One second - at the risk of any reply to Dan’s statements being considered harassment - can I ask if this is actually Krishnamurti’s message?
Isn’t his message rather that “you are deeply selfish, egotistic, and this selfishness and egotism is creating havoc in the world”?
And: “there is division, division created by your images of each other, your selfishness, your conceit, your pretence of knowing things which you do not know, your thinking and ideas and separative beliefs”?
Surely it is only when selfishness and division have come to an end that it can be said that there is no self, and no division.
As I see it, the wars and killings are indeed real. But any attempt we make to take this in (reading, listening, thinking) or put it out (writing, speaking, thinking) is in the realm of storytelling. These stories might be closer to fiction (biased clear view) or to fact (unbiased skewed). Other ways of saying this: the map is not the territory, the word is not the thing.
We’ve discussed this matter many times before, so I think we know where we both stand with regards to this story-making business.
But the stories we are concerned about here are more the religious stories: i.e. that there is “no division”, that we are “all one”, that the “self does not exist”, that there is “an immensity”, etc.
These are either true or false, depending on whether the mind of the person speaking about these things is itself in a state of truth, and so can speak about these things as actual facts.
If it is not, then they are only stories, and nothing more than that.
As Dan says,
So either the brain has freed itself, which means that the statements are being made from a state of truth; or the brain hasn’t freed itself, which means that the statements are merely a story being told out of a story-laden brain.
“Participating in the Immensity” is from the interesting Ending of Time talks with Bohm. As I understood it , it was the brain that is silent, empty can be mind, that, then “it is mind”.(universal mind)…A different kind of participation then, than in the sense you mention. But the prerequisite for this is for the brain to have freed itself from the ‘self’ , its past conditioning. K. “Freedom is essential “
Hi Sean. Wrong is a word of mine . K. say: Now let us ask to ourselves a further question. So let us ask it to ourselves. The best I can do is to give a quote from K. on this subject, since I am not very good at articulate my thought . In short :
K.:Now let us ask ourselves a further question. Is this freedom, this solitude, this
coming into contact with the whole structure of what we are in ourselves - is it to
be come upon through time? That is, is freedom to be achieved through a gradual
process? Obviously not, because as soon as you introduce time you are
enslaving yourself more and more. You cannot become free gradually. It is not a
matter of time.
The next question is, can you become conscious of that freedom? If you say, ‘I
am free’, then you are not free. It is like a man saying,I am happy. The moment he says `I am happy’ he is living in a memory of something that has gone.Freedom can only come about naturally, not through wishing, wanting, longing.Nor will you find it by creating an image of what you think it is. To come upon it the mind has to learn to look at life, which is a vast movement, without the bondage of time, for freedom lies beyond the field of consciousness.
I have to admit that i had some expectations when i put the question about the capacity of human beings to make things up.
Do i always have to learn this (having expectations) the hard way?
Can one be conscious of having an ego, of creating images of other people, of being defensive of one’s little insights into things, of putting up walls of disengagement, of wanting to be special or different or right about everything?
I think one can. And, if asked, one can admit as much without much effort.
So I don’t think there is any hocus pocus about any of this. If one is not free, not ego-less, one doesn’t need cosmic consciousness to perceive the fact.
I don’t know if those words would be right… I think of it as when the brain is no longer ‘occupied’ by self / past images, in the way it is now, that the organ has the potential to resonate with what K is calling the “Immensity”. It then IS the Immensity!
That would be its flowering or blossoming which is presently precluded, made impossible, by the self being present; K.“where the self is, love is not”.
Of course you all remember Krishnamurti saying: ‘Because I am free I want you to be free’. Here Krishnamurti explicitlly stating he is free, so it sounds like a contradiction to hear him say as I’ve just read above that when one says he’s free he no longer is free. So, it’s good to bear in mind that Krishnamurti must be understood in context and he several times, after having said something (often in discussions with D Bohm) he would say that he would have to check what he was saying. ‘Truth is a pathless land’ also applies here.
My understanding is that most would be, could be, and if statements are speculative, story-based statements.
Perhaps Krishnamurti’s statements about “the immensity” were not grounded in speculation, but in truth. But unless our own minds are presently grounded in truth - i.e. not in belief, thought, hope and desire - then I think our repetition of his statement is a form of make-believe.
