Die Now!

Kinfonet Discussion
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“You have enough problems - wars, your neighbours, your husbands, wives, children, your ambitions. Do not add another. Either die completely, knowing the necessity, the importance, the urgency of it; or carry on. Do not create another contradiction, another problem.”

Public Talk 7 Paris, France | September 19, 1961

Was Krishnamurti being flippant when he said this to his audience, or did he know it was possible for the brain to “die completely” when one knows “the necessity, the importance, the urgency of it”?

If I take Krishnamurti seriously, I assume he wasn’t being flippant; that he knew it was possible for one to die now to everything one holds dear and meaningful. But because I can’t imagine being completely inconsolable, I can’t imagine “dying” to everything I know because if the conditioned brain can’t imagine it, it can’t do it.

I, the conditioned brain, does what it thinks it should do, and does not to do what it thinks it should not. I am conditioned to choose what to do, and that means I can’t choose to do what I can’t imagine doing.

So to die to everything I know is impossible until/unless “the necessity, the importance, the urgency” overwhelms the brain’s conditioning. Or to put it another way, doing what must be done is out of my hands because my hands can do only what they know or presume to know how to do.

Is the conditioned brain unable to “die completely” because it is impervious to the gravity of the situation? Or is it capable of addressing the situation honestly?

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Obviously if one knows “the necessity" of something then one knows that it is necessary - and need I add, if something is necessary, then it must be.

The simple logic is simple. So either we deny the undeniable logic (if we consider nonsense to be on a par with reason for example) or we don’t really feel or see that its a necessity (no reasonable, honest counterargument possible - which does not mean no one will argue - we have determined champions of dishonest nonsense here on tthe forum)

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‘Die to’ are strong scary words. Yet we do it each moment! It is the stream of thought that maintains the illusion of our continuity as well as the illusion of our individuality. Everything is in every moment living / dying. So there has to be an awareness of this more or less constant ‘rhythm of thought’. An awareness that ‘me’ as thinker is in K’s words a “trick “ of the thinking process. There is no ‘me’…so the scary sounding ‘die to myself’ is having the insight that there never was a ‘me’ to begin with. Then it starts to unravel and come apart. There is a powerful resistance to seeing into all this. Freedom may be possible but who knows?
We are investigating that possibility in the best way we know how.
Thought creates the suffering and then as thinker says how can I stop this suffering! Creates an imaginary image of ‘freedom’ and the thinker says I will try to attain it! (In some imaginary future!)
Thought creates the ‘problem’ and the ‘thinker’ sets out to solve it!

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But does the conditioned brain really “know” anything? If it does, why did Krishnamurti talk about the need for the brain to “die” to the known, to empty itself of its content and be “nothing”?

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Yes - an example : when we grab a scalding hot coal, we will know that that’s a bad idea.

Divisive minds might say : but sometimes we “know” stuff that is false. I’m up for exploring this if you are. What might be an example of that?

Knowing that Jesus is god, or Communism is the best, don’t count - why? Because believing stories that we are told is just conditioned belief - it is a form of irrational knowledge (knowledge in the absence of sufficient reasons like evidence and logic)

Holding on to ideas that we identify with is a natural, psychological habit - that functions perfectly well in many situations. But it is accompanied by cognitive resistance when challenged - its primitive, and causes harm and conflict - the idea is that we can do better, our understanding of the processes of identity and motivation and the concept of ecological systems and wellbeing for example could help us see the necessity of acting in accordance with a higher good than naive self-interest.

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The brain can act efficiently, sanely, compassionately without the constant presence of an illusory, divisive ‘self-image’. The ‘emptying’ is the emptying of that. The ‘me and mine’ is then nothing.

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This is what we call “muscle memory”, the kind of practical knowledge every living thing needs to survive - the kind of knowing the brain needs to retain.

And then there is self-knowledge, which is not the kind of knowledge the brain can be emptied of because it isn’t knowledge per se, but the transformative effect of a partial insight that reveals the limit of intellectual knowledge.

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I’m guessing everyone here agrees this is true, but that no one here is a living demonstration of its truth.

I may be convinced that my brain is full of content that needs to be dumped, but holding this belief is effectively no different than holding the opposite belief. Beliefs are content that is at best, unnecessary, and at worst, false and misleading.

But for lack of intelligence, the stuffed brain can’t tell what content to keep and what to discard. Without intelligence, the brain is a hoarder.

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I’m using Krishnamurti as an example. There may be others but I don’t know them in the way I know him, his talks, his writings.

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We assume Krishnamurti was talking about what was actual, but this assumption is just another belief to add to the bundle of stuff that distorts perception and perpetuates illusion.

I may feel better about holding the “correct” beliefs, but how do I feel about not having the discernment to identify and eliminate the incoherent content from the necessary content?

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I am glad to hear you say this.

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My ‘feelings’ about this or that are part of the whole ‘package’ or the whole system that is being investigated. The ‘discerner’ about the ‘content’ is the content. The desire to be this or that, to achieve this or that is the content: ‘your’ reality, ‘my’ reality….the investigation into our self misses the mark if it becomes just another problem. Judgement of what is seen in ourself means the investigation has stopped and self has taken over. It needs to be picked up again and again. No map, no guide, no judgement.

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Or let go. As in allowing awareness to loosen the grasp of thought.

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The foundation of the conditioned brain is its incoherent content. So when this confused, conflicted content reflexively reacts to awareness with emotions like fear, anger, desire, hatred, etc., inappropriate or harmful behavior follows.

Desire and fear are not fundamental - they are reactions to the brain’s incoherent content.

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There is no “discerner” - there’s only intelligence, a word for what the conditioned brain has not awakened to because of its attachment to its content.