KAMALA MUKUNDA
I find myself often torn between two or more alternatives. Whether to tell a person what I think or not, whether to work or read a book or check my mail, whether to take a bus or a taxi. The feeling is one of being fragmented, as if there are multiple ‘selves’ putting forward their case for what should happen. I experience these pulls and tugs less as clear and fully articulated, more as muddled and feeling-laden. And finally, I go ahead and do something, so I wonder, was there someone in charge, who reviewed everything and took a final call? This has been the situation for as long as I can remember, and when I look at my colleagues and students, I see them in the same boat.
Recently, we were pointing out to our students a habit of negotiation that they have fallen into, for small, everyday matters: from being on time for breakfast in the morning, to getting into bed at the agreed-upon time at night. At each step through the day, there is the tendency to say just ten minutes more, come on, what’s the big deal? During our conversation the students were in complete agreement over the fact that times need to be respected in a school community. Yet as my colleague pointed out, this young student—who is agreeing with me now—is not the same one I will encounter at 10.30 at night; that will be the just ten minutes more student. These feel like two different people, and in that case, what is the use of talking to only one of them?
Krishnamurti describes this as a state of conflicting desires, and calls it fragmentation. He has invited us to observe it within ourselves. In a dialogue with David Bohm in 1976, he put it this way: ‘Can one be aware, conscious, know, the various fragments, examining one by one by one by one, and who is the examiner, is he not also a fragment who has assumed an authority?’
Seeing myself as fragmented leads me to wonder, what is it to be whole then, and can I be whole? Alas, it is only another fragment that asks that question! From my reading and observation of myself and others, it seems that all this is the mischief of the ego, the bundle of thoughts and memories that keeps attaching itself to different desires. ‘What I must do’ at any given time is a tussle between competing desires that are all pretty self-centred.
Further, Krishnamurti and many others have said that the nature of ego is to separate itself from other people, blinding us to the truth that consciousness is actually one, undivided whole. In other words, it is only a trick of thought that sets me apart as an individual. This insight has struck me from time to time, that the fragmentation within is tied to the fragmentation in the world. Or, in my daily life, that the conflicts I experience with my colleagues and students spring from an internal lack of wholeness that I also experience.