A beginner’s mind

Great question! I think it would make a good new thread. (Hint, hint.) If after 20+ years of ‘hanging around Krishnamurti’ you (I, we) haven’t gotten it, what does that say about us and it?

If I could suggest Rick, rather than - in the butterfly manner we are wont to do - starting another thread and moving away from what we have been attempting to explore on this one, could we actually look at and remain with this present discussion without going off into secondary directions?

You just suggested it, goofy! (Note: Goofy is affectionate.) I was echoing your suggestion:

So, for instance, we can take this question you have asked, and ask it here, in the context of the discussion where it arose. The question being:

The context of this question here is the suggestions made by K (which I mentioned earlier to Inquiry) which involve the challenge of remaining with difficult or unpleasant psychological states (such as hurt, sorrow, fear, envy, greed, confusion, insecurity, etc).

Now why do we find remaining with these states so difficult?

Did you read the quotes I shared on post 143?

Did you read what I wrote to you about dissonance and awareness?

This is the context of the challenge of remaining with inner psychological states we are looking into. This is something we can look at here and now.

There is already a thread on this topic dating jul 2020, where Inquiry partecipated:

And this, I feel, is the most pertinent reply you made on that thread, which I feel is relevant here:

Thanks for the link, but isn’t one of the main points of these dialogues that they are grounded in the present moment, not a moment in 2020? You can never explore the same topic twice kind of thing. The alternative is accumulation with the great big cul de sac it brings. What say you?

I’ve just highlighted, Rick, the part of that thread which I feel is most relevant to this one.

K suggests remaining with ‘what is’. But we habitually resist this because we want to become - we want to become something better, etc. We can look at this here and now, 10th February 2024.

These are the relevant things K said, shared from post 143:

Seeing and staying with what-is. Sounds simple, right? But, if you read between the lines, its three main parts are hugely challenging: What is ‘what-is’? What is ‘seeing’ and how can we do it? Ditto for ‘staying with.’ Sure these have all been discussed up the wazoo. But that doesn’t matter! What matters is our relationship to them NOW. To arrive at fixed conclusions about them is to turn them into museum exhibits, entries in a Krishnamurti catechism.

So the main psychological challenge we face is to remain with these psychological states, right?

This is the central issue for all of us. It isn’t about Krishnamurti or his teachings, etc. It is about the fact that we are psychological butterflies :butterfly: - we jump from one psychological state to another without ever fully being aware of any of them. Isn’t this so?

And part of the reason for this is that we are habituated to this movement away from ‘what is’ (as Voyager has been saying). We are in a psychological battle with ‘what is’:

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Being grounded in the present does not mean that the threads here should always be new. This is not our life, this is a vitual meeting place intended for talking about the knowledge or information we have and share of K. The knowledge we can discuss or find in a thread of 2024 has the same importance or can be important as the one found in 2020, and of course you can explore the same topic twice, why not? And resuming an old discussion may be useful to find new answers or to delve more into the topic. I posted the link because I thought you might be interested to hear the response Inquiry gave to the topic in discussion. If that is not the case you can gladily ignore it. :grinning:

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I love that definition! It depicts so well our brain… :nauseated_face:

And winning the battle (to the extent that’s possible) entails significant loss.

  1. What is ‘what is’?

In the context of our present discussion, the ‘what is’ is what Voyager was calling the “impact of reality”. This being - outwardly - the sound of the waves crashing on the shore, the sound of a distant voice, the seeing of a face, a cloud, a flower, a face in the crowd (all examples we have discussed on this thread).

And inwardly, psychological feeling states - such as the feeling of insecurity, being confused, having a wound, the feeling of being hurt, the feeling of envy, the feeling of hate, irritation, of sorrow, of desire.

  1. What is ‘seeing’ (or ‘staying with’)?

As we have been discussing for a day or two, it may be that the seeing we have outwardly, of trees and clouds and flowers, can be carried inwardly. A choiceless, non-judgemental seeing. K says, in one of the quotes from post 143, that the looking at fear has the same quality as looking at the moon:

So the same quality of fresh seeing both outwardly as well as inwardly.

  1. How can we do it?

This is where we have to have a quality of emotional intelligence that we seem to lack (for reasons we are now exploring on the thread).

But part of what this ‘staying with’ or ‘remaining with’ seems to involve is a sense of openness, vulnerability, non-resistance, sensitivity; a feeling or intuition or insight that the feeling being looked at is not actually separable from who we are (psychologically speaking), meaning that it is a part of us - something that is suggested by the metaphor of holding the feeling as though we were holding a baby, or something precious like a jewel. It involves an element of intimacy, which is difficult to communicate rationally.

These are some of the responses which come to my mind.

Can we look at these things with a fresh - and not a jaded or reactive or merely skeptical - mind?

Yes. To approach this issue as though for the first time.

A very good analisys.
May add my twopence? I am a supporter of simplicity, of basic and banal things that often we tend to neglet or forget.

  1. Leisure
  2. Slow down

Those two are connected, you cannot have leisure if you don’t slow down, and you can’t slow down if you don’t have leisure.

Slow down means stopping to engage our minds and time with continuous activities, occupations, distractions, discussions, yes just the discussions we have here… :nauseated_face: and… “resonate” with boredom. Actually the feeling of boredom comes because we are not resonating with the actuality.

Leisure means a certain freedom from daily routine like going to work, raising children, etc. Working from 9 to 17 doesn’t leave space for any proficuous exploration. IMO.

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Do we see the danger (trap) of thinking and talking about “seeing and staying with what-is”? Once the words have been understood properly (quite simple) the work is in the doing, not discussing. I spend time online in forums because I love reading/writing about these things. If my intention were transformation, if I were singlemindedly passionate about it, I’d work at it instead of teasing at it (via endless discussion). What does it mean when we say we burningly want to live a different kind of life (in the Krishnamurti sense) and spend hours a day on a forum talking about it?

I understand what you are saying Rick, but part of the opportunity of discussing these things is to become clear about what it is we are interested in, what it is that we have in mind to act upon or do (which may be mistaken).

For myself, discussing what it means to ‘remain with’ psychological states is an opportunity to think-feel through what it is I mean by ‘remaining with’. When it is completely clear to me, then naturally I won’t discuss it anymore.

It’s rare to discuss these things in ordinary life with people (and so clarify it for oneself).

These, if I may point out, are all assumptions. Who can claim to be single-mindedly passionate, or burning with the passion to discover a different kind of life? If we merely assume we have this passion, then we obviously don’t.

And if one is passionate about what it means to ‘remain with’ psychological states, then why do I constantly go off on tangents and secondary issues? This is part of the challenge for us here: we never remain with any goddam question to the end, right?

Which isn’t to say that we are not passionate. I feel we all are sometimes. But we don’t sustain this passion because - I feel - we don’t know what it means to remain with our psychological states. This is why I think this present discussion is important, has value.