The most obvious interpretation
of this episode:
| A single lapse in vigilance could cost you your life and no one will miss you. There is no place for innocence in the wilderness or, by extension, in the jungle of transactions, negotiations and conflicts that is society. |
A somewhat subtler interpretation:
| Notice the antagonism between the monkey and the tiger: the portrait of a self that is split and polarized between two natures. As the monkey, it surrenders before distractions, losing contact with the real world; as the tiger, it is all keyed-up alertness, a killing machine whose actions are untouched by the leavening (ferment) of reflection and compassion. |
Contemplation:
| The self is a strange and
willful anima (spirit), a creature that defies our best efforts at curbing
it or guiding its course.
Sometimes, as with the hungry tiger, the destructive energies of the self cannot be restrained by reason or prayer. And like the complacent monkey, sometimes, the self wanders from dream to dream, never organizing its resources to deal effectively with life. |
Extension of Thought:
| From the various failures of communication, missed opportunities, overreactions and misadventures that are textured into our daily experience, we know that we are usually either in monkey mode or in tiger mode. And many of us swing from one extreme to the other as we try and cope with the relentless demands of a highly structured and competitive social environment, in which pressures and uncertainties multiply while rewards and satisfactions diminish. As such, we often damage ourselves and are also unable to respond creatively to circumstances or to realize our fullest potential, at home or in the workplace. |
The most reliable way out of this
predicament:
| Practice meditation in any of its several forms. Through meditation, it is possible to direct the contents (and discontents) of the self towards harmony, to link the levels of consciousness together, to uncover the concealed motives, obscure desires and rival drives that shape our behavior, and so to recover energy locked in neuroses and self-deceptions. |
But...
| ....if meditation suggests itself as a form of taming the tiger or training the monkey, it can easily turn into a trap; the tiger’s nature and the monkey’s are stronger than we think. Should the monkey element predominate, the meditator may lose sight of the aim of the exercise and simply delight in the experiences that attend many meditative states; in this case, the act of meditating becomes an addiction in itself, not a means of emancipation. And if the tiger element should predominate, meditation is not treated as a transformative experience leading from mindless turbulence to mindful tranquility, but as strategic preparation for the martial aggressiveness of ordinary life |
J.Krishnamurthi, on these problems
of spiritual practice:
| "A righteous life is not the following of social morality, but the freedom from envy, greed and the search for power-all these breed enmity," observes Krishnamurthi. "The freedom from these does not come through the activity of will but through being aware of them through self-knowing. Without knowing the activities of the self, meditation becomes sensuous excitement and therefore of very little significance." |
What is the essential function of
the meditative practice?
.
| Krishnamurti points here to the essential function of the meditative practice: it is not intended as a languid (lackadaisical) escape from the self and the world, but as an athletic engagement with them. Only by reflecting on the "activities of the self "can we hope to recognize the monkey and the tiger within, to bring these antagonistic natures into concord. |
Conclusion
| That, perhaps, is the first step towards practicing a dynamics of becoming, in which we can radiate the tiger's energy without his ferocity, preserve the monkey's imaginativeness without his complacency. By approaching experience in this way, we may well be able to replace narrow vigilance with responsive creativity as the key to survival in the wired jungle of modern life. |
Acknowledgement: The Speaking
Tree, Times of India, 5th June, 1999. Inspired
by Ranjit Hoskote's "The Tale of Two Natures"
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