July 18th ~ There is such a thing as sadism. Do you know what that word means? An author called the Marquis de Sade once wrote a book about a man who enjoyed hurting people and seeing them suffer. From that comes the word sadism, which means deriving pleasure from the suffering of others. For certain people there is a peculiar satisfaction in seeing others suffer. Watch yourself and see if you have this feeling. It may not be obvious, but if it is there you will find that it expresses itself in the impulse to laugh when somebody falls. You want those who are high to be pulled down; you criticize, gossip thoughtlessly about others, all of which is an expression of insensitivity, a form of wanting to hurt people. One may injure another deliberately, with vengeance, or one may do it unconsciously with a word, with a gesture, with a look; but in either case the urge is to hurt somebody, and three are very few who radically set aside this perverted form of pleasure.
December 22nd, 2019 ~ This is a tough pill to swallow. It is subtle, but it is there. When fatigue sets in, it slips out.
Here are a few instances that come up when reading this piece from Krishnamurti.
Not just in what I say but noticing when others gossip. I have the thought or feeling about it before someone brings it up. As if I expect someone to bring it up. It is conditioning. It is a conditioned response. I like “Dark Humor.” The movie Fargo was a red flag. I was one of the few laughing in the wood chip scene. It felt quite bad. One time, I was in a coffee shop in San Francisco in the early 2000’s. It was open mic night. There was an older African-American women telling a story. It felt masochistic in that she was talking about whipping and sharpening the piece of leather used for whipping. It was hitting something deep in me. My reaction was to laugh. She didn’t stop. A friend of mine told me the story of when she heard her father had died. It was a shock, apparently. She said she couldn’t stop laughing.
It is re-assuring to hear K when he said: “. . . . there are very few who radically set aside this perverted form of pleasure.”
One last thing. In the video “What is Guilt?“, Krishnamurti talks about what you didn’t do. I think when we are talking about guilt, people feel guilty about what they did. However, looking at what we didn’t do is a different angle. We didn’t behave in a way that didn’t represent who we are. It is rather “regrettable,” he says. Yes, it feels more like regret, than guilt when you look at it like that.