end of our debate, Heidegger won because he was also a Poet in disguise).
Yes, Heidegger is a controversial being, but humans always are. Yes, Martin is not an easy thinker either, but, are you?
Each time you think about your own life, we mean, seriously think about your existence and a particular issue bothers you or threatens to terminate your life, are you "easy"? One of the most harmful collective beliefs is to think intensity serves entertainment and romance only, and everything which falls under the realm of our immediate comprehension is valuable knowledge.
Social media paints a sad picture of our intellectual and spiritual lives. The internet floods us with data so undecipherable that we must rely on algorithms―not quite robots yet, but mechanistic processes―to decode them. Simplifying our lives comes at a cost. We have apps for everything, eyes riveted on screens, hands welded to "smart" phones embedded with "life hacks" to be our "best selves" while viruses, coups, and global warming knock at our physical doors.
Every time we do a tap on our smartphones to check how our digital selves on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tik Tok, YouTube, Gmail, etc., we multitask our way through life and believe we made it to ubiquity. Coded bodies and virtual offsprings extend our biological selves and become realer than life itself. Did you notice the many videos of us never change on screens while in reality, we do? Hence, the ratio real/unreal becomes so anxiogenic emotional gratification is the next best thing. “Don’t be evil,” they say. Really?
Intense focus vs intense entertainment. Who's winning?
Existential intensity always produces anxiety but can serve other purposes than the concealment of Angst. Ask us, Poets. When we lack intimacy with reality and prefer to numb ourselves with entertainment instead of using our magnificent intellects to delay gratifications and solve real problems, we find solace in Jiddu Krishnamurti's words:
We are concerned with the transformation, with the total psychological revolution of this consciousness and to explore it, you need great energy and that energy comes into being when there is no dissipation of energy, what dissipates through trying to overcome what is, to deny what is, or to analyze what is (because the analyzer is the analyzed).
Man seeks experience. He seeks experience other than the ordinary daily experience. We are bored or tired or fed up with all the experiences we have of life, and we hope to capture some experience which is not the product of thought.
"Experience" means "go through," to go through with anything and end it, not remembering it and carrying it on. But we don't do that.
Please listen to this. A mind that demands experience more than the mere physical, psychological everyday experience, that demands something far greater and above all this...what it will experience is its own projection and therefore it is still mechanistic, still materialistic, which is the product of thought.
So when you do not demand any experience, when there is no distortion and therefore no illusion, and one has understood the whole meaning of desire (desire is also a distortion), when in the process of examination, then only the mind, the whole structure of consciousness being free is capable of looking at itself without any distortion as you see in a clear mirror your face. The mirror reflects exactly what your face is. There is no distortion unless the mirror is distorted.
Existential complexity requires intense focus. This is the era of intense entertainment.
Being a Luddite today is hard. The Web 2.0 helps spread information and life-affirming knowledge, and closes the geographical gap between us and our close ones during pandemics. But hypermodern technology only mirrors our intense collective desire to escape finitude, and distorts our vision of reality.
Jiddu Krishnamurti’s philosophy is more spiritual but draws a stunning parallel with Heidegger’s warning. The Question Concerning Technology
draws a parallel between the enframing, distractive essence of technology and man’s capacity to think. A visionary read, considering what financial greed, the anti-vacs and other conspirationists are putting the world through.
The Question Concerning Technology
is a delightful philosophical exercise, what phenomenologists call a "monstration." Heidegger excelled at it. A successful monstration is peaceful, focused, observes an event and culminates in aletheia, the moment when the observer becomes aware of something truer than the obvious. "Monstration" roots from Latin, means "to show" and gave the word "monster," entities you cannot ignore.
If your intellect persists and survives Heidegger’s monstration, your daily "Yoga" selfies, insta stories, twitter life in tiny format, and camera-eats-firsts will reveal something about yourself you won’t be able to ignore. They will cease to be natural for you as they did for us, and you will gain a lot of mental clarity and energy. Until we’ve solved the terrifying enigma of death, monstrated in viruses, global warming, but also in healthy, individual bodies, clarity is all we need. If technology does not serve clarity, it doesn’t serve life and we need to get rid of it.
"Experience" means "go through," to go through with anything and end it, not remembering it and carrying it on. But we don't do that.
Jiddu Krishnamurti, 1976
Technology, our death, and religion
Either mythologized or technologized for entertainment, the mystery of our mortal nature will not go away. Or perhaps it will, when we start asking the right questions. Here's a few:
Is existential pain real for me? Am I anxious about the present? Are future perspectives terrifying? Is my life precious if I am not a millionaire? Am I competent to solve the problems of the world because I am famous or a billionaire? Can I solve the problems of my community when I haven't solved my own? What is real freedom? Is stupidity a virus? Is there a vaccine against existential Angst and fear of death? How not to die now? Is everything I have learned of service to me? What is not serving me? Will I die if I discard borrowed knowledge and start inquiring about existence myself?
