The myth of living in a 'normal'

With the second wave of the pandemic slowly winding down in our country, people are starting to get into a new 'normal'.What we call a'normal' is living life in a particular groove, a repeatability of a pattern of living where one is in control of the outcomes of one's actions that lead to a stable and happy life. And yet, the unfolding of our lives is anything but stable and happy.

Every time we seem to have found a sweet spot of security and stability and settled into it, something beyond our controldisrupts it. The pandemic was one such event. Throughout our lives we have several small, individualized events that throw us off our normal, and then begins the battle to get back to the normal. Why is it that we are always struggling to achieve a normal? And, interestingly, when that so-called normal is reached, life becomes a routine, repetitive and boring. Then begins the search for newness and experiences that will bring back excitement in our lives. This is a pattern that almost all of us can relate to, and has been repeated over and over again, millennia after millennia.

This then begs the question: Why do we seek a normal at all? The answer may be so elegantly simple that it can be missed. It is at the heart of who 'I' am because it is what seeks the normal. To understand this 'I' or oneself is then where the answer lies. The 'I' is constantly seeking security and stability. It is never static, always seeking, wanting to change the moment to something else. The unravelling of the 'I' is what 'The Book of Life: Daily Meditations with J Krishnamurti' does with great precision.We build our own little world with what we like, dislike, love, hate, believe, and fear. All these are stored as 'my' experiences and give my little world a reality of its own. When things don't go our way, the consequence of living in the limited world of our creation is suffering, anxiety, anguish, anger, and fear. We then either explain away the problems, analysethem to find comfort or distract ourselves with various modes of entertainment.

The 'me' is a complex organism, leave alone the finely tuned marvel that is our body with its billions of operations each second. Can this psychological 'me' be understood by oneself without having any expertise or prior knowledge of psychology or any other traditional perspective? Krishnamurti is clear when he says, "To discover anything new you must start on your own; you must start on a journey completely denuded, especially of knowledge, because it is very easy, through knowledge and belief, to have experiences; but those experiences are merely products of self-projection and therefore utterly unreal, false."

Where is this discovery to start? Do we seclude ourselves in order to learn about ourselvesor can we do this on the run in our daily lives? "Surely only in relationship the process of what I am unfolds, does it not? Relationship is a mirror in which I see myself as I am; but as most of us do not like what we are, we begin to discipline, either positively or negatively, what we perceive in the mirror of relationship", points out Krishnamurti.

Observing ourselves without any distortion is then the key to laying bare who we are. Krishnamurti shows how. "So, to look at a fact is to be aware. In that awareness there is no choice, no condemnation, no like or dislike. But most of us are incapable of doing this because traditionally, occupationally, we are not capable of facing the fact without the background."

'The Book of Life' touches upon 48 themes of our daily living such as Relationship, Love, Desire, Fear, Learning, Authority, Sex, Feelings, Energy, Attention, Marriage, Passion, Truth, Reality, Time, Knowledge, God, and Meditation. With 365 quotations, one for each day of the year, every page holds a relevant key to unravelling ourselves.

So, if you want to begin afresh and leap out of the pattern of settling in to a normal, give yourself the gift of this book. You cannot have a better beginning to 2022 than this.