Krishnamurti: On Psychological Security

What does it take to experience true security in an age that seems obsessed with being secure? Literally, billions of dollars are spent each year, by countries large and small, to purchase armaments in an attempt to obtain security by pure force. Yet, at a psychological and emotional level, individuals in these societies probably feel less secure then they ever have.

In a talk that predates the rise of the national security state, the late spiritual teacher, Jiddu Krishnamurti, examines our individual and collective need for security and explores whether psychologically security is even possible.

Throughout millennia, Krishnamurti notes, humanity has always sought physical security - adequate food, clothing and shelter - but has never managed to arrange a society that could provide these basic needs in adequate abundance to all. Perhaps it is this reality, he suggests, that compels an additional need for a psychological sense of security that is almost impossible for a society to attain, but which is possible to the individual.

"Desire for physical security," Krishnamurti observes, "has psychologically taken over the physical demands. One needs physical security, and that is the function of a good society." However, he notes, "each human being seeks pyschological security, inward security, relying on belief - holding on - hoping there, by inner belief, to find security in an idea, in a person, in a concept, in an experience."

But, he asks: "Does he ever find security in any of it . . . and if he doesn't why does he hold onto it?"

"For centuries, he suggests, "a belief has been created, and one accepts it naturally from childhood, and it is easier to follow what has been the tradition rather than to break away from it."

In the attached videos (from 1979), Krishnamurti examines how we have set up society after society that has failed to provide basic security - in terms of providing adequate food, clothes and shelter - and questions if, in light of this, we have the ability to critically examine the societies we have set up, and perhaps move from that critical examination towards true psychological security.

Tolle, Heisenberg and Descartes: "I Observe, therefore, I Am"

Rene Descartes
(1596-1650)

Rene Descarte's famous dictum, "cognito ergo sum" ('I think, therefore, I am'), while logical and apparently self-evident on its face, may be wholly wrong. Voices as varied as spiritual teacher, Eckhart Tolle, and Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Werner Hesienberg (who first developed the eponymous 'Uncertainty Principle' that forms an integral component of the quantum theory), have critiqued Descartes on precisely this conclusion. "I am, therefore, I think," would perhaps be a more accurate summary for Tolle, who has identified "thinking without awareness" as the main problem of humanity.

Werner Heisenberg
(1901-1976)

For his part, Heisenberg in "Physics and Philosophy:The Revolution in Modern Science," observes that Descartes' distinction between internal reality (res cogitans) and outer reality (res extensa) skewed  science so that it looked almost wholly to the external, a viewpoint that cannot be sustained given the role of the observer in quantum mechanics.

"(T)he basis of the philosophy of Descartes is radically different from that of the ancient Greek philosophers," Heisenberg notes. "Here the starting point is not a fundamental principle or substance, but the attempt of a fundamental knowledge. And Descartes realizes that what we know about our mind is more certain than what we know about the outer world. But already his starting point with the "triangle" God-World-I simplifies in a dangerous way for further reasoning."

"The division between matter and mind or between soul and body, which had started in Plato's philosophy, is now complete. God is separated both from the I and from the world. God in fact is raised so high above the world and men that He finally appears in the philosophy of Descartes only as a common point of reference that establishes the relation between the I and the world."

"If one uses the the fundamental concepts of Descartes at all," Heisenberg continues, "it is essential that God is in the world and in the I and it is also essential that the I cannot be really separated from the world. Of course Descartes knew the indisputable necessity of the connection, but philosophy and natural science in the following period developed on on the basis of the polarity between the "res cogitans" and "res extensa." The influence of the Cartesian division on human thought in the following centuries can hardly be overestimated, but it is just in this division which we have to criticize later from the development of physics in our time."

[Heisenberg, "Physics and Philosophy," pp. 52-53]

"If one follows the great difficulty which even eminent scientists like Einstein had in understanding the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory," Heisenberg remarks, "one can trace the roots of this difficulty to the Cartesian partition. This partition has penetrated deeply into the human mind during the three centuries following Descartes and it will take a long time for it to be replaced by a really different attitude toward the problem of reality."

