Nottingham and Krishnamurti: The Fractured Human Psyche

One of the most insightful and informed ministers active today is the Reverend Theodore (Ted) Nottingham of Indianapolis' Northwood Christian Church. In a video that directly addresses the human condition, Rev. Nottingham examines the duality and multiplicity of the human psyche in view of the world's great wisdom traditions.



"If you've had a bad dream," Nottingham explains, "if a thought goes through your head in the shower, your state changes. We are very fragile in that way. We are fractured. We are multiple. We are legion."

"The whole purpose of true teachings," he notes, "is to reunite us so that we can bring together the core of our true self, rise up out of that brokenness and enter the nobility of truly being creatures of free will, creatures in the image of their Creator. One of the blinders for us," he explains, "is that we have a strange psychological way of not seeing these contradictions."

"This is the condition of the human being," Nottingham observes. "This is everybody. It is a condition that many teachers have called 'asleep,' because we are so unaware, (because) our attention is so diverted and fragmented and there is nobody home to be present to our reality."

"There has to be a step back," he notes. "The mystics call it 'detachment,' a position of conscious presence that is not dragged around by what is going on, that does not have the rug pulled out from under it at any moment, and that is dependable both for God and for ourselves."

The ability to detach from outward phenomena is possible, Nottingham notes, but it "has to be created," through practice in mindfulness. "We don't come with that," he warns, "and life conspires to keep us from that place of centering. All the spiritual disciplines return to this. Meditation, prayer, all of these methods and habits and ways of life offered to us by the teachings lead us into a centeredness within, in a place of inner quiet, an inner sanctuary that is sealed off from the outside."

"In the world," Nottingham notes, "we are in exile. Spiritual beings lost in a world of materialism, disconnected from our source, no longer dependent as we should be on that which is greater than we are, thinking that we are independent, (we are) cut off."

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Jiddu Krishnamurti
(1895-1986)

Another great spiritual teacher, Jiddu Krishnamurti, made the same observations and voiced the same warnings regarding the many split off 'selves' that can exist within the human psyche.

"We are many and not one," Krishamurti observes. "The one does not come into being till the many cease. The clamorous many are at war with each other day and night, and this war is the pain of life. We destroy one, but another rises in its place; and this seemingly endless process is our life. We try to impose the one on the many but the one soon becomes the many."

"Our problem," he observes, " is not how to hear the one voice but to understand the composition, the make-up, of the many which we are are." Yet, this is exceedingly difficult, he notes (as so many other teachers have), because the parts - each with its myriad of desires - cannot undertand the whole. Thus, like Nottingham, he concludes that it is in understanding desire itself, and detaching from one's desires, that one comes to wholeness.

 "The voice of the many is the voice of the one," Krishnamurti writes, "and the one voice assumes authority; but it is still the chattering of a voice. We are voices of the many, and we try to catch the still voice of the one. The one is the many if the many are silent to hear the voice of the one. . . .

"To be aware of the whole, the conflict of the many, there must be an understanding of desire," he notes. "There is only one activity of desire; though there are varying and conflicting demands and pursuits, they are all the outcome of desire."

"Desire may not be sublimated or suppressed," Krishnamurti cryptically observes, "it must be understood without him who understands. If the entity who understands is there," he warns, "then it is still the entity of desire."

Complete detachment from desire through the experiential realization of one's wholeness, or centeredness, without any fractures, seems to be what is required. To see one's desire with one's very being, devoid of the raucous narrations of the many smaller 'selves' we each possess, is the way that leads us out of the mind trap we have created. For, "(t)o understand without the experiencer is to be free of the one and the many," Krishnamurti notes.

"In the awareness of this whole process," he writes, "there is a silence which is not of the experiencer. In this silence only does understanding come into being."

[Krishnamurti: Commentaries on Living: First Series," pp. 37-38.]

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"The mystics," Nottingham notes, "tell us that you must be emptied, so that you may be filled . Meaning that it is possible, by eliminating the many false 'selves' of the psyche, for us to become "transparent to the divine," as the great 20th-century Christian mystic Karlfried Graf von Durckneim put it.

Krishnamurti on Wealth and Enlightenment

All of the world's great religious or wisdom traditions address the impossibility of reaching higher states of consciousness and spiritual realization while attachments to the people and things that seem so important to our egoic self-consciousness remain.

Perhaps the most famous of these teachings are Jesus' encounter with "the rich young man" ( Matt. 19:16-22), and his saying that it is easier for camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God (Matt 19:23-24; Luke 18:24) - the kingdom of God which he specifically and plainly said was within us all (Luke 17:21).

Buddhist and Vedanta yoga traditions each stress the importance of non-attachment, while Judaism, Christianity and Islam each teach the importance of charity, a specific form of non-attachment. But it is perhaps the modern spiritual teacher, Jiddu Krishnamurti, who best explains why attachment to the things and people of the world are a hindrance to those who are on the path to spiritual enlightenment.

"For the rich as for the poor it is extremely difficult to find reality," Krishnamurti observed, further noting:

"The poor crave to be rich and powerful, and the rich are already caught in the net of their own action; and yet they believe and venture near. They speculate, not only upon the market, but upon the ultimate. They play with both, but are successful only with what is in their hearts. The beliefs and ceremonies, their hopes and fears have nothing to do with reality, for their hearts are empty. The greater the outward show, the greater the inward poverty."

"To renounce the world of wealth, comfort and position is a comparatively simple matter; but to put aside the craving to be, to become, demands great intelligence and understanding. The power that wealth gives is a hindrance to the understanding of reality, as is also the power of gift and capacity. This particular form of confidence is obviously an activity of the self; and though it is difficult to do so, this kind of assurance and power can be put aside. But what is much more subtle and more hidden is the power and the drive that lie in the craving to become."

"Self-expansion in any form, whether through wealth or through virtue, is a process of conflict, causing antagonism and confusion. A mind burdened with becoming can never be tranquil, for tranquility is not a result either of practice or of time. Tranquility is a state of understanding, and becoming denies this understanding. Becoming creates the sense of time, which is really the postpone of understanding. The "I shall be" is an illusion of self-importance."

Perhaps this is why it is "the poor in spirit" who are "blessed" for "theirs is the kingdom of heaven," according to Jesus in the 'Be-attitudes' which served as the introduction to his famous "Sermon on the Mount." For it is "the poor in spirit" who are non-attached to the things or people of the world, and are not interested in "becoming" anything; rather they are the ones who are simply 'beings,' and spiritual beings at that. Spiritual beings who truly dwell within their "be-ing"

Thought and Love

The late, great spiritual teacher, Jiddu Krishnamurti, writes of how thinking and love are antithetical entities or processes:

"THOUGHT WITH ITS emotional and sensational content, is not love. Thought invariably denies love. Thought is founded on memory, and love is not memory. When you think about someone you love, that thought is not love. You may recall a friend’s habits, manners idiosyncrasies, and think of pleasant or unpleasant incidents in your relationship with that person, but the pictures which thought evokes are not love. By its very nature, thought is separative. The sense of time and space, of separation and sorrow, is born of the process of thought, and it is only when the thought process ceases that there can be love."

The above quotation is from Volume 1 of Krishnamurti's Commentaries on Living, at page 6, which is available online at messagefrommasters.com.