On Being Well-Adjusted, part III

First seek an understanding of human affairs, THEN seek to integrate, adjust or withdraw.  Too often, whether in the case of Buddha or Krishnamurti, young, ignorant minds go off into seeking "the highest truth" while not understanding why clothes dry or why an interest is charged on a loan.

Too often, maladjustment starts at the very beginning of one's adult life.  From living a sheltered childhood, to a sudden exposure to the harsh realities of a competitive adult life.  Many are horrified at the prospect and withdraw.  But that is a failure of the adjustment process, not an indictment of society.  Parents are responsible for slowly exposing their children away from fairy tales and into the world of millionaires and courts and real estate.

After an adult has successfully navigated, to a reasonable extent, the "real world", it is permissible for him to seek to withdraw to focus on another kind of pursuit.  Not everyone has to be an entrepreneur.  One could as well be a mathematician, an artist, or an astute generalist.  But to be maladjusted, to never understand the world, and then to withdraw is not renunciation, it is an admission of failure.

Society is indeed sometimes brutal.  But the brutality is not mystical (due to "ignorance of one's true nature" or suchlike), but tangible, due to material and historical conditions.  It may indeed be justified for someone to run away from a war zone, to be a deserter, but then, he cannot live in honor as the town mayor when the war ends.  You can escape the obligations of a "sick society", but you do not, if you are moral, then get to reap the rewards of that same society.

For a sensitive individual, I recommend very much that they should seek to become financially independent, to live with thrift and wisdom so that they may have enough money to live the kind of life they want.  And to become financially independent, it is important to understand society.  Not from a guru, but from study as well as lived experience.

Innocence of spirit can be maintained only by living a life of integrity, where one does not deceive oneself.  If one has to compromise on one's integrity (say, by paying a bribe to get a driving license), it must be with complete self-awareness, and with a feeling of tragedy.  Continuing with this analogy, a morally compromised man (that Krishnamurti would consider well-adjusted) would feel happy that he was able to cunningly achieve his aim, a morally integrated man would feel dejected despite having achieved his aim, and a defeatist (but moral) man would hang himself to death at the state of affairs.

The society is rarely totally evil.  It is made of all kinds of people.  In a very decayed society, or even in jail, you may find exceptional individuals.  You must aim to understand and navigate the circumstances that you find yourself in, and then overcome those circumstances with your strength and acumen, WHILE preserving your innocence and inner moral compass.

And then, having achieved mastery over the earthly affairs, to enjoy your freedom from the shackles of an allegedly "sick society".

That, if you can manage, will be a life well-lived.

On Being Well-Adjusted, part II

 (part 1)

If we disregard the esoteric notion that the goal of human life is unearthly, then living happily and wisely on this earth has to matter.  In this earthly living, what kind of "adjustment" is worthwhile, and what kind of adjustment is a surrender of one's integrity?

Krishnamurti was well-provided for right from his childhood, when he was adopted by the Theosophists.  He never had to struggle to make a career or to make a living.  Though he had romantic engagements, he never married or had children.  He lived a cocooned life, where important politicians and rich people kept him safe and free of worry.  He lived an aristocratic life despite his claims that he "gave up" the mantle of the world teacher.  He kept enough funds of the original "Order of the Star in the East" to keep himself comfortable, and his rich friends continue to support him.

Krishnamurti could rail against "society" and the pursuit of wealth and being career-focused while he himself lived comfortably and flew first class.  By all material indications, he was well-adjusted in society.  He never went to jail.  He never considered the tax laws as unjust.  He never fought in a war while letting others fight for him and his freedoms.

It is also a surrender of one's integrity to amass riches while misleading other people that one is the world teacher.  The integral act would have been for Krishnamurti to completely disavow his world-teacher status and be a common man.  But he did not do that.  He did not start working in a factory and find a rented accommodation.

All this is to say that criticism of the society as being profoundly sick, and stating that adjustment to such a society is a disease, can only come, ethically speaking, from someone who is not enjoying the fruits of such a sick society.

