Who Am I Sample Jean Klein
Who Am I Sample Jean Klein
Who Am I Sample Jean Klein
WHO AM I?
T S Q
Jean Klein
non-duality press
ISBN 978-0955176265
Non-Duality Press
6 Folkestone Rd, Salisbury SP2 8JP
United Kingdom
www.non-dualitybooks.com
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to express my gratitude to Mary Dresser
and Henry Swift for all their help in preparing this
publication, and to Pat and Barbara Patterson for their
many useful suggestions.
CONTENTS
Preface
Introduction
Prologue
Relationship
Knowing Yourself
The Nature of Thinking
The Art of Listening
Discernment
The Progressive and the Direct Approach
Meditation
The Teacher and the Teaching
A Conversation on Art
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129
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PREFACE
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INTRODUCTION
The desire to question life comes from life itself,
from that part of life which is still hidden.
Life provokes us to question. It wants to be admired.
As long as it is not, the question remains.
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INTRODUCTION
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PROLOGUE
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R E L A T I O N S H I P
Is there relation in oneness?
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plane. I can move from one love to another with complete ease.
A. Your body has been misused and has become completely conditioned. This behaviour is a mental pattern in
which selective discrimination has been systematically
repressed. Without this pattern the body is completely
free and mature sensitivity arises in which selective discrimination comes to play.
Q. So when you say that love is not exclusive it has nothing to do with intimate relationships?
A. Love belongs to all. You dont need to conrm it on a
physical plane with all.
Q. You said earlier that real friendship is the silence
when there is nothing left to say. Would you talk more
about this?
A. Let us say you live with someone you really love.
There may be many moments when there is nothing to
feel and nothing to think. There is only being together.
You often feel it with couples who have been together a
long time. When you live with a man or a woman there
comes a time when you know all about each others past
and there is nothing left to say. But the intervals are
full, not empty, and the complete comfort in the interval
is the background of the whole relationship. Then it is
beautiful to be together. Everything comes out of this
silence and dissolves back into it.
Q. As a parent is there any way to bring up children not
to be identied with the personality?
A. Until a certain age the child looks constantly through
you to appropriate himself in the world. So you must be
free and it is your freedom that is the teaching. How the
parents behave is very important. There are so many
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things that cannot be said but only demonstrated in living. Of course there is authority in your way of behaving
but it is not an imposed authority. Real authority is never
authoritarian. It comes from impersonal wisdom, not the
personality.
The child must understand that there is no repetition.
One must never x an experience. He must always be
inquiring. Every event should be faced in a new way.
This means that you do not face your child as something
denite, a child, but at every moment face his totality.
Never compare him with another. If you take yourself
as a parent and your child as a child, he feels himself
imprisoned though he may not know why he feels this
way. There must be friendship between parent and child.
In friendship there is no father, no mother and no child.
There is only love.
Q. How can I educate my child so that there is no repetition?
A. Where there is imagination there is no repetition. Until
the age of 7 or 8 the right brain should be emphasised.
This is the feeling, global sensation, intuitive part. The
child should remain in painting, playing, music, dancing,
and so on. The analytical left brain can be developed
later with this as a background.
Q. What about sending children to schools?
A. Our educational system is primarily built up for the
survival of the person. There is very little humanity in
our education. All is structured around psychological
survival in a society built on competition. But young
people are the beginning of a new society. If you educate
the child at home, he has the opportunity to become a
beautiful being, but you must face such a responsibility
intelligently and with open eyes or he may turn around
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resolved in any number of ways. One cannot say beforehand which way is suitable. When you live free from
egotistical motivation your capacities are surprisingly
varied!
Q. So there may be times when it is right to ght with
passive means?
A. One acts according to the moment free from predetermined psychological and political ideas. Then there is
presence to the situation and only in this presence can
intelligence function. To have an ideal of passivism in
all situations is no more intelligent than to have an ideal
of aggression. All means must be at your disposal. You
cannot be fettered by ideals. There may be times when
inviting your aggressor into your house and giving him a
meal is right acting. But there is no such thing as passivism. There is only acting. Non-acting is also acting.
Q. What do you think of nationalism?
A. Biological survival includes the community, language,
rituals, customs, and so on. Culture is an extension of
the individual, so in a sense the deep urge to protect the
culture is part of biological survival. But nationalism is
based on idealism. It is an abstraction, a fabrication. It is
collective psychological survival. The protective instinct
of biological survival has a certain limit, the limit of
physical security. It is impossible that biological survival
alone could lead to grand-scale war. The limits of psychological survival, on the other hand, are less dened.
