Are you referring to the “mirror of relationship”? As in our relationship to the outside world shows us who we are? That the fact that someone who is not able to understand what people are saying might indicate that they have some kind of difficulty listening?
Self is hurt. That is, hurt is, and self comes from that. There is no hurt which can be removed from self to just leave self. So self cannot come to an end unless an end comes to hurt.
Why not go a step further and stop all finding out? What after all is finding out really? What happens if we stop finding out? Is that not freedom from finding out?
You have stopped to listen to me. Why move from there?
Relationship is not some distant abstraction. It is now. It is right here. So it is in this dialogue that everything happens.
As you say, that’s a step further. Let’s first be sure that our first step is the right step.
Can the self come to an end?
Here I am. I am more interested in what I know, and want to have my say. I know what you are saying, and I know this repetition of inquiry. I am confronted by people searching, inquiring, and this lends me to join in and offer ideas, comments, and suggestions, from my experience. The end is what I see it to be, and that is what goes on endlessly, with religion, politics, philosophy, and all kinds of experts and specialists. So I have to avoid all that, like the plague, and find a leisure in my own inner inquiry.
Actually it’s both. there’s the actual fact of relationship and what’s going on now, and there’s the talking about it as K often did. We do need to make an abstraction to discuss it, right?
I am saying that relationship is here and now. We can’t meet together here and now with abstractions. Abstractions are a clever way of not meeting because they always bring in time.
I haven’t stopped. The illusion of “I” is an ongoing process that stops for nothing. What brings this illusory process to an end is its diminishing ability to continue. It takes more energy to maintain egocentricity than to give up the ghost and live without the illusion. You say you’ve stopped, but I doubt it.
But the self is isolating. For relationship to be, the self must have a stop. Even for a few moments I have to stop and listen to you…or to my wife or child. Otherwise I’m not really related. I’m in my own little world and my wife or child remains in their little world and the inevitable conflict results.
You’re not really related because you don’t really stop. Your relationships are determined by who/what you think/believe you are and who/what they think/believe they are. We call this relationship, but it’s just images, characters in their separate narratives, negotiating and manipulating.
I think you should speak for yourself, Inquiry. Your isolation divides you from life…your neighbor or friend or a flower.
Insight into the wholeness and totality of the self-image is necessary, it seems to me. The ‘self’s’ ‘totality’ is not. or rarely, grasped. And the consequent action of how it re-establishes itself almost immediately after such insight , through identification with thought’s conclusions. (Like a spider repairing its web.)
That’s what I am asking you to do: doubt it and enquire into it. But for doubt to have any bite you have to doubt your own assertions too. Otherwise, there is no enquiry. Can the self come to an end? That is our question. Are we both very clear about what we mean by the word ‘self’? Are we seeing the thing itself or just a lot of theories spun by other people, including what K has said about it? If we are just seeing the ‘self’ as theories and abstractions then the process goes on and on because abstraction is engrained in our mode of enquiry. Therefore we are never free to enquire because all we are doing is working with ideas. The ‘self’ naturally comes to an end when this movement of ideation ceases because the ‘self’ is ideation, which is the accumulated formation of ideas and concepts over time. But it cannot be a process whereby all this slowly ceases; it cannot be something that is gradually diminishing.
To listen to me, ideation is deadly. That’s not a gradual diminishing. That’s a shock to the system.
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I never heard it put like that…interesting! Ideation…concepts and beliefs…all limited…all dividing from what actually is…from the fact…from what is, be it violence, anger, fear, hate, jealousy, greed…or our neighbor or friend.
I am putting it as I see it in the course of our dialogue. For some, it may be seen as too simplistic, but I don’t see any of this as a complicated issue.
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We are aware of it when we experience the suffering the self engenders, and only then. When we feel good about ourselves, we don’t attribute it to an illusion, a falsehood we perpetuate. When you take an interest in the self illusion, it doesn’t matter what Krishnamurti said or what anyone has said about it. You’re living with it, watching it helplessly because you can do nothing about it but acknowledge its effect.
You say the self naturally comes to an end when the movement of ideation ceases, but this is an idea of yours. When you imagine yourself to be someone, you’re playing a character and a role, and you can modify that character and its role, but you can’t quit the whole charade until the cost of carrying on isn’t justified by the results. And you can’t accurately assess whether the results are worth the effort until you’re honest enough to be rigorous in your assessment.
In other words, this particular “ideation” doesn’t cease until the whole enterprise is seen for what it is, and that seeing can’t come about until there’s enough self-doubt to allow for more honesty and less duplicity, and that is a gradual process. The self doesn’t end with a bang. It ends when the weight of the evidence is greater than the will to carry on with the illusion.
It sounds simplistic perhaps, but to most of us it’s not obvious that that’s all that the self is. We think that we are an ‘I’ that’s NOT just ideation.
Yes the self-image is the sufferer and though it is a psychological resistance to ‘what is’ it spreads to the body.
This is the way it seems here. The times of psychological suffering, anguish, fear, worry lessen as the thought creating them is seen for what it is: mechanical movement of thought.
An image can’t suffer. It’s only an image, and in this case, an illusion. What suffers is the human who mistakes the image for itself.
It would seem so. The “human” identifies with a series of image/thoughts that are frightening, threatening, etc. Who / what is the “human”?
Say I’ve lost my job, cant pay the rent and am about to be evicted…now K. has said his secret was that he didn’t mind what happens. Does that signify the absence of a ‘self’? No self, no suffering?