Let us leave aside Krishnamurti then, as he, being a hypocrite, is not worth responding to, and consider afresh how a man with integrity ought to live in this world, a world that demands the subjugation of his intellect, his strength and his insight.  How must a man live comfortably while still not allowing his soul to be sold, and his mind to be corrupted beyond recognition.

How to preserve one's innocence while being clever enough to navigate the traps of this world?

Is it doable?

(to be continued)

On Being Well-Adjusted, part I

Jiddu Krishnamurti famously said: It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.

What is "society"?  What does it mean to be "well-adjusted"?  In what sense is society "profoundly sick"?  What kind of "health" are we talking about here?

If we take Krishnamurti's statement to be true, what is the recommendation for a modern human being?

Society is the structure of human interaction.  Whether it be financial, educational, religious, political, ethical, historical, legal, kinship, sexual, habitual, pertaining to manners, ...  The various kinds of interactions between human beings, and the burdens and benefits thereof, is society.  The structure is a behemoth of rules, implicit and explicit.  You are born in a family, you spend the first twenty odd years getting educated as per the norms of your society, you form friendships and relationships, you earn and spend money, try to be on the right side of law, and so on.

Nobody, anywhere, claims that their society is ideal.  But one can evaluate the health of a society in many ways.  Does it show signs of "low-trust"?  Is there a lot of hypocrisy (people asking you to follow certain rules but flouting those rules themselves)?  Is there a general sense of well-being and safety?  Is the environment healthy and clean?  Is there beauty?  Are people able to have a comfortable, dignified life?  Is there freedom of expression?  Are the institutions overburdened and inefficient?  Are hard work and ethical living rewarded or punished?  Do people feel empowered, or powerless?  Is there disease, or good health in the majority of the population?

But even in the best societies, as per our metrics, an individual faces a certain burden of socialization.  He cannot just do as he pleases.  There are rules and responsibilities, rewards and punishments, those who like and love oneself and those who are strange or hostile.

Spiritual people like Krishnamurti advise that the only true goal is salvation, and earthly and social goals are quite secondary.  Their focus is not on material conditions, but on inner growth.  To them, a man who is poor or one who is jail but elevated in his consciousness is far better than a cunning man who is comfortable and powerful, but otherwise commonplace in his thinking.

We can all agree that the former man is maladjusted, the latter is well-adjusted.  The former man has not adjusted to the rules of society and is suffering materially, while the latter has mastered the rules of his society and is prospering.

Is it possible for a happy and wise man to be materially well-adjusted?  Or is maladjustment the inevitable fate of wisdom?

Was Krishnamurti himself well-adjusted?

(to be continued)

Mechanism and Destination

Too many otherwise smart people fall in the trap of optimizing their ability to navigate modern life, and then dying.

They focus on their health, go on diets, build muscle, buy expensive goods, keep an immaculate home, get a good education, have a brag-worthy spouse, invest sensibly, push their kids into the ivy league, and then, ..., nothing.

They read self-help books, advance in their careers, post their photos on LinkedIn or on Facebook with the well-known, watch the Game of Thrones, and then, ..., nothing.

They go on picturesque vacations, eat at Michelin-star restaurants, get spa treatments, use the best skin products, keep track of their health parameters, and then, ..., nothing.

...

Mechanism is one thing, and Destination is another.  (this phrase is from my remembrance of a remarkable and life-altering essay by J Krishnamurti)

A life can be trivially wasted in shiny mechanisms, while the destination remains pithy, pitiful and prosaic.

It is fine to earn and to save money, if you have an idea on how that money can be used to go further.  If with that money you buy a bigger house, and then you spend even more money to maintain that house, then the house has transformed, for you, from a mechanism that could enable you to do bigger things, to a beautiful cage.

A meaningful destination comes naturally to some, but vast numbers struggle to create an appearance of one or have no understanding of why it might be important.  Why?

I hold that a destination is meaningful only insofar as it yields clarity, understanding and fulfillment.

