'The mind-forged manacles I hear!'

On True Liberation | Literary Vignettes

While reading through Jiddu Krishnamurti’s Freedom from the Known, I was so inspired by some of his mighty musings on true liberation and its connect with the ‘mind!’

Inspired me much-o-much to do a little series on vignettes from the literary arena - vignettes that bespeak to the extraordinary power contained within the liberated mind and heart! 

Says Jidduji, ‘You have to be your own teacher and your own disciple!’

Face the fact; look at yourself! Do not run away from yourself! The moment you run away fear begins!

Exactly what Carl Jung tells us, when he quips, 

Who looks outside dreams! Who looks inside awakens!

Again, something akin to what Sartre would tell us in his Being and Nothingness, 

I carry the weight of the world by myself alone without help, engaged in a world for which I bear the whole responsibility without being able, whatever I do, to tear myself away from this responsibility for an instant.

And most of the time, we are not able to come out of the snares, the shackles and the fetters that we have created for ourselves!

Yes! Indeed all our pits and miry clays are of our own sweet volition and choosing!

The power to press the exit button on any particular ‘chain’ or ‘shackle’ lies entirely in our control! This would take us to Blake’s wonderful expostulations in his ‘London’ –

In every cry of every man,

In every infant’s cry of fear,

In every voice, in every ban,

The mind-forged manacles I hear!

Yes! Indeed, these ‘mind-forged’ manacles or fetters, are of our own sane choosing!

Means to say that all suffering happens because of the button that we choose to press!

For example, when I wish to join a particular group/s on social media, I still have it on me, the choice and the power to decide to press the ‘Join’ or ‘Exit’ button that’s at my command! Ain’t I? But but but... I would rather be in company and feel needed, than be alone and feel insecure, feels this pavapetta poor me!

That’s again because these groups, these communities seek to ‘condition’ our perspectives and outlook for us full-time - 24 x 7, with their shares and videos, their indoctrinations and ruminations, curtailing our own ‘freedom of the mind’ in the process. Every minute our mind is congested and cluttered by these unending stream of information flow or crap flow, that hinders our own creative imagination! 

Hence Jidduji says,

The individual is the little conditioned, miserable, frustrated entity, satisfied with his little gods and his little traditions!

How well he has worded the precarious predicament of the individual!

He goes on to advocate the importance of cultivating for oneself a free mind and a free heart –

Says JK -

In order to observe the movement of your own mind and heart, of your whole being, you must have a  free mind, not a mind that agrees and disagrees, taking sides in an argument.

When we condemn or justify we cannot see clearly, nor can we when our minds are endlessly chattering; then we do not observe what is we look only at the projections we have made of ourselves.

It is one of the most difficult things in the world to look at anything simply. Because our minds are very complex we have lost the quality of simplicity. I don't mean simplicity in clothes or food, wearing only a loin cloth or breaking a record fasting or any of that immature nonsense the saints cultivate, but the simplicity that can look directly at things without fear - that can look at ourselves as we actually are without any distortion - to say when we lie we lie, not cover it up or run away from it.

Also in order to understand ourselves we need a great deal of humility. If you start by saying, ‘I know myself’, you have already stopped learning about yourself; or if you say, ‘There is nothing much to learn about myself because I am just a bundle of memories, ideas, experiences and traditions’, then you have also stopped learning about yourself.

One reason why Jidduji so wishes to tune us here to a different note altogether! And so does Blake!

These are ‘mind-forged’ manacles, to them!

I quote Jidduji verbatim here,

If you do not follow somebody you feel very lonely. Be lonely then. Why are you frightened of being alone?

In enquiring into ourselves we are not isolating ourselves from the rest of the world. Man throughout the world is caught up in the same daily problems as ourselves, so in enquiring into ourselves we are not being in the least neurotic because there is no difference between the individual and the collective. That is an actual fact. I have created the world as I am.

How beautifully Jidduji has worded them all!

‘I have created the world as I am!’

How lovely it would really be!

Indeed, literature offers us this wonderful possibility for creating worlds the way we wish to, ain’t it?