[Ibid., p. 55.]

Eckhart Tolle

Perhaps, a better summary, and one that both Tolle and Heisenberg might accept is "observare ergo sum" - "I observe, therefore, I am" - for it is the observer that finally determines the outcome in quantum mechanics, coalescing one reality out of an infinite number of possibilities, and for Tolle it is the witnessing Presence of the observer that stymies the ego and makes his or her world whole.

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For a detailed introduction to the work of Heisenberg and the development of the quantum theory, particularly as it relates to consciousness, the cosmos and our Being, see the related post ("God, Quantum Physics and Cosmology: A Video Compilation"), which is available, below.

God, Quantum Physics and Cosmology: A Video Compilation

An interesting and informative video introduction to quantum physics, cosmolgy, the "new physics" and their relationship to "God" has been put together by UNFFwildcard on YouTube ( "God and Cosmology I").

Very detailed, the video series (embedded below) is nonetheless a concise explanation of the "new physics" and the problems and possibilities that quantum theory presents for our understanding of the cosmos, consciousness and, perhaps, an omnipresent God that pervades and supports the universe.









Video for God and Cosmology - Part 4 is available for viewing on YouTube by following this link.

Fear, Desire and Experience

"Before you learn to swim, water seems to be a dreadful place. "Suppose I drown? What will become of me?" But once you learn to swim, you love the water. You have to learn to swim in this ocean of samsara - to become a master swimmer."

-- Swami Satchidananda --

Mastering our fears by overcoming desires - in this instance, the fear of death and the desire for perfect security - leads to the experience of something far greater than the sum of all fears and desires, i.e., the human ego. The ego cannot experience the divine, its experience is only that of fears that can never be allayed and desires that can never be fulfilled. Yet experience of the divine is just beyond the ego's seemingly firm, but feeble, grip.

"To know itself," the modern sage, Sri Nisagardatta remarked, "the self must be faced with its opposite - the not-self. Desire leads to experience. Experience leads to discrimination, detachment, self-knowledge - liberation. And what is liberation after all? To know that you are beyond birth and death. By forgetting who you are and imagining yourself a mortal creature, you created so much trouble for yourself that you have to wake up, like from a bad dream."

[Sri Nisagardatta Maharaj, "I Am That," p. 68.]

Over and over, saints and sages have used the metaphor of water - the spring, the lake, the river and the ocean - to express the challenges to, and potential for, transcendental experience of our higher being. Jesus walked on water, the Buddha crossed over to the far shore. The lotus flower is rooted in the muddy bottom of a lake and blooms on its surface. Rumi's flutes are fashioned from the reeds that grow along the river's shores, already singing plaintively for the divine breath that will loose the music they hold within themselves.

Rhetorically, Nisagardatta asks: "What is wrong with (the mind) seeking the pleasant and shirking the unpleasant?"

"Between the banks of pain and pleasure," he notes, "the river of life flows. It is only when the mind refuses to flow with life, and gets stuck at the banks, that it becomes a problem. By flowing with life I mean acceptance - letting come what comes and go what goes. Desire not, fear not, observe the actual, as and when it happens, for you are not what happens, you are to whom it happens. Ultimately even the observer you are not. You are the ultimate potentiality of which the all-embracing consciousness is the manifestation and expression.

Perhaps it was Herman Melville, author of "Moby Dick," the great novel of what happens to man when he seeks to kill the leviathans that lurk beneath the oceans' waters, who said it best when he observed:

"Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest of azure. Consider also the devilish brilliance and beauty of many of its most remorseless tribes, as the dainty embellished shape of many species of sharks. Consider, once more, the universal cannibalism of the sea; all of whose creatures prey upon each other, carrying on eternal war since the world began."

"Consider all this; and then turn to this green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!"

In his metaphor, "Tahiti" is the higher consciousness of enlightenment available to the man who reaches its shore having crossed the ego-ocean of the "half known life," with all of the self-cannibalizing fears and desires that lurk beneath a surface that is often calm, but just as often storm-tossed. "Push not off from that isle," Melville warns, for if you do, "thou canst never return!"