S p i r i t ua l i t y S t u d i e s 8 - 1 S p r i n g 2 0 2 2 1 1 Shai Tubali human search for transcendent knowledge becomes limited, since the brain responds to the presence of a question in the habitual way of finding a confident answer within the field of the known, that is, memory, prior experience, and ready-made authoritative formulations. Since the seeking and the finding are carried out by the same conditioned activity of human thought, such answers, Krishnamurti tells us, can only lead us in the opposite direction to that which we were striving to achieve in the first place. Thus, the Krishnamurti dialogue demonstrates the way that a question can liberate the mind and open it widely so that it becomes genuinely capable of contacting that which exists outside of thought’s domain. Questions, as the truth-seeking mechanism, release their potential transformative power only as soon as we have blocked all pathways of false finding. They have subtler activities, such as leading the questioner beyond the division of subject and object, inquirer and object of inquiry, and they are unanswerable in the sense that they forever uncover a living truth that cannot be appropriated by thought. This renders all accumulated answers, including the noblest ones, meaningless, and for this reason, important questions should be asked every time anew. In addition to the tool of unanswerable questions, the other major tool of the Krishnamurti dialogue is what I term methodological negation: a transference of the principle of mystical negation from the realm of metaphysics and epistemology to the realm of methodology. According to Jones (2016, 229), the approach of negation is one of the elements that distinguish mystics from theists: the theist ascribes positive features to God, whereas the mystic perceives the negative way as a corrective to positive depictions, which by their nature can only be borrowed from the phenomenal realm [8]. It is thus both a device utilized by those attempting to convey their mystical experiences (Blackwood 1963, 202–206) and a “speculative theological strategy” for figuring out the logic of notions about the supreme being (Jones 2016, 229). Negation as an epistemic act has been broadly used by East Asian mystics. We find its earliest expressions in the sixth-century-BC Sanjaya, who employed negation as a tool of skepticism in a way that perhaps inspired the Greek philosopher Pyrrho (Raju 1954, 695, 703), but also in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, where the reality of Brahman is famously described as “not this not that”, or “neti neti” (Upanishads 2007, 105–106). However, negation was also introduced into the Western theistic tradition through the via negativa approach of Neoplatonism, most notably represented by Plotinus, which later influenced mystical thinkers such as Augustine and Eckhart (Jones 2016, 226). The type of negation expressed in the Krishnamurti dialogue cannot be adequately placed within the framework of metaphysical and epistemological negation. Krishnamurti did not devise an analytical tool for the evaluation of the ontological status of certain realities or entities. The problem that his dialectical negation tackles is of time, memory, accumulation, and conditioning. In other words, what he negates is the past, in which any existing religious or mystical path is inevitably included, since humanity’s past as a whole is ingrained in one’s brain as thought-forms. This form of negation as a radical position of the mind, or as the vitality of the unconditioned brain, can be considered his unique contribution to the via negativa approach. One may surmise that in developing his negation, Krishnamurti was seeking out a method that could do the impossible: avoiding even the subtlest action of the dualistic, self-enhancing mind by leading the mind itself to realize the futility of its action (Shringy 1977, 202). Since the problem of human existence is action based on idea, any “positive” or constructive approach involving will and self-interest merely perpetuates our conditioning in a modified form (Shringy 1977, 193, 198). Thus, the negative approach is the only available one: in its non-fragmented awareness, it “breaks the circle of ignorance from within, as it were, without strengthening it” (Shringy 1977, 199). In Krishnamurti’s eyes, what appears to be a positive approach is, in effect, a negative one, since it ultimately reaffirms the false, while his way, which consists entirely of seeing the false, is “not negation. On the contrary; this awakening of creative intelligence is the only positive help that I can give you” (quoted in Shringy 1977, 197–198). Moreover, what methods and techniques can be relevant in light of the fact that the unconditioned reality is only discovered as a result of the shedding of the false? (Shringy 1977, 203).
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