2004 Letter from Johan Lem
Issue No. 24, 2004-2005 of the Krishnamurti International Link magazine, contained the letter below from Johan Lem. I don’t know who Mr. Lem is, but this letter struck me as the most common-sense approach to applying K’s work that I have ever seen. To me, this letter is worth decades of reading and studying, if it is applied. I suspect however, that until one has done decades of reading and studying, letters like this mean nothing. I hope it can save you more time than it saved me!
Understanding, or Living the Teachings?
After having read a few articles in different issues of The Link, I have the impression that the goal of many authors is to understand the teachings, and their approach is often very intellectual and complicated.
My approach is simple. Many years ago I used the teachings to understand myself. This understanding is not intellectual, but direct; it occurs through seeing what is happening one’s psyche when it happens. This seeing comes through a state of awareness when inner and outer senses are open, alert, interested to see or experience what is taking place there and then, no matter whether it is pleasant or unpleasant. From that moment on, if one is alert in daily life, the teachings are no longer so important: ‘what is’ has taken over the teaching job.
As in this awareness thought has automatically calmed down, such a state cannot be found through any activity of thought. There must be no wish to achieve, no motive. One must come upon it. It may help to re-discover one’s senses, which in our culture are so dominated by thought. As a child, one had excellent contact with one’s senses. This re-discovery, like every discovery, happens without chronological and psychological time, without evolution. It cannot be learned and thus become part of our culture. The only thing that can be assimilated is that it is possible to understand oneself, the activities of the psyche, directly by seeing, not by thinking. This discovery can also help us to understand that life takes place in the everlasting now, and so on. And we see that the constant flow through our individual consciousness of information and impressions, sensations, thoughts and emotions makes up the content and quality of our individual life.
In this awareness, seeing or being the flow of information and emotions through consciousness in daily life creates a certain emptying process of the psyche. This happens step by step and layer by layer as deeper layers may come to the surface when the upper layers have been emptied. Any emptying of bodily tensions may also be involved. It is not an emptying of consciousness but an emptying of the unconscious psyche. It is a healing process. It takes chronological time without using psychological time. A step may be the seeing, and thus emptying, of a single emotional reaction. The actual content of one’s consciousness and one single point in the unconscious psyche have been changed and often healed without the use of any psychological time, with no involvement of future, becoming, or thought wanting to achieve. Thus the psychological timeless state, the now, creates an evolution through chronological time. This may sound paradoxical, but it is not. This state of consciousness is alert but passive; there is no turning of stones, no doing, only seeing. Every movement in this process is a result of something happening and not the result of an act of will. As I see it, as I have experienced it, this is living the teachings. Living the teachings means living in peace with oneself.
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Thank you Johan!
