nobody went up the hill
to fetch a joy for forever
nobody fell down
a wounded clown
then redid the entire endeavor
I enjoyed our walk together, Paul. 
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I would just say that itās impossible to say what is going on in someone elseās head, no matter how well you know the person. The Covid crisis has taken a heavy toll on all our mental health. Your friend cutting you off sounds like itās got nothing at all to do with anything youāve done Nobody.
Thanks, Sean.
I went through a period of speculating: Why did he do what he did, whatās going on in his head, does he have a clue how this is affecting me, usw. But then I realized the toll that mind games like that take.
Carrying the past around in our brains is what seems to take a continuous ātollā in never or rarely ever being free of it to meet each present with emptiness. Weāre āstuffedā with memory and are rarely aware of the āprisonā it makes.
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We are the prison, prisoner, guards, and warden. Itās all in the head.
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The warden is clever, makes our prison cells comfortable. So comfortable that we donāt even notice the doors are open and we could leave if we wanted. And if we do notice, well, it doesnāt seem worth the effort and upheaval.
This is like telling a blind person to open their eyes.
The self-centered mind canāt acknowledge the existence of anything it canāt react to on its own terms, i.e., what-should/should-not-be.
No, not quite. We are not blind. We can see very clearly that we get angry. But how do we look at our own anger?
And for that matter, our thoughts in general. Are they seen as āmineā or as the process of thinking?
What I found so strange and ironic in the above long exchange was that attachment was never mentioned. In all relationships, when loss and subsequence suffering is experienced, it is always because of attachment. What is ironic is that one person was experiencing pain as a result of attachment, and the other was so attached to his thinking that neither was aware of their attachment (and their latent conditioning).
I wondered why no one had talked about attachment, and so did a search of two words (attachment and loss) at the jkrishnamurti site and am just including a link to the first mention:
The same way we look at everything - conditionally. We see things not as they are, but as they should/should-not-be. We canāt help itā¦itās our conditioning. The question is whether we can acknowledge our reactive responses for what they are, and especially, if we can observe our reactions as they occur.
Itās preachy and condescending to speak knowingly of love and compassion when, to oneās audience, they are just words.
Interesting talk, you can learn a little bit about each speaker from watching how they react to the others. These lines rang a bell for me:
T: So is it that we are not afraid of the wound itself but what happens if the wound disappears.
K: Partly. Because the wound has given me some sense of identification. You follow? I am somebody with a wound, without a wound, Iām nobody. (Laughs)
Iāve often thought that one of the main reasons I donāt ātake the leapā (instead of just contemplating taking the leap) is that I donāt want the game to end. I mean if I were suddenly conflict free and non-neurotic, what the cāhell would I do with all that free time?!!
Itās perverse thinking, right? But Iād wager Iām not the only one who does it.
nobody,
I had to chuckle when you, in quoting K, were struck by: āwithout a wound, Iām nobodyāā¦ (not laughing at you) but the fact that you were inadvertently struck by your nickname.
Seriously though, one has to be really fed up with just about everything to take the āleapā. It is the being fed up which gives one the energy to go far.
P.S.: sorry about the loss of your friendā¦
I totally missed the nobody thing. Good catch! If the woundless are nobodies, Iām definitely a somebody.
To get really fed up, I think you need to be really open to feeling pain. That takes a strength and courage I donāt seem to have. And a love of truth, which I do have, but that can be trumped by hunger for pleasure.
At the moment of anger, that explosion of psychological energy is something totally unconditional because it is out of our control. This is so, isnāt it? Afterwards, we go back and look at what happened and try to make sense of all the thoughts this explosion has generated. So is it possible to look at what happened without the desire to make sense of it?
Is love and compassion under our control? Because we can also approach the question from this angle, which is very interesting if one has a little patience with it. Can we decide to be affectionate? Which means anger and affection may be very closely related.
Then there is no need to discuss it any further. You have all the answers sealed and signed, courtesy of J Krishnamurti. Or the pain of relationship may actually have nothing whatsoever to do with attachment. Which is also courtesy of J Krishnamurti:
K: Throw out attachment, sir. You have something or other. Why canātā¦ Your own feeling of anger, jealousy, whatever it is, just watch it. (This is from the same dialogue you referenced earlier)
Therefore we have to work this out for ourselves.
We said the whole problem began with the identification of someone as special to oneself. Identification is a slightly different word from attachment, but it is surely the same process at work. Letās not get stuck on one word over another, but letās look at what is actually taking place in our relationships with other people. Then the words we use to describe what we see donāt matter too much because we are not making theories about it.
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No. Itās a conditioned response, a reaction caused by oneās belief about what should/should-not-be.
Is love and compassion under our control?
Of course not.
But the reaction is unconditional. It may be the result of conditioned thinking, but as a reaction it has a totally different kind of energy. Our ideas about what should be and what should not have conditioned the brain. The reaction of anger may be a product or a consequence of these ideas, but anger itself is not expressed just as an idea. Otherwise, it wouldnāt be experienced as anger and we wouldnāt call it that.
Thatās like saying a bullet doesnāt need a firing pin and a trigger to be discharged.
No, I am saying that when the bullet is fired, flying, you canāt do anything about it. The explosion of energy is of a different quality to the energy that caused it.
āExplosionā is a good word for this event. Whatever the trigger, it, we explode, I āsee redā. I saw a video of a resting female tiger approached by a male. As he approached her cautiously ,she all at once āexplodedā, sending him flying backward with the force of it. It was fearsome. Then he turned and walked away and she resumed her resting.
Itās different with us though isnāt it? It doesnāt just explode and then dissipate, thought comes in and itās extended, elaborated , recorded, until it finally does die. Two different forms of energy at work here, the universal explosive energy and the energy of the āselfā?
There is a similarity here with ālossā among the animalsā¦when there is death, there is a stopping in the others, but then it (the sorrow explosion?) is over and they move on.