What do we get out of a constant repetition of make-believe statements? We get the beginnings of a religion. Is this what we want? Is this what seriousness means?
Religion of the false kind is where the self exists but continues to pretend that it doesn’t.
. Of course you are right on this. Jobuys talk about the first step. To see what is, what we are, ie quote : Can one be conscious of having an ego, of creating images of other people, of being defensive of one’s little insights into things, of putting up walls of disengagement, of wanting to be special or different or right about everything? as you say …and all the rest of it, would be I think the first step.
Given that the world is tearing itself to pieces because of our egoism and prejudice, surely this is the fact we ought to be looking at, getting our teeth into, being serious about - not making speculative claims about “freedom”, “the immensity”, “non divisions”, etc.
Maybe it is a matter of temperament, but I have no patience for a Krishnamurtian equivalent of Christian religion, with people getting carried away with lofty statements and claims.
The fact is, we are each of us caught in this trap of thought, trap of self, trap of prejudice, etc, and we have to give our best energy, our most constructive co-operation in dialogue, to meeting this thing - don’t you feel?
The operative term being: perhaps. What are we to do with statements outside our ken? Carrots may inspire us to keep trudging, but there is a false promise in them, a lie.
We are not refuting the teachings on this thread, On the contrary, you might even say we are attempting to protect them. Or rather, their spirit. You have missed the point if you think it is supporting your ambivalence. I realize you are only here for entertainment purposes and have been stimulated by the drama but be warned you are trying my patience.
This is why I feel it is crucial to be very careful with these statements so that there is not even the appearance of dogmatism about them. As with all Krishnamurti’s statements, they have to be verified through one’s own direct experience - that is the final criterion.
This is why, for me, to talk too casually or familiarly about certain statements Krishnamurti has made, such as “non division”, “freedom”, “participating in the immensity”, “the sacred”, “the mind outside the brain”, “no-thing-ness”, “the non-existence of the self”, “(total) insight”, “(total) transformation”, etc - all the goodies - is to begin to subtly lie to oneself and others; to begin to create a religion.
It is like Christians talking about God, as though God were something anyone could understand if they were just a little bit more serious or respectable.
There is a discussion Krishnamurti had with a Buddhist scholar in which the Buddhist scholar asked him: (I am paraphrasing because I don’t have the text in front of me) “Isn’t there a contradiction in your saying that we need to deal with sorrow and end sorrow, not escape into belief; and telling us that when we have ended sorrow there is eternity, beauty, the ever-lasting?”
To which Krishnamurti replies: (I am paraphrasing) “Wouldn’t you - if you had really ended suffering and found out something immeasurably beautiful - want to share that thing with other people, even though you know that they will do exactly the same thing as human beings have always done: namely, ignore dealing with suffering and cling to your statement about the immeasurably beautiful thing? You would do, wouldn’t you? - Because it is all one movement, part of the whole.”
Krishnamurti once asked, “Of what value is it to you if I am happy and you are not?”
The answer is obviously zilch, nada.It makes no sense to live vicariously through platitudes drawn from his works and worse, taken out of context. As James said above, that is the stuff of religion. To believe in “all-one” /silence/immensity etc., is no different than believing in God. If we can’t spot those blatant beliefs, how on earth can we even begin to uncover the more subtle ones that anchor us to our ego? We have to do the work and the first step - not K’s first step - our first step, is to stop pretending to being somewhere other than where we are. Surely for those of here, we prize honesty above all else? This is hard work. There are no shortcuts.
In the case of the ass, true. But to me Krishnamurti is saying all this accumulation for security, from fear, etc , has to go before the body dies. And if not it is a damn shame. The self is all about ‘carrots’, they are the ‘legal tender’ in the ‘darkness of division’, the connection with the ‘immensity’ is simply reality.
. Of course you are right on this. Jobuys talk about the first step. To see what is, what we are, ie quote : Can one be conscious of having an ego, of creating images of other people, of being defensive of one’s little insights into things, of putting up walls of disengagement, of wanting to be special or different or right about everything? as you say …and all the rest of it, would be I think the first step.