Questions are endless. Hopefully, our bodies are not.
Technology claims to liberate us from the crude reality of the Dasein, the state of being here, geworfen, jeté, thrown into one single frail body. Yet, technology is nothing but a discourse (logos) on doing (technè), and must borrow a bit of immortality to religion to sustain itself and charm us. Religion never eludes death.
What we want, what's eating us up and causes us to document our lives endlessly with our smartphones is a religious temptation, the possibility that we may not be as finite as we think (without being able to prove it because reality, biological life, and viruses demonstrate otherwise).
Despite the many scandals and obvious obsolescence of its cosmologies, religion will keep on thriving. Not religion as a political institution, not "man-made" religion, not religious mythology (although majestic, hardly understood, and transcended), but the act of being religious, of bringing a sacred quality to life, of operating an inner revolution, of relating to what lies beyond the obvious, because what is obvious does not work anymore.
"Obvious" doesn't work anymore
Here's an obvious fact: the Corona virus varies, chokes people to death, and requires extreme caution to protect ourselves and to protect others, but we keep holding on to the past and pretend Christmas, New Year's Eve inebriated celebrations, our business trips, Instagram relevancy, or our "vacay" are more important than what supports them: our physical integrity.
Apparently, we enjoy deriving our sense of self from the body, while we virtualize and endanger it. "Obvious" doesn't work anymore. Life is complex or maybe not. Maybe we need a faster aletheia, a mass awakening and pain will help with that.
What about Poetry?
Poetry will not cure Covid-19 and will not make up for our defective intellects, but poetic being is close to religious being.
Poets are extremely sensitive because they experience the body a lot and as a Poet starts to mature, s(he) realizes the body contains wonders and nightmares which cannot be lived without other bodies. With all its thoughts and emotions, the body is a temple of interpersonality for us, poets.
As for religious people (the real ones), they experience oneness, an elusive quality of consciousness, and treat the body as a shrine too. Not a shrine of personal thoughts, drives, and emotions, but a sanctuary for the absolute. A vehicle for self-realization: the purpose of life. What real mystics identify as the Self, others call it “God.”
Sensitivity to life is religious and poetic. The Poet is interpersonal. The mystic is impersonal. One is on its way to the other. For both, otherness is an essential aspect of the human experience, a doorway to reality, the absolute: life.
If technology does not reflect or enhance reverence for life, we need to get rid of it.
Augmented living and a dream about the Gods
One of {R}’s editorial members had a fascination for a ritualistic object from India called Yantra. The word Yantra means "barrier," "reins," "lock," "guide," but also "machine," "constraint," "restraint," "bind" and conveys the idea of strength (see Sanskrit-French Dictionary,
Inria).
Devotees pray before yantras, bathe them with perfume, milk, and other precious substances, and offer flowers to them. Why the need to propitiate objects and why are we talking about this? Yantras are devices of worship.
Our obsession with augmented living and robots is not new, yantras dating back to the early stage of tantric worship of the Goddess thousands of years ago.
So, for some psychological reason {R} encourages you to explore, our collective unconscious links divinity, immortality or eternity to the machine, the mechanic.
Machines are "a complex and manufactured object which transforms one form of energy into another and uses this outlet to trigger an effect, to act directly on the object of work for modification according to a fixed goal." (Translation
CNRTL)
Internet is a meta-machine. Pondering over the definition above again, having internet and social media in mind will start the aletheia.
Murielle Mobengo is the editor-in-chief and founder of Revue {R}évolution, as well as a poet. She inquires poetic existence, the origins of poetry and its intricate connection with mythology, the spiritual underpinnings of art, and philosophy. Murielle composes poetry in French, English, and German, and has a fondness for Western ancient languages and Sanskrit. She perceives symbols as a unified language expressing pantheism, and describes herself as a symbolist and a mythologist. Murielle Mobengo is a disciple of Kashmiri Shaivism, the non-dualist Eastern philosophy which traces its roots to the birthplace of Yoga.
This issue of {R}#3 honors Herman Hesse, a Poet who sensed our obsession with technology, the wild child of science, is but a metaphor, a longing to unite with what’s truer than the obvious.
Revue {R}évolution
hopes you will enjoy the reading of "A Dream about the Gods," by the lucid author of Siddhartha, a
poetic
masterpiece of magical realism.
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