we would rather cling to the known

We would rather cling to the known than face the unknown.

In this last episode, in this series commenting on quotes by Krishnamurti, we we've come to one of the most basic fundamental difficulties of human psychology. As Krishnamurti puts it, we would rather cling to the known than face the unknown. And this tendency to stay with what we're familiar with is found in almost everyone. And it comes at a cost.

Many people stay in a job that they loathe, that is not really helping them to grow at all. They stay far too long, simply because what they know is somehow less risky than going into a new situation, which is unknown. And even more damagingly, many people stay in relationships that are dysfunctional, deeply unhealthy. But those relationships are at least known.

As Shakespeare puts it in Hamlet, we would rather bear those ills we have than fly to others that we know not of.

Any change is a movement from the known into the unknown. And there's always this risk that the unknown will be even worse than the known, even when the known is really quite bad. A part of us is risk averse, because even in a bad situation, we've normally found some coping mechanism, some way to survive. And of course, we don't know: if we make a change, we don't know whether things will be better or worse. And if they are worse, we don't know whether we'll be able to cope. It'll certainly be potentially stressful, challenging. So perhaps we are right just to stick with the known.

The thing is, by clinging to the known, we are limiting our growth. It's like keeping a plant in a small flowerpot. It's grown and it wants to grow bigger, but if we just keep it in that small flowerpot, it won't be able to grow any further. And that's how many of us are living our lives. We've stuck ourselves in some small flowerpots. And now we're very reluctant to move into a bigger flowerpot.

So we limit our growth, and at best, we come to live a rather comfortable life. It's as if we are mildly sedated the whole time. We can live from habit. We know how to cope. And so we just live out our life in a rather minimal way.

On the spiritual journey, this really won't do. One of the key aspects of spirituality is to embrace growth. And that requires us to face the unknown. It requires us to let go of the known, both with major decisions in our life, but also in small day-to-day things. We have to learn to see each moment anew, because this is one of the great ironies in clinging to the known, is that we're not really seeing things anymore. We're not really clinging to something in the outside world. We're clinging to our idea of it. We fixated something in our mind. And now we cling to that, and we're really interacting with our ideas about the world. And it can be very comfortable. It feels predictable. It feels somehow safe and secure, even if what we are clinging to is actually rather hurtful to us.

So when we cling to the known, we stop seeing the outside world as it actually is. We start to live in a sort of inner dream world, composed of our own ideas about the outside world. And on the spiritual journey, we need to come back to seeing what is around us directly, in each moment. And if we do this, we start to realise that every moment is unknown, perhaps just in some small way, in some little detail. But even a little detail can be a tremendous gift.

And then, of course, one of the greatest ways that we cling to the known is that we cling to our idea of ourself. We cling to who we think we are. We cling to our old personality. We cling to our particular ego behaviours. And we'd rather do that than face the unknown aspect within ourself. Who am I? Who am I if I no longer cling to the personality that I've been clinging to all these years? Who am I really? This is the greatest unknown of all, and the exploration of this great unknown space within oneself, this is the central part of the spirit spiritual journey.

So, as always with Krishnamurti's observations, there's an implicit invitation to do things differently. So let's try it. Let's try, no longer clinging to the known. Let's try facing the unknown and plunging into it.