Yes. There’s no need to disclose personal details when we can talk about what the details exemplify, so why conceal anything in these discussions?
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It’s private. Trust would have to be strong, the setting would have to be right. A public forum is not ideal for either!
(Rick to Douglas): Would you be fine sharing your darkest dark side with us?
James: One can be honest about one’s so-called ‘dark-side’ without going into personal details about it.
I was talking about sharing personal details. Sharing abstractions isn’t much challenge, you can remain anonymous, insulated. Showing your actual warts and scars is way harder and possibly transformative. ?
Do you see the contradiction between these things Rick? You are saying that not to share personal details leaves us with abstractions, and yet you are not willing to talk about a whole shopping list of things.
Personally, I disagree with your premise that we can’t talk meaningfully without going into every detail. For instance, I can talk about the hurt I’ve experienced in a relationship without saying everything personal there is to say about that relationship. It’s the hurt that matters, not the myriad details about how it took place.
Anyway, you have also said that you do not want to talk about your deepest concerns. You also don’t want to talk about thought or the imagination. (And obviously you don’t want to talk about K). So I am a little bit unsure of how to proceed. It seems that it is you who only want to talk in abstractions, no?
Isn’t this what you are doing?
I am happy to talk about thought. Imagination not so much. My relationship with Krishnamurti is still too loaded for me to be able to talk unbiasedly about him, so I rarely do. (Which makes things challenging since it’s a Krishnamurti forum!)
Sometimes. Sometimes I share personal thoughts and feelings, show my self. It depends on the situation: whom I’m talking with, my mood, the topic. I don’t always want the challenge of self-exposure, intimacy is a toughie for me.
I have read what you wrote with interest, but you are a very hard fellow to get a grasp of. I read things like you found Krishnamurti when you were in your 20’s and you went through the whole arc, from compliance to defiance, from following him to leaving him behind. So why after all of this, after leaving him behind, is this still too loaded for you to talk about? I dont get it, unless you are still struggling with holding onto Krishnamurti in some way?
Yes, this is a Krishnamurti forum and you seem to have some struggles with this, which I can totally understand. I have similar issues when I join a Buddhist or Eckhart Tolle or Advaita forum for instance. I can relate to them, but I am an outsider, will never totally fit in. I think you feel similar here with Krishnamurti forum, on one hand you really like a lot of his ideas/approach but can never be a full blown Krishnamurti-ite 
I am gonna go out on a limb here and propose that K is co-opting the words “relationship” and “nature” in the line above - as is his wont. (Not that he isn’t in this instance talking about actual nature). My take is that by relationship he means observation without a self-identified observer and by nature the intent is to get at the ‘natural’ world, Life, the ‘what is’ seen were we not to look through a glass darkly.
I am certainly taking liberties here but just for fun here are a few lines from Rilke that I like to think is exploring similar ground:
First regarding the natural order of things, from “Letters to a Young Poet”:
“But there is much beauty here, because there is much beauty everywhere. ”
And secondly, regarding the loss of relationship, Der Panther, a poetic momentary glimpse into the infinite world outside the confines of imagination.
No harm in living vicariously through the poets for a spell. Temporary respite and all that.
Nor I. An intellectual understanding of the Teachings only takes one so far. At some point one has to start experimenting with that understanding, however limited. It is telling in this regard that nature does feature prominently in K’s notebooks and journals. Experimenting with what it means to ‘live the Teachings’ rather than ‘by them’ is far, far easier to do when one communes with nature than with other people. Or so I find anyway.
Now I’m interested. What’s “loaded” about your relationship with Krishnamurti?
I went through a phase where I couldn’t take Krishnamurti seriously because the only way to know if his teaching points to what cannot be imagined or verified scientifically is for the brain to jettison everything that makes it my brain.
It seems like you too went through your arc and left Krishnamurti behind, for the most part.
I am still in the phase where Krishnamurti speaks to me and I am reading/watching everything I can of his.
Not at all. There was no “arc”, and I’m only beginning to comprehend intellectually, what K was talking about.
Yes, but it is also a pathetic depiction of a wonderful, powerful trapped “will” - a sight we have often seen at zoos - where a magnificent wild creature is compelled to live out its days between the four walls of a man-made dungeon. The poem is both an image of the human mind (what we do to ourselves) and of the animal world we have subjugated to our interests.
I know that K can sometimes take a word and use it in counter-intuitive ways, but to be honest Emile, I think K here just means a relationship to nature. He’s not just speaking about our ‘inner’ relationship to ‘what is’, etc.
