Death is the mother of beauty

Kinfonet Discussion
83

You lost me. Try again?

84

But you are again going back to your image of K. It is not an accusation. You are doing it now. You are looking at me through that image.

85

Does love come from being or non-being, psychologically? Our answers come into being, don’t they? Our images of one another come into being. Our opinions and beliefs come into being. Does love come into being? Or love is there where there is nothing else occupying the space.

86

You’re telling me what I’m doing…as if you knew.

Attend to what you’re doing.

87

But you are showing us all exactly what you are doing. Don’t you see this? You are comparing one person against another - ten years worth, now, by your own calculations. Numerous people have pointed it out to you, yet you carry on oblivious.

If you want to carry on with this for the next ten years, I don’t mind. But if you are going to continue the attack then make it real, put some teeth into it. Don’t just keep repeating the same old vague assertions that there is mimicking of K. Dig much deeper and challenge exactly what is being said rather than the manner of it. I can’t help the manner of it; I can’t suddenly stop writing in fairly good English.

88

Answers, images, opinions, beliefs are all not there, nonexistent, then there, thrown into existence by some set of causes, by conditioning. You’re asking if love takes this same route from non-being to being. If not, if love is somehow ‘beyond’ causality, it must be ubiquitous and eternal. If true, if love is always there, then there’s no doing it, getting it, working towards it. It’s more a question of realizing its presence.

I’m probably misinterpreting what you said, so fill me in!

89

We are alone in the universe. Totally alone. What do we do with it? How do we live with this fact? Do we actually just live with it? Or do we contrive to do something about it? Do we perhaps perceive it as a fact? If we do thus perceive it, this means we have already created a gap between ourselves and the universe. Into this gap we then throw all sorts of things, which is what we call our consciousness. Within our consciousness a great deal of strange things come into being; and some of these things remain with us for a lifetime, while other things are temporary. Where does love belong in all of this? Is it something permanent that is always there or is it something transitory that comes and goes? Or does love have nothing whatsoever to do with any of this?

90

Feelings and emotions come and go. Some of these I might call love. I love a piece of music, a color, an idea. I love trees, animals, music. I love my friends and family.

Is there something else, a kind of love that is not dependent on feelings/emotions, that does not wax and wane? Something we might not even think of as love?

91

I don’t need to form an image of you when you constantly remind us of who/what you are by behaving predictably.

92

A pitiful defense of yourself, but you are to be commended for quitting the K mimicry, Had I never brought it up you’d still be doing it.

You are comparing one person against another

Who are these two persons I’m allegedly comparing “against another”?

Numerous people have pointed it out to you

Provide evidence. To my knowledge, no one has pointed this out to me.

if you are going to continue the attack then make it real, put some teeth into it. Don’t just keep repeating the same old vague assertions that there is mimicking of K.

I only remind you of your K mimicry when you do it, and as I just said, you haven’t done it lately, for which I am grateful…it really grated.

I’m sorry you’re not feeling the “teeth” you ask for, but I’m not repeating anything old or vague. I comment only on what you do, which is almost invariably didactic and presumptuous. If you tire of being reminded every time you do it, don’t accuse me of doing nothing new.

93

If we have to start to remind you of your ‘Inquiry mimicry’, this will never end.

94

K and me - who else? It means you can’t listen to either of us. The one is seen as sacrosanct; the other is seen as sacrilegious - so you are destroying any chance of a relationship with either of them.

95

We are selective in our affections, aren’t we? And these feelings of affection come and go. So what is affection? Is it just a feeling I have when you please me? Or is there something deeper that remains unaffected by circumstance? Is there within us a force or an energy that never becomes selective, reductive, exclusive?

96

Thoughts and feelings wax and wane, thinking-feeling is selective, reductive, exclusive.

Is there any force or energy in us untouched by thinking and feeling?

97

And therefore immune to death. In other words, something that is not within the field of being or non-being.

Surely there is that quality of mind which is neither being nor non-being when we don’t land on a definitive answer, when we don’t say Yes or No to a fundamental question. Take, for example, this past weekend where we have been looking at the question, ‘Is there anything sacred at all?’ This is perhaps the most fundamental question of them all; and it is interesting to watch just how the mind plays with such a thing. Because there are no insights to be gleaned from an investigation into it. There may be insights into the nature of the mind that seeks an answer, but that’s all very small beer. For an insight into the nature of the sacred immediately destroys that which the mind is observing. In this sense the sacred is not only destructive of everything that approaches it, yet it is in itself something that is both indestructible and inviolate. This quality can only be felt sideways on; it cannot be faced directly. Otherwise, it would be like looking directly into the sun. So the question of whether or not there is anything sacred can never be answered. And therefore the very quality of not knowing - the quality of a mind that is genuinely and seriously living without any answers at the deepest level - has within it something of the sacred.

This doesn’t mean that our fundamental questions have no answers to them. It just means that our answers tend to belittle the questions we pose, bringing them down into the realm of thought and feeling. An unanswered question has tremendous energy. ‘Do you love me?’ - that’s a tremendous question when it doesn’t get answered. In the same way as with the question about the sacred, only love itself can provide a full and incontrovertible answer.

98

Interesting image you’ve formed.

99

This might be funny without the emoji mixing the message.

100

Fixed it…

101

So explore it. This is your image, not mine. If you have any image of K, which apparently you do, it produces other images all over the place.

There is another aspect to all this talk of mimicry that may also interest you. I have only just found out about it. A friend of K’s came to him and said, ‘How can I ever transform?’ And K said, ‘You’ve got to be me - in the imagination.’ So look at it this way from now on, if it ever troubles you again. [See David Bohm’s account of this in Appendix 1 of An Uncommon Collaboration by David Moody.]

102

Thanks for this! For me when the ‘light’ would go on illuminating something in myself that K had pointed at, it seemed the right thing to do when expressing it to use his words like “the thinker is the thought” because now they had become personal. Copying but not mimicking?