Random Musings on Krishnamurti’s The Mystique of Enlightenment
Somatic experiencing and Krishnamurti’s “calamity”
After reading what Krishnamurti describes as the “calamity”, I’m convinced that his body was actually letting off a massive amount of stored up trauma. In particular, he talks of his body shaking and feeling pain, speaking of it as an explosion. From my own experiences of EMDR, I can say this is what I feel, though my experience was started by a therapist as opposed to Krishnamurti’s sudden release of this energy. I relate this to the book Waking the Tiger by Peter Levine which discusses somatic experiencing psychotherapy for trauma which involves allowing the body to vibrate and move as it needs to so that trauma is let out.
Here are a few random bullet points based off of this premise:
The natural state is a trauma free state. Enlightenment is to be free of trauma stored in the body. Thus animals are in their natural state since they have a naturally somatic experience and are enlightened. Moo.
Certain classes of thought prevent somatic experiencing. Much of trauma therapy is centered around moving past the cognitive level to the somatic level such that the underlying stored trauma can be discharged. We could relate this class of thoughts to cognitive distortions, though I’d say cognitive distortions are but a subclass of this whole class of thoughts. It is any thought which aims to solve a problem of ego that prevents somatic experiencing.
Krishnamurti mentions the notion of chakra or “ductless glands”. I like to think of this as vital energy (qi) that moves through the body. Perfect movement of qi corresponds to the natural state and enlightenment. Trauma can be thought of as a blockage of qi in the body and so thought is created from blocked qi.
From my experience, I find that I can enter the somatic experiencing state on my own if I’ve done enough breathing techniques to calm my body down. This is typically done by deep diaphragmatic breathing and progressive muscle relaxation. I also practice transcendental meditation during this time to unglue myself from whatever thought loop I am stuck in. After this, I allow the energy stored in my body to discharge through some sort of shaking or running movement (discharging trapped fight or flight energy). I’m not saying I’ve reached enlightenment, but I notice a significant movement towards what Krishnamurti has described as the natural state based on the delta from my severely traumatized state that I was in when I started healing my PTSD versus how I am right now.
Absence of division in the psyche and my second disagreement with Krishnamurti
Krishnamurti talks of the natural state as being one which is fully integrated. This corresponds to the internal family systems model of understanding trauma in that there are different parts of us within the mind that need to be led by a leadership self. Building off of the last point, blockages in qi which cause a certain class of thoughts to perpetuate correspond to built up trauma in the body, or in the IFS model, a part that is not in harmony with the rest of the psyche.
I don’t exactly disagree with Krishnamurti on this point but somewhat dispute it when he says that each person’s concept of enlightenment is different and that there is no real commonality. This is both true and false. It is true in that no two people will have the same natural state unless they have the same exact genetic code, if we’re assuming that enlightenment is based on biological realities as opposed to some grand spiritual idea. However, I do believe that there is a certain innate morality that each enlightened person will have that is intrinsic in biology because altruism is evolutionarily advantageous. This idea is echoed in the Erikson stages of development, which posits that for an individual, each phase of life presents a new challenge and a new virtue to be cultivated. Thus, there is some “skeleton” of moral development that an individual is meant to follow. I believe the primary variables that influence variations in the natural state among individuals is nervous system sensitivity (see highly sensitive people, or HSPs) and concentration in qi through the body (see the Enneagram, a system that describes different personality types).
An ordering principle to reality based on the notion of enlightenment
Let’s piggy back off the last topic and revisit the idea that altruism is evolutionarily advantageous. That won’t be the focus of this section, moreso the idea of why evolutionarily advantageous behaviors even exist.
Krishnamurti describes his natural state as one where the sensations are fully felt and thought is no longer self-inspecting but purely for the purpose of operating within the real world. The fact that these two things are paired together implies that thought focused on introspection and self-examination blocks one off from the senses and disconnects them from reality. It is described as “useless information”. If enlightenment is the ability to come fully into the senses, then the only “useful information” is that which is created purely through sensation that does not pass through the ego. In essence, the ultimate state of man, if that’s what enlightenment is, is a state that minimizes information waste.
Let’s ignore Krishnamurti for a moment. In many schools of thought, this highest form of enlightenment encompasses the creation of something that contributes to society. Many times, this is science, or art, or social change. But in all cases, it leads to the “betterment of humanity”, which we may roughly say as that which frees other humans from suffering or leads to greater compression of information. For more on information compression and why art and science are tied to it, see my essay Compressing God into a .txt File.
If evolution is selecting for this, we may opt to ascribe an animistic principle to the universe that aims for compression of information and self-realization. In vague terms, we may be thought of as fragments of the universe, collectively helping it understand itself. For more on this, I’ve picked my next book to be Jacques Monod’s Chance and Necessity as it tackles an animistic principle to the universe’s workings.