Krishnamurti (1956, p 23) describes the way we turn to labels of experience and to group identities and ideologies (collective beliefs) as a substitute for direct experiencing:
“You can be converted from one belief to another, from one dogma to another, but you cannot be converted to the understanding of reality. Belief is not reality. You can change your mind, your opinion, but truth or God is not a conviction, it is an experience not based on any belief or dogma, or on any previous experience. If you have an experience born of belief, your experience is the conditioned response of that belief. If you have an experience unexpectedly, spontaneously, and build further experience upon the first, then experience is merely a continuation of memory which responds to contact with the present. Memory is always dead, coming to life only in contact with the living present.”
We can change window-dressing on our belief system and our group affiliation, but still find little guidance regarding an authentic sense of self (Krishnamurti, 1956, p. 23):
“Conversion is change from one belief or dogma to another, from one ceremony to a more gratifying one, and it does not open the door to reality. On the contrary, gratification is a hindrance to reality. And yet that is what organized religions and religious groups are attempting to do: to convert you to a more reasonable or a less reasonable dogma, superstition or hope. They offer you a better cage. It may or may not be comfortable, depending on your temperament, but in any case it is a prison.”
I would suggest that Sonya was not trying to convert Katherine to some Krishnamurtian philosophy. Rather she was helping Katherine exist her own prison. This prison was built with expectations placed on Katherine by other people in her life, as well as her own belief about herself and her self-imposed expectation.
In offering support and guidance to Katherine, regarding her release (or escape) from prison, Sonya was relying heavily on the wisdom offered by Krishnamurti. Beyond his general statements regarding experiencing, knowing and identifying, Krishnamurti offers many insights concerning the role played by interpersonal relationships, the way in which we should address the past, present and future, and the guidance in our life that is provided by our inner self and our external world. These insights were evident in the personal coaching that Sonya offered Katherine.
Similar insights have been offered by Chris Argyris and Don Schön (1974). They provide an assessment of interpersonal relationships, and even more broadly, the way in our thinking operates in the world, by differentiating between the way in which we think about and describe about our relationships with other people and about the world in general and the way in which we actually act in the world. The way we think and describe is identified by Argyris and Schön as Espoused Theory. This closely aligns with what Krishnamurti identified as the idea of experience. Conversely, Argyris and Schön identify the way in which we actually behavior in the world as Theories-In-Use. I would suggest that this second way of being in the world aligns with Krishnamurti’s experiencing in the world.
While there is no apparent intention on Krishnamurti’s part to abandon the idea of experience, there is a push in Argyris and Schön work for one’s Espoused Theory to more closely align with one’s Theory-in-Use. Put simply, these two psychologists and organizational consultants are suggesting that we “practice what we preach.” For Argyris and Schön, the theory-in-use is all-too-often self-fulfilling and self-sealing, meaning that we act in ways eliciting responses which confirm how we tacitly think the world operates and that we rarely “own up to” this self-fulfilling strategy. For instance, if we believe that another person is likely to become defensive if we share some negative feedback with them, then we are likely to appeal a strategy (our theory-in-use) that is usually called “easing-in.” In our conversation with the other person, we cover over the negative feedback with false or partially true positive feedback. This so-called “feedback sandwich (positive to negative to positive), is likely to make the person receiving the feedback quite defensive (“what is this person really trying to say to me?”), thereby reinforcing the assumption of defensiveness.