Psychological survival stems from the mind and will go
as far as the mind goes.
Q. You say that we must be free of ideals. What do you
see as the function of idealism?
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A. It is a tool of society to organise the various individuals and small groupings of individuals which
naturally make up a culture into a larger and more
homogeneous collectivity. All idealism, even the most
spiritual, is based on calculative thinking and becoming. War of course belongs to the becoming process, to
comparison and aspiration. It is becoming for the hypothetical survival of the person, when, in fact, there is no
person.
Ideals may take you to war but at the moment of
ghting where are the ideals?
Q. How can I best bring about peace in the world?
A. So youre looking for peace? Youd like to see your
surroundings in peace? Are you in peace? Because,
before giving peace to your surroundings, you must he
in peace yourself. First, face your lack of peace. See that
you are constantly at war with yourself, you are violent
and aggressive with yourself. As long as there is an ego,
there is war. As long as you think youre an independent
entity, theres war, and its useless to try to end conict
on a social level. If you are not in harmony with yourself, you remain an accomplice to society.
This question of war and peace is very important.
When you come to the life experience of global being,
there is real freedom and absolute security. As long as
you have not integrated this freedom you cannot help
bring social or political freedom. Freedom can never
come through a system.
Q. But we need to inuence institutions. How can we do
that?
A. Dont try to inuence. The moment you breathe, the
whole world is affected by your inhalation and exhalation. So when you live in peace you radiate it. If someone
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asks for help, help of course. But dont become a professional do-gooder.
Q. Doesnt one have a personal responsibility to change
things one feels are wrong?
A. When you are free from the idea of being somebody,
the problem of responsibility doesnt play a role. When
you are no longer limited by the personality, there is
intelligence, and acting is adequate from moment to
moment.
If you have any idea of being somebody, a friend,
helper, political person, teacher, mother, father, and so
on, you will only see the situation coloured by this image.
It is a fractional view and because it is partial it breeds
conict and reaction. Since the action did not appear and
disappear in wholeness there will be residue. Before acting, one must understand the situation. To fully comprehend it, you must face the facts free from ideas. It must
belong to your wholeness; otherwise you are stuck to the
wheel of reaction where there is only relationship from
concept to concept.
When you become a professional doer you are no
longer spontaneous. You can never create harmony. It
is beautiful to be really nothing, without qualication.
All that appears, appears in you and you act according
to the appearance using your capital, intellectual, bodily,
material, etc. Then all action is balanced.
Q. You say dont become a professional do-gooder but
what if that is my job? Also, I know that you yourself
travel the globe doing good. We cannot just sit and let
people suffer! No one who is starving is interested in
self-inquiry. Biological survival must be taken care of
rst. This requires professionals.
A. I dont say you must ignore the world but rst you have
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to know how to face the facts properly, that is, free from
the limited individual point of view. Our surroundings
appear to us according to the stance we take. From the
point of view of the body and senses, the world appears
as sense perception. From the mental view the world
appears as mind. From consciousness the world is only
consciousness. When you leave here dont try to change
anything. Only be aware that your ideas and actions
stem from the mind. The moment you look at your surroundings from consciousness you will see things differently and seeing things differently your understanding
and actions will be different. You can never change the
world from the personal standpoint. You can only change
society from the impersonal, from consciousness. The
question often arises: how can I change society, I disagree with so many things? Realise that there can be no
transformation unless action comes from a completely
different view than before. In the personal realm you
remain an accomplice with society. Creative action
can only come when you see your surroundings from
the point of view of consciousness. Then you are really
related to society, the situation, the world. Otherwise,
you remain related only to yourself, your reactions and
resistances. See that society begins with you.
You are your own nearest environment, so begin with
yourself. When you learn how to look at your closest
environment you will automatically know how to look at
the broader environment. In this way of looking theres
understanding, and understanding brings right acting.
The moment you come to the living understanding, you
wont need to ask me or anyone else what to do.
Q. Isnt there work to be done to improve communication and dialogue between different countries?
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exhausted it comes to its inherent calmness. In this tranquillity reality is reected and is experienced as a forefeeling. The fore-feeling must unfold to living reality, to
what has been fore-felt. One could call it an involution
to the source of the fore-feeling. However, the realising
of the fore-feeling cannot be an idea based on hearsay;
rather, you must be taken by reality, absorbed totally by
it in direct experience. This is not only the foundation
for a religious life, but the foundation for a whole new
society, a humanity in beauty and love.
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