Good, that helps me understand the forum guidelines better.
I dislike having to be dragged into a discussion about this Sadhguru person (who I have no interest in at all!), but as youāve brought this up again Iāve gone and found the conversation where he talks about Krishnamurti. And, as I thought, from the context it is clear that he has a very traditional Hindu outlook and criticism of K.
First of all his whole exposure to Krishnamurti was only five Saturday afternoons at a K study group listening to or watching videos of K (!). He doesnāt seem to have actually met him in person, or spent any length of time studying him.
Just before the part of the conversation you quote, he labels Krishnamurti as an intellectual, someone who is on the āgnana margaā (the intellectual path), and whose teaching is too narrow and elite for the ordinary person. He goes onto say that
everyone could feel the man is special, but no one could get what he was talking about because he refused to play the role of a Guru. He refused to initiate anyone into anything or give any kind of method or process.
These are the same traditional criticisms of K that all the traditional Hindu gurus make. So by saying that after Kās death he left behind āno living processā, it is clear what Sadhguru meant.
K obviously impacted this guru enough to send his daughter to one of the K-schools, but thereās no evidence that he had a very deep appreciation of K.
To nevertheless address the point that you were making, it is clear that there is a wide difference between Krishnamurti being alive and being dead. Clearly there is no K alive to respond in the immediate to all the things that are taking place today, or to be a fount of energy for the expression of his teachings.
But the teachings are just as valid now as they were when he was alive (to the degree that they have any validity at all), because the reality K was describing when he was alive is the same human reality we both experience today. At least, thatās what Kās teaching is a pointer to.
Let us let the whole Sadhguru quote go, okay? Itās not bearing fruit, thereās no sense pursuing it.
I think itās appropriate to let the whole thread go, in fact: too turbulent.
Thanks for your messages everyone!
Hello James, nice to see you back here.
As with everything, we all probably understand āthe perfumeā of Kās teachings differently. For me, itās like when I run my hand over flowering rosemary in the hills - the perfume cuts straight through to something pure and deep. Iād say the perfume in Kās teaching is similar in the way that it cuts through beyond words and rings with truth. Is this āringing trueā something that others see as important?
Oups! well spotted, a mistake on my part - Iāve gone a bit French - though the dictionary tells me that Acceptation is an English word that is a synonym for Acceptance, with the added notion of gladly accepting, as opposed to grumpily accepting. (I donāt know which word is best, maybe there is a sort of joy in being free from who we are?)
Hi Sean [Kevin], nice to hear from you again! I just thought I would touch base with Kinfonet, as itās been a while.
The issue seems to be that the āring of truthā or ācut throughā that Kās words have for some people (I would include myself among them) is that it may be largely a subjective quality. And so the question is how much is it a subjective evaluation (or aesthetic judgment)?
Other people who are equally intelligent (or stupid), equally moral (or immoral) etc as oneself, may not discern the perfume that you and I are talking about - perhaps because they are intoxicated by the perfume of some other teaching. It would be good, for example, to get Rick to talk about this because he seems to be on the fence about K, and yet he is clearly attracted to the kinds of topics and questions that K talked about.
Personally, while I donāt feel K was always the most effective speaker - he could sometimes express himself in a manner that confused his listeners unnecessarily - his words carry with them an inner authority that Iāve never heard in anyone else; and if other people donāt sense that then my feeling is they havenāt really listened to him properly.
Fool! (or grasshopper if you prefer) if only you had listened to my explanation about explanations, it would have been clear that your question was worth more than any explanation.
The concept of spiritual growth should be banned, is misleading imo. There are only 2 steps on the path of awakening - the first is the discovery that my reality might not be the whole story. and the 2nd being a clear insight into what I am ( ie.the conditioned, projecting, discriminating, suffering process).
Any hope of accumuating the correct knowledge or understandings is not a path to freedom from the known - conclusions, stories and dogma can only serve knowledge. (ie a progression, improvement of the self, not freedom from)
If by not seeing that āthere is no divisionā (in Kās words,) we are living our lives in a kind of darkness? Nothing we can ādoā can dispel it. Only āinsightā? We take the dark for the light and accustom ourselves to the killing, the hatred, fear, suffering, greed, competition etc because we donāt see that we āareā our āneighborā? We donāt see that we āareā in fact āawarenessā itself.? The ādarknessā we live in keeps us in the trivial? In the trivial self-image, which has divided itself psychologically from the rest of the world, trying futilely to become something finer, something betterā¦the very ātryingā which itself, creates and maintains the darkness?
Is Enlightenment about our exploration and accumulation of correct understanding? Is it dependant on our exploration of the correct teachings?
Are we supposed to imagine some complex idea clearly? Or to come into direct contact with the Truth, know the unknowable, directly experience unity with the whole?
Or is it to face what we are? That it is a simplistic, mechanical, process that is far from perfect. That its pettiness, its narrow, circular selfish dictat has awful consequences.
Yes to face myself who believes that I am living in the light but am actually living in the dark. āEnlightenmentā is not in our hands? It must be that in āseeingā (insight) into the self, the false division it has created and suffers, is dispelled?
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The self can judge itself but by its judgement, it reinforces itself. It cannot dispel itself because it would have to āremainā to do the dispelling?
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Every village has its fool?
That sounds like a formula:
awakening = see the limit of my take on reality + see what I truly am
?
When the believer faces itself and calls itself a liar and the believer agrees that believing is lying, there is no believer or liar but only belief, which is darkness, which is where we reside.
Am I in the dark because I was not born choicelessly aware and capable of direct perception, or because I was conditioned to believe, to choose what is true and false, actual and illusory? Does it matter whether I was born corrupt or I was corrupted by my keepers? Or does it not matter because it makes no difference who or what is to blame for my corruption?
My corruption is all that matters, and all I can do about it is live with it warily, because I canāt be trusted, and caringly, because Iām confused.
My corruption is my confusion, and seeing confusion for what it is, is clarity.
You may be right but consider the possibility that there isnāt actually any ādivisionā. Consider that the belief that there is, is the source of the confusion. We have given names to the million things, put them in categories, given them values and see them as separate. Thought has named itself āIā and separated itself from all the other āIāsā¦we fight and kill each other endlessly, why, because we are inherently corrupt or because a misstep was taken along the line? Does thinking about the possibility that there is no division open the possibility of new insights into this ādarknessā? Maybe?