He often spoke about the importance of cultivating a relationship to nature in his talks with school children - he clearly felt that such a relationship is fundamental to the sensitive development of a human being. In his discussions in India he would often raise the matter to make people aware that they had lost contact with nature through living in towns and cities. He was critical of the way traditional Indian religion (both Hindu and Buddhist) had devalued the natural world, and pointed out to Indians that nature was reverenced in the Rig Veda and celebrated among Indian poets.
In traditional Indian religion nature is often dis-valued. Nature is maya, illusion; or it is regarded as something compound and destined to decay. K rejected this attitude, and apparently saw nature as something inherently valuable, inwardly dynamic, sacred. In contrast with Vedantins K often spoke of how human beings are despoiling the earth, destroying nature, killing animals, to draw attention to the ignorance of such activity.
In the section that precedes the first quote I shared above (from K’s journal Krishnamurti To Himself), K says
It is odd that we have so little relationship with nature, with the insects and the leaping frog and the owl that hoots among the hills calling for its mate. We never seem to have a feeling for all living things on the earth. If we could establish a deep abiding relationship with nature we would never kill an animal for our appetite, we would never harm, vivisect, a monkey, a dog, a guinea pig for our benefit. We would find other ways to heal our wounds, heal our bodies.
But the healing of the mind is something totally different. That healing gradually takes place if you are with nature, with that orange on the tree, and the blade of grass that pushes through the cement, and the hills covered, hidden, by the clouds.
This is not sentiment or romantic imagination but a reality of a relationship with everything that lives and moves on the earth. Man has killed millions of whales and is still killing them. All that we derive from their slaughter can be had through other means. But apparently man loves to kill things, the fleeting deer, the marvellous gazelle and the great elephant…
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.
Do you see what I mean? Nature for K is something actual, significant, vital - not just an ‘example’ of what lies beyond thought. Nature is to be cared for, protected, preserved, because it is something in itself - it is a part of us. We are nature too.
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Yeah I guess I’m still working things out in my relationship with (my image of) Krishnamurti. I’m probably in the home stretch of of the teacher/student arc.
Psychological dependency.
You feel differently now?
This may be about choice of words, but my understanding is that we should not be fooled into thinking that my conditioned brain is a reality detector, but merely a mirror of my conditioning.
So not jettison what I am, but be free of, not fooled by what I am.
Could you also say ‘not be identified with’?
As long as there is a ‘sense of identity’ attached to thought to feeling to sensation there will be recording, comparison, judgement, etc. Also pleasure and suffering. Is it possible for there to not be identification?
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I’m wondering… If part of your objections to Krishnamurti is that he has become an implicit authority for us, do you not also see that what you are doing also relates to implicit (albeit unspecified) authorities of your own? Maybe these are the authority of certain experiences you have had in the past, which dictate your attitudes; or maybe they are the authority of certain Hindu scriptures or teachers that have influenced you, and which make it difficult for you to examine certain assumptions.
The point is, can we not explore with a ‘beginner’s mind’?
The phrase is of course from Zen, but I’m not talking about any Zen doctrine, but just the attitude of dropping what we know, or at least bracketing our knowledge and experience for the time being, and exploring from humility, simplicity, innocence (inasmuch as we feel able to do this).
I think this ‘beginner’s mind’ attitude is the only way to truly enquire or explore - to start as if we hadn’t read any religious or philosophical books, as though we hadn’t had any experiences etc, and to explore from there.
Then there need be no sense of protecting anything, no assumptions or conclusions for how an exploration should end up.
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Beginner’s mind sounds great to me. And yes inner authority is something to be aware of. It’s subtle and hard to spot.
Is “inner authority” another way of describing a ‘sense of identity’? Rather than thought , say, being just a movement of a ‘material process ‘ in the brain, it is ‘felt’ as ‘I am thinking’…? Is that identification of a ‘me’ with the thinking, is that the “inner authority “ you’re referring to?
That’s maybe the deepest and subtlest inner authority, the authority of (the realness of) self. Without that ground-level authority what would we be?
Body, brain, thought, sensations? Isn’t that what K is implying, that the ‘you / me’ is “nothing”? That that’s the ‘fiction’ that’s causing all the problems for us?
In different words, the ‘sense of identity ‘ has ‘hamstrung’ the brain. In the technical realm it operates amazingly but in the psychological, it precludes the kind of ingenuity, invention and compassion that could make the world a ‘better’ place not only for all of us but also for those around us.