Dear Rick, as you told James a few weeks back, get your priorities straight! Kinfonet is the only priority, 24/7, everything else is secondary 
Mea culpa! It’s fun to see Kinfonet revving up. Reminds me a tad of the heyday of the KFA forum. I like it when things go a bit mad. Obsessiveness is next to godliness!
Start your engines
Glad to see that Rick is taking this in the right spirit.
Please forgive me K folk of the Dead K Society, but I am intoxicated with John Keats tonight. This one is flashing through my mind over and over again and in so many ways reminds me of Krishnamurti, echoes his teachings (hope I dont get in trouble for saying K had teachings, haha):
“I almost wish we were butterflies and liv’d but three summer days — three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain.” John Keats love letter to Fanny Brawne
p.s. - I will take my passionate self over to another thread and focus on that now, with Paul D, before I wear my welcome out here in this fine group.
Oops - it looks like I missed some things! It’s always nice to see some poetry on the timeline. As Mary Oliver writes,
Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.
Ok. So back to the topic. The topic is how we Kinfonet members communicate with each other.
Maybe, in the course of exploring this topic we might also bring in the other topic that was mentioned: What tools do we have with which to inquire?
I think the three tools we have are relationship (i.e. our reactions in relationship), reason and logic (using thought, the intellect), and observation (which includes the senses, sense-perception, sensitivity or ‘emotional intelligence’ - for want of a better word - and awareness).
But to return to the first topic… How do we communicate with each other on Kinfonet?
Emile, I too am baffled here. What David S wrote seems perfectly reasonable to me. What am I missing?
Yes to all.
What about intuition, insight, gut feeling, inkling? Experience, memory, conditioning? Thought, imagination, speculation? All hands on deck!
We rely almost 100% on written words. Rare exceptions: images, videos, audio.
Humor is risky here, for some (not me!) it demonstrates lack of ‘seriousness’.
All this falls under observation for me (partial insights come from observing closely, intuition from emotional intelligence or sensitivity).
All this falls under the reactions we have in relationship, as well as reasoning and logic for me (one can’t reason from thin air).
Yes. These are the limits of dialogue here - with the exceptions you mention.
Humour (UK spelling) is welcome of course 
I wasn’t sure what a daffodil was and I wanted to post a video of a waving field of them, but when I searched for it, I found this (sorry David):
Forgive the rhetorical reply. In hindsight it would probably have been better to keep my thoughts to myself. But as I have been asked to elaborate …
To say that ‘K loved nature’ - and by association, imply that this is being advocated by the teachings - is vastly reductionist in my view. The Teachings are drawing our attention to a world that lies beyond the manmade one of thought/feeling - of which nature is but one example. From the Teachings’ point of view (not the poet’s) to single out and exult nature is to elevate it to a higher plane. and that of course means it is seen to be ‘purer’ that the teeming comings and goings of a bustling metropolitan street corner at rush hour. Preference is manmade.
K was no poet. He did try his hand at it early on but was not happy with the outcome. The teachings are not poetry. They are much more comprehensive. And as such I don’t see the point of comparing the teachings with poetry, even great poetry such as the one transcribed above. They each are carrying out their own mandate.
Lastly, and I will probably get pummeled for this opinion as well, I think K’s education experiment turned out to be an abject failure. The revolutionary message of the Teachings had to be watered down and legitimized for those institutions to function as part of normal society. Hence for example, the far reaching attempt to equate K to Keats in that school article - or for that matter to cite K’s ‘favorite’ poet as further evidence of linkage. I am not suggesting one is better than the other. Just that to conflate them is to sully both. Stuffing square pegs into round holes.
Furthermore, I am pretty sure K said elsewhere he only read mysteries but he does contradict himself from time to time about personal matters so who knows what is the actual truth of the affair.
More importantly though and in keeping with the title of this thread:
K is dead. Long live the Teachings.
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Thank you Emile for taking the time to so eloquently elaborate on what was asked. I see a lot of your points, views and respect them, but we can agree to disagree on some of it.
All I will say, add is that we have to remember to get out of our heads/intellect at times and more into our hearts/feelings, to really get life, and poetry is one approach.
Thanks again for your interesting and thought provoking reply.
It’s a very good point, and eloquently made Emile; but I’m not sure that this is completely so. Of course, to say that K “loved nature” is perhaps too glib - if we are using the word ‘love’ to mean love of pizza, love of tennis, love of sci-fi novels, etc, then this is clearly not the right kind of love being talked about. ‘Love’ is this popular sense is merely love for one of many things to be enjoyed. But K clearly had a special relationship with nature - something that is apparent from his several journals, his conversations with others, and from the examples and incidents he mentions throughout his public talks.
Now it would be correct to say that a ‘love of nature’ as such is not explicitly presented as a central aspect of his main teachings. So, for example, K’s public talks explore thought and time, conditioning, conflict, fear, pleasure, desire, suffering, death, and meditation. A relationship to nature as such is not usually specified as a required element of the teaching.
However, if one reads between the lines, a relationship to nature is everywhere implied in what K says. His examples of what it means to observe, for instance, invariably begin with our relationship to nature - to trees, to the sky, to the clouds, to rivers and mountains. Whenever he talks about sensitivity he highlights the importance of sensitivity to the natural world. Whenever he talks about beauty, his examples are the mountain, the river, the stars, the reflection of the moon on water, etc. Of course the essence of beauty, like the essence of creation, is not in any object (according to K), but the sacredness of all life is something he mentions frequently enough for it to be taken as central to his outlook.
