For me, my experience is the totality of being. Is my experience what we are calling my consciousness?
How I react to what I see, is of course part of my experience.
But it is first of all your own consciousness that says the mind is the source of conflict, as if it already knows exactly what it is talking about. Your consciousness - which includes your thoughts and feelings - has invented a convenient explanation, thatâs all.
The âyourâ is vital in all this. It is your consciousness that listens and responds to the questions we are posing. It is your consciousness that hears the question about being the source of all conflict and responds to it. But does a fact require any response at all? Surely, it is only to ideas that we respond.
My anything - my experience, my thoughts, my feelings, my beliefs, my dreams, my fears, my memories - the whole lot is summed up in the phrase âmy consciousness.â And my consciousness is the source of all conflict in the world. Now, is this not a fact? Without further explanations and clarifications, is it not simply a fact? Or are we placing the responsibility for conflict elsewhere?
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Tower of Babel Alert! Iâm using consciousness to mean (something like) the space in which thoughts and feelings arise. But staying with the gist of what you said, yes, thought-feeling might be saying âthe brain-mind is the source of conflictâ based on conditioned knowledge.
Clearly, you have a significant other you âloveâ, but that kind of love (the Greeks called it âerosâ) is not the love K was talking aboutâŚand this applies to other kinds of love like 'philia" or âstorgeâ,
This is a Krishnamurti discussion forum. If you want to talk about your love for someone, youâre in the wrong place.
So what is K talking about when he uses the word âloveâ? If you donât know, why dismiss all the other aspects of it so quickly? Why hide behind K? Letâs instead face the fact that some people are significant and others are not. I am obviously significant to you because you keep coming back for more. Why am I your significant other?
Alright, forget all the clever words - brain, mind, thought-feeling, consciousness - letâs make it very simple and direct. Is it a fact that you are the source of all conflict in the world?
We could wait forever to become totally aware of the contents of our consciousness. Or content itself is the beginning of conflict.
For the moment I call it âconflictâ I am the source, whether it is outside or inside. Without my presence in the world, there is no conflict. I am the source; just as you are the source; just as he is the source; and just as she is the source.
Can we therefore relate to one another from this fact alone and not from all our reactions to it? It is the same fact for each one of us.
No. It is an idea for me.
For me or for you, it will always be an idea, a concept, an opinion. This is not in doubt. Our awareness is limited. So this is not about how we see it. The mountain is there whether we see it or not. The sun is there even when we are living deep within a cave.
The self exists, whether or not you are aware of it. And the self is in perpetual conflict with the world. Otherwise, it has no meaning.
If you are not the source of all conflict in life, then what is the source? To answer this question, are you still going to go off to an idea?
Who is doing the looking, the searching and the finding out? I am. It starts with me. So there is no higher level of perception involved. There is no journey from the depths of the cave to the surface above. Thatâs merely a delaying tactic to prevent immediate action. Why isnât this equally clear to you? You are looking, searching, at times confused, at times anxious, at times intimidated, at times aggressive, at times joyful - you are the source of all that too, arenât you? Or are you putting the responsibility for all of that on to something else too, pretending that the source of it is at a distance away from where you are? Sometimes you are confused and sometimes you are clear - thatâs conflict. It is built into you.
Look, the very fact that you donât have a clear perception is what shows you how close you are to the source of all conflict. When you say, âI canât say for sure,â thatâs the voice of conflict speaking through you. Thatâs all. This is very simple. There is conflict in our feelings, in our thoughts, in our hearts and on our lips.
From this fact alone is it possible to meet for there are no other facts.
To be honest I am not really interested in what the source of conflict in life is. If I had to find an âanswerâ I would probably turn to my thoughts and feelings and memories of experiences. If the question was more urgent for me, I would probably do the same, but with more intensity.
Why accuse me of âhiding behind Kâ? Is it because Iâve accused you of mimicking him?
Since Krishnamurti has equated what he calls âloveâ with intelligence and compassion, that rules out all other forms of attachment we call âloveâ.
Letâs instead face the fact that some people are significant and others are not. I am obviously significant to you because you keep coming back for more. Why am I your significant other?
What makes you significant (in the context of this forum) is that you are not serious about Kâs teaching, but you are very serious about yourself and what you think you know and understand. Youâre too full of yourself to be in a forum about emptying oneself and being free from the known.
Thatâs why there are wars. Nobody really wants to get to the root of it deep within themselves.
Why? Why not start with what you actually know about love, which is the pain of it? Unless this is faced and understood in its entirety all this other talk of love and intelligence will remain purely hypothetical.
I really doubt âgetting to the root of conflict deep within oneselfâ even occurs to most people. Probably the only reason someone would want to get to the root of anything within themselves is if they believed it would benefit them by enhancing happiness, pleasure, stability. Even then, it would be the last resort, because getting to the root is hard and sometimes unpleasant work.
In the light of this (seeming) fact, where are we, what do we do?
I know nothing âabout loveâ and I have nothing to say about attachment when the subject is love. Why donât you start a thread on attachment and why you call it âloveâ?
Unless this is faced and understood in its entirety all this other talk of love and intelligence will remain purely hypothetical.
Since youâre mistaking attachment for âloveâ while telling another to face and understand something in its entirety, it seems better to me to be âhypotheticalâ than as hypocritical as you.
No, the subject is pain - the other words are just our way of dealing with it.
The sun only shines because its shining has appeared to us.
âThe sun is shiningâ is a fact because each of us can see it (intersubjectivity).
Even the man in the cave can see it when he comes out of the cave.
Postulating the existence of a sun that has never appeared to anyone, that exists âobjectivelyâ âin itselfâ makes little sense.
We go on living in conflict. What else is there to do? But I am still the source of it, whatever else I may do or not do. The fact doesnât change. I shall carry it with me until the end of my days.
But even when we see the sun directly, nothing really changes. That is why it makes no difference by thinking in terms of seeing the fact. The fact is and always will be invisible to the observer. But it is also very clear that I am the source and the cause of all the mischief in the world. It is like telling those cave people that without the sun there would be no cave. They donât need to climb outside to see the logic of it.
Again, forget entirely about perceiving the fact. This is not about your perception of it. This is a fact totally beyond our perception.
Can we be unconflicted about being conflicted? Not make it into a bad thing or a good thing or anything at all. Just notice it, the pervasive sense of this vs. that we feel. Watch it, see what it does, be aware of its consequences: anxiety, tightness of body and mind, anger, fear.