Hence it is, that, personally, as practitioners of literature, and facilitators of learning, we at MCC, have never encouraged rote learning in our kids, a drudge of a learning, a passive learning, that stifles and throttles their creativity. Rather we encourage them to create meaning, or co-create meaning in the text the way they would want it to be!

Indeed, a liberated student, by the ideals of JK, would sure know what it is, to stop looking up all the props and notes on their books, guides and screens, and work with impactful vibrancy in creating ‘worlds through words’ as they are, and as they ‘will’ it to be!

On the other hand, when a learner (say a student) prefers not to stay liberated, but rather opts for some wiki-mickey help online, the learner really suffers from - what Marx in another context would term - alienation!

Well, when I don’t feel a sense of purpose and a sense of connectedness with what I do, I can never attain self-realisation! Neither can I have fulfillment of any sort! That means to say that, I have not created the world as I will it to be!!!’ That again means I stand alienated!!! I just photocopy someone else’s world for my teacher on paper!

Hence, it would augur well to bear in mind the kutty little fact that, a true litterateur would ‘create the world as they will it to be!’ and not resort to imitating, plagiarizing, cut copying other thoughts and other voices! Therein lies true liberation!

That was a little sample to liberation on the literary arena!

Literature also offers ample samples to liberation on the arena of love.

Take for instance the case of Jane Eyre and her love for Rochester. She feels her love for Rochester quite therapeutic in feel, and a very liberating one at that! Says Jane -

There was no harassing restraint, no repressing of glee and vivacity with him; for with him I was at perfect ease, because I knew I suited him; all I said or did seemed either to console or revive him. Delightful consciousness! It brought to life and light my whole nature: in his presence I thoroughly lived; and he lived in mine. [Chapter 37]

What beautiful words, ‘There was no harassing restraint!’

Indeed, that’s to a liberating, liberated love of sorts!

There’s yet another kind of liberation that one attains through expressing oneself in writing, which the narrator of the intriguing short story, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ strives to attain! Well, she real frets and fumes over all her ample restrictions imposed on her by her husband John, a doctor by profession. Since she is now undergoing treatment for an unspecified ‘nervous condition’, she has been forbidden from working and writing! But as the story progresses, the narrator is seen to slowly and steadily free herself from the constrictions and restrictions that have limited her potential and her identity! Her chief therapeutic source being her writing!

Not able to talk her mind to anyone, she finds such solace and therapy in writing down her thoughts and ideas in her personal journal! ‘I must say what I feel and think in some way—it is such a relief!’, she quips!

So much to the power of writing down one’s personal musings on paper, which has such liberating power to its frame!

Yet another extraordinary woman, in real life, whose journals and diaries prove beyond measure that, writing indeed is such a liberating force, would be Etty Hillesum! We’ve done a kutty post on Etty in March 2018. You may want to read it up HERE!

Etty Hillesum, then, in this her book titled, An Interrupted Life the Diaries, 1941–1943 and Letters from Westerbork, evinces an extraordinary outlook, which has the Jiddu ji connect too! (More on this amazing book, with some surprises in store, I promise all ye readers, once I’m done reading Etty!)

To Etty, ‘Man suffers most through his fears of suffering!’

She adds saying,

How much I want to write. Somewhere deep inside me is a workshop in which Titans are forging a new world. I once wrote in despair, “It is inside my little skull that this world must be rethought, that it must be given fresh clarity”. I still occasionally think so, with the same, almost diabolical, presumption. I know how to free my creative powers more and more from the snares of material concerns, from the idea of hunger and cold and danger.

They are, after all, imaginary phantoms, not the reality. Reality is something one shoulders together with all the suffering that goes with it, and with all the difficulties. And as one shoulders them, so one’s resilience grows stronger. But the idea of suffering (which is not the reality, for real suffering is always fruitful and can turn life into a precious thing) must be destroyed.

And if you destroy the ideas behind which life lies imprisoned as behind bars, then you liberate your true life, its real mainsprings, and then you will also have the strength to bear real suffering, your own and the world’s.

So much for the liberating power that's so innate within the act of 'writing!'

Words that could be etched or engraved in gold, at any monument or museum that celebrates writers and their craft, ain’t they?

Well, these vignettes from literature on what it means to be truly liberated would continue for a little season on this, our blog! 

Do stay tuned!

To be contd…