Yes, but he did it in such a loving tone 
When relating to someone, carefully, attentively, it is not belief is it? It is belief when I am not actually listening and I am reacting to the words. It is a belief because I am thinking about the other, and I have made it their, his or her, perspective, and I am digesting this from my perspective.
Would it then be easier to listen if someone said : “vndk bvcgcbbs chd bhc h jcdnnsn hcdn hcb sn jcnc sc sssncsbck wnccfh hec jndf efn”?
Hi again Paul. I think this is a very important point and something that we can perhaps observe in ourselves. Has being in contact with Krishnamurti’s teachings had an opening. liberating effect upon my life or has it had a narrowing, restrictive impact in the way that all beliefs surely do? As with everything else, surely only close observation from moment to moment can answer this question. How do you and others see this?
Sean, I came to this teaching 20 years ago after 30 years in ‘revolutionary’ politics, which at the time seemed to have led nowhere. I was captivated by K’s take on life, especially convinced by his idea that what was needed was a psychological revolution, or else everything would return the same, which is what I had myself seen.
I read everything I could, including the entire collected works and I established a relationship with the UK centre at Brockwood, working there for over a year. I certainly found that his psychological ideas opened my eyes up to the world in a new way and led me to a huge amount of self-enquiry. I found the mystical side less appealing and felt an increasing pull and push with regard things such as ‘the other.’
Looking back, I see that in turning to K as I did, I was trying to find a new framework for belief to perhaps replace that which I had jettisoned. I think that this did not aid me in appreciating the true relevance of K. I have seen many people fall into ‘seeking’ the thing that K talked of rather than in understanding and using K’s psychological insights as a lever to look into themselves. The whole thing of belief blinds one. It leads one to either accept of deny rather than turn to oneself. It leads to magical or even delusional thinking, fired by the emotional drive to ‘succeed’ and break through the conditioning.
One has to understand and observe one’s conditioning, day by day and without judgement, as K rightly said. Instead, we fall into imagining the precipice and the snake and jumping back. In which case, no real change occurs, only another twist added.
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Of course we react from what we are. We react from our conditioning. It’s very true, Peter. Rather than trying not to react however, maybe pay attention to the reaction because that reaction tells you something that you should be paying attention to, your state of conditioning. Don’t expect blinding flashes of insight. There probably will be none. The expectation itself is part of the conditioning. If that is the case, observe that. In this way and to the extent you manage, the structure of the belief system weakens. Enjoy it. Be kind to yourself.
The fact that you pose it as a dichotomy is itself interesting. Is it, in fact, a dichotomy?
If I may be permitted a metaphor: The mind, to an extent, is similar to a mirror in that it reflects, to whatever degree of accuracy, the actuality. With regard the mirror’s reflection and the reality it reflects (the reflection never being an exact representation), would you say there is a dichotomy? I would simply say one is the actual and the other, its reflection.
So, what if I had the idea that the mirror should offer an exact reflection of the actual? Surely the dichotomy would not be between the mirror and the actuality but between the reflection and my wrong expectation of it.
Coming back to the mind: Were I to expect the mind to offer a ‘total perception of what is,’ there would be a dichotomy between that expectation and the actuality, which is that the mind can never give a total perception of what is.
You have posed this question as a dichotomy as well. Why can’t it be both? If you are aware that you are eating, would it make sense to ask, “Am I aware or am I eating?”
When I observe my mind, awareness and thinking seem not to run simultaneously, but to alternate rapidly: aware, think, aware, think, aware, think. Like timesharing (serial processing) rather than multitasking (parallel processing) on a computer.
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Precisely. There is nothing revolutionary in prizing the rational over the irrational. In Krishnamurtian thought, as you put it, they are essentially the same. Both lack the anonymity of pathless-ness.
Hello Pilgrim. I would say that the question here is really this - is it possible to observe oneself and others effortlessly without the filter of past knowledge and experience and without accumulating? In practice, that means coming to this forum as if for the first time, putting aside knowledge of K’s teaching, knowledge about fellow posters and looking at a question like this with freshness and new eyes. Do we ever do this or is this all an idea?
Do I know what God is? Or a spoon, or myself, or time, or an apple, or a bee, or the wind?
If I don’t know what anything is; why should I take my beliefs seriously?
Or maybe I think that my descriptions/definitions of things (like God and spoons) means that I know what they are - rather than just a list of insignificant (or erroneous) details.
Hi again Pilgrim. I don’t think there is any “how” that can help us, is there? We have what K pointed out about observation. I don’t see any other way into all this other than experimenting with observation ourselves and seeing what we discover.
Watch TV, read a book, play a game, go for a walk, go shopping, do the cleaning; the mind is constantly thinking what to do. One thing ends and we are looking for the next one. There is a sense of dissatisfaction and unfulfillment. The way we deal with this is to try to improve the activity and the level of pleasure. We believe there is a personal approach and there will be something special. Rarely do we allow the mind to completely come to rest without any purpose. Probably we don’t understand, the mind fully at rest, as in meditation, there is the discovery of an effortless fulfilment.
Yep.
And … there’s the purpose! Even when the goal is to unravel the system, we end up getting caught in the system. Addicted to pleasure, we are, in all of its forms.
It seems to me that they do run simultaneously, and that it’s attention that jumps back and forth between them. It occurred to me a long time ago that thought is running continuously (what I call the yack-track) while awareness, though compromised, is constant. The result is distraction, and all that is missed and misunderstood.
Attending to thought makes sense to me, but not attending to awareness. Awareness, as I see it, enables-precedes attention. When you try to attend to awareness, you end up attending to the subject or object of awareness, not awareness itself.
Yes, you can only be aware of what you can detect and how its unfolding. As I’ve said, awareness is consciousness. What we are conscious of is what we’re aware of.
Clearly, the “we” that “don’t understand” does not include the one who speaks of “effortless fulfillment”.
I also use the two terms interchangeably most of the time, though each has its own semi-distinct vibe for me due to the context it tends to appear in. Awareness has the scent of nondual spirituality and neuroscience, consciousness the scent of psychology and philosophy of mind. And then of course there is Krishnamurti’s idiosyncratic distinction between the two.