If at the end of a day, you have taken ten thousand steps, and have eaten healthy, and have finished another chapter of a self-help book, that day must be recorded as a day preparing for life, not life itself.

We are not merely mechanisms, the core of being human is to think and to imagine and to dream and to elucidate and to clarify and to research and to create.

A life devoted to mechanism is a wasted life.

I believe it was Osho who once stated to the effect that for a poor man to embark on transcendence was a blessing, while for a rich man to NOT be interested in transcendence was a curse.

The aim of human life is to reach higher, not to spend all one's years in preparation of it.

All beauty, all strength, all vitality, all wealth, must be in honor of, and a tribute to, the mystery that is all around us.  The mystery of an infinite universe and of us being able to see the stars in it at night.  

Anything less seems like a pity, and more than a pity, and worse than a pity. 
(this phrase taken, with admiration, from the last para of the outstanding essay by David Albert about a very different topic)

Choice and Depth

In college, I was quite the tinkerer and hacker of computer systems and computer software.  It was late 90s, and though we had a local area network, we did not have internet access.  We didn't even an internet email address.

Operating systems were installed from floppies, some newer systems had CD drives.  PC magazines used to come with free software CDs and those CDs contained not just games and Windows shareware, but also free software such as the Slackware Linux distribution, or Cygwin (GNU tools for Windows).

Since we did not have internet access, we pried open, figuratively speaking, each software that we could get our hands on and explored every nook and cranny of it.  We explored all the settings, the various flags, limits, "GNU extensions", and we tried to compile it on unsupported operating systems.

I remember being introduced to perl and zsh, at that time still new things.  Perl was authored by Larry Wall, and zsh was written by Paul Falstad, a student at Georgia Tech university.  I read almost their entire man pages, and came to understand the philosophy and the interesting features in them.  I was intimately familiar with their capabilities, the differences they had with other languages and shells, and what differences existed in one version vs the previous one.

Linux was still new, and most free software with source code supported many Unix-like operating systems.  In our institute, we had access to HP-UX, SunOS 5, Solaris, IRIX, and SVR4.2, among others.  It was a lot of fun trying to make the GNU toolchain and compilers and libraries work on these varied Unix systems.

I remember that even in a limited operating system as MSDOS, we looked at almost all the system utilities and what they did and why and how.

Similarly, because the computers were much less powerful than those of today, it was both necessary and enjoyable to exploit whatever hardware capabilities were there.  With only 4MB of RAM, and 64MB hard disk, one had to be very efficient at storage and memory allocation.

That period set the tone for my professional career, as I, after a brief stint as a software engineer, veered back into system administration and network engineering.

...

When I look at the capabilities of computers and networks today, I find that there is nothing I cannot do or find anywhere in the world, but my curiosity in what I have already on my system is thereby much reduced.

The systems and software that I have on my personal computer are absolutely remarkable, and I sometimes mourn my disinclination to explore them more.

It is also true that systems have gotten more complex.  Tinkering with a simple engine is perhaps far more enjoyable than owning a complex piece of machinery which is more capable but less accepting of amateur exploration.

As an analogy for this situation, consider a man who lives in a village all his life.  He probably knows all the little ponds, the birds and their mating calls, he can identify cattle and horses, and he experiences life, dare I say, with more depth.  Each experience is deeper because of the familiarity one has with the context and the contents of that experience.

On the other hand, a man who has been given a boon to be teleported anywhere in the world will probably not find it easy to give deep attention to any one place, to any one thing, or to any one person.  He will always be going here and there, and it will be impossible for him to call any place home.  The attraction of novelty will not allow him to be bored, and boredom is, I think, essential to experiencing anything in depth.

The real learning starts when the novelty has worn off.  But if another novelty then takes its place, then the learning will remain facile.

The absence of boredom, and commitment, that an unlimited choice bestows on oneself is therefore a boon as well a curse.  It is the boon of freedom, and the curse of never delving into anything deeply.