Creation & Direct Perception
Thinking Less and The Explosion of Creativity.
I started The Last Stop On The Late Train in July of last year!
62 posts! Hundreds of subscribers! I’ve connected with new readers and old friends.
Today’s post will be a little different. It’s a single quote without too much analysis. There is some connective tissue between J. Krishnamurti and the overall purpose of this newsletter, charting a course through the sea of information that we find ourselves in today.
First — here’s an extended quote from J. Krishnamurti on creation:
You know what creation is? Not the expression, that's fairly simple to understand - as a writer, as a poet, as an artist you want to express, that is not creation. Creation is something entirely different. You know, creation can only come about when there is energy. Energy that is not... that has never been contaminated, that is not the result of effort, will, but that energy which action itself brings. And now all our activities, more or less, are self-centered, centred upon ourselves in relation to various things; and that self-centered activity, which is of the thinker, invariably breeds contradictions; and being in a state of contradiction demands expression - I must escape, I must write, I must do. The man who is in a state of self-contradiction and in a state of self-centered activity, what he does as painter, as an artist, as a musician, he may call that creation but it is not. Creation must be something extraordinarily different. And it is.
Now, as I said, the mind when it is not touched or has understood the whole structure of contradiction, conscious as well as unconscious, it is completely still. Because any movement of energy is a dissipation. It's only when the mind is completely still, with tremendous energy, then there is an explosion, and that explosion is creation, which may or may not need expression.
Krishnamurti & Me
For 7 years, 6th grade to 12th grade, I attended Rishi Valley School, one of the KFI schools, a school founded by Jiddu Krishnamurti.
Krishnamurti, as many of my Indian readers doubtless already know, at the tender age of thirteen, was identified by the Theosophical Society as the future World Teacher, and was seen by the theosophists as a messianic figure.
The Theosophical Society established the Order of the Star in the East (OSE) and opened membership to those who accepted the doctrine of the Coming of the World Teacher.
In 1929, at the age of thirty-three, Krishnamurti dissolved the order and rejected the role of world teacher and in a lovely address, he declared that “truth is a pathless land” and asked everyone to eschew religions and sects and to cease to be followers. He dedicated his life to public discussions around the nature of truth and to education designed to develop questioning minds. He founded five schools in India, one in England, and one in the United States (in Ojai valley).
Though he died before I was born, I learned about Krishnamurti briefly at school. His ideas weren’t part of the curriculum. My Dad, who had attended his public lectures, always did a funny impression of his oratory style. In the last five years, I’ve listened closely to recordings of those lectures and discussions on Youtube and elsewhere, and, inspired by him, I try and live free and fearlessly.
What does that mean? It means thinking less. It means noticing that thought is rooted in time. It is always of the past or the future. Thought runs against the present, against the moment of creation.
Krishnamurti and Information Saturation
This is a newsletter about discernment in the age of information saturation. Krishnamurti urged us to not look externally, to the worlds of data, of authority, of doctrine, for truth.
Truth, the pathless land, is not somewhere out there on the endless internet. It is the direct comprehension of the precise moment, it is confronting oneself in the now.
“Truth cannot be given to you by somebody. You have to discover it; and to discover, there must be a state of mind in which there is direct perception.”
I urge you all to think less, to eschew doctrines, and to find moments of direct perception. It’s what I’m trying to do. To find stillness of the mind. And from that stillness, tremendous unthinking energy.
Thank you for a year’s worth of support for this newsletter. Please continue to share it widely. If you have your own thoughts on the act of creation, I’d love to hear them in the comments.
The Last Stop on The Late Train will remain forever free, forever un-paywalled. If you’d like to support this work, you can buy me a monthly coffee at https://buymeacoffee.com/raghavrao. ☕☕☕
MISSY Pre-Order Information:
Apologies if you have already pre-ordered my book. Some people have mentioned having a hard time pre-ordering my book. The best online retailers for my book are currently Waterstones and Blackwells. Amazon US does not currently support my book because the US rights remain on submission.
Here’s the pre-order link again.
For more info about my book and why it’s currently only available for pre-order in the UK or to share it with other interested parties, please see the previous post on this subject.