While K was critical of those ecologists and artists who merely relate to nature through their own narrow interests - through their own specialised thinking - he was clearly concerned that human beings should cultivate a relationship to nature. Nature, for K, was not merely “but one example” of what lies beyond “manmade” thought - that sounds too Platonic to my ears - but something carrying the essence of what lies beyond thought, a sacredness in its own right. Furthermore, K felt that a relationship with nature is at the root of a sensitive relationship with other people. Krishnamurti To Himself:
If we could, and we must, establish a deep long abiding relationship with nature, with the actual trees, the bushes, the flowers, the grass and the fast-moving clouds, then we would never slaughter another human being for any reason whatsoever.
If you have lost your relationship with nature you will inevitably lose your relationship with other human beings.
So I’m not sure that we can discount the significance of nature to K’s teachings. I would actually make it central - but it would an interesting matter to discuss with people if they are interested.
Good, as long as we remember that intuition, experience, memory have a rich and complex life of their own that transcends any category they might be put in. In other words, we need to avoid relegating these things to ‘categorized and understood’ like pinned butterflies. Deal?
We rely almost 100% on written words.
Yes.
What are the consequences of relying almost solely on the written word for communication (of the subtle things we often try to communicate)? What’s lost in that limitation, what’s gained?
We have discussed this previously, but text-based discussions obviously miss the nuance provided by non-verbal cues, the information provided by seeing and hearing another directly, as well as making it difficult to immediately clarify what another is saying (without interrupting the flow of their expression). One can only type so fast!
I have a gut-feeling that you are wanting to protect a bunch of things when you talk about intuition, memory, and imagination, and it isn’t always clear (or rather, it is never clear!) what it is precisely that you want to protect. From past conversations it seems to me that you are unwilling to see or accept the limits of thought, of thinking - which means that you also see some kind of unlimited potential in the imagination. The imagination - as I understand it - is merely a form of reasoning through images instead of words or assumptions or ideas. There is nothing extra-special about the imagination. Art can be special, beautiful, profound - but the imagination that produces it is not fundamentally different from the daily practical thinking we use for finding our way home or planning a journey using the underground (if you live in a city with an underground).
Observation, awareness, seeing, sensitivity, etc - this is the only means by which we can come into contact with ourselves as we are in the practical present. Right?
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Things missing in text-only forum communication:
Sound and flow of voice - pitch, inflection, accents, rhythm, pauses.
Gestures, body movement.
Facial expression, eyes.
Presence, real-time ‘live’-ness.
Synchronization, conversational flow of interaction.
Pros:
Time to think before responding, hone arguments, double-check logic.
Text messages persist, can be studied later, searched through.
Threaded conversations are sometimes easier to follow than live free-for-alls.
For some people, the written word is clearer and carries more weight than the spoken word.
A pro for me, might not be for others: It’s great fun to write!
A pro for those who value personal boundaries, written words are less intimate than spoken.
Keep 'em coming!
Trust the gut. Unlimited potential for mind/thought/imagination? I don’t know about that, but HUGE potential, yeah baybey! And you’re right, I’m protective, don’t like talking about it.
I have this image of myself as a kind of open book, I’ll happily talk about very personal things with pretty much whoever is interested. And in some ways that’s true. But I’ve realized with the help of forums and dialogues I have a tendency to keep a fair amount to myself.
Is that true for yous guys?
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I think I only keep to myself what civilised company expects me to shut up about.
I have no secrets as such - no ideas to protect. Why do you keep stuff to yourself?
So you’d be fine sharing your darkest dark side with us?
Why do you keep stuff to yourself?
'Cause it’s mine, dammit! 
What is that? The first thing that comes to mind are horrible things I did that make me shudder whenever the memory of them pops into my head.
Which I would share if need be (can’t think what that might be).
Yes these memories are mine, but I like to think that I shudder because the suffering that we create is appalling, not just from personal guilt.
I get the impression that some people think they are bad people because of recurring/habitual thoughts of violence etc that well up sometimes. Something like this this could be our dark side?
Why? - I mean, I can understand that, if one is a musician or an artist, to explore the nature of imagination can seem threatening; but no-one is saying that the imagination doesn’t have its place, that to be an artist is wrong or imperfect, etc. Imagination is essential for culture, for art, for building bridges, for environmental city-planning. There’s nothing wrong with it per se.
But it’s not God, truth or enlightenment, right? It’s not your wife or partner. Imagination has its place, but it is not absolute reality, correct? (if it were, then it wouldn’t be an image, it wouldn’t require any form of image).
Again, why? Your objection seems to be that we would have to
But I don’t understand why this should be an obstacle. One can be honest about one’s so-called ‘dark-side’ without going into personal details about it. I don’t know what you mean by ‘dark-side’, but if, for instance, one has been violent, aggressive, angry, there is surely nothing wrong with exploring the nature of anger, violence or aggression, right? Or if one has been traumatised by some kind of abuse, we can talk about the marks it has left in our psyche, right? (which might be shame, hurt, grief, anger, numbness). We don’t need to hear the lurid details, but there is nothing to stop us from exploring it with others, as far as I can see.
Is it though? I mean, deeply personal stuff is personal, so of course one can keep the details to oneself; but the truly personal is also the most human, right? (‘dark-side’ or not). Our brains are not our property, and neither - it seems to me - are our thoughts or emotions. So we can talk about our humanity without going into unnecessary or painful (i.e. re-traumatising) personal details.
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