Then you have addressed your own concern or objection about what I am doing here. Hopefully, it’s no longer a problem between us.
@PaulDimmock
It’s not about a problem between anyone, it’s about the reality of self. There is still no point to the questioning, there is still no reality to the finding out, and there is still no integrity in the approach taken to self/other.
Is suffering merely psychological and only related to the psyche? I say no., it may be generic or accidental.
What is the reality of the self if not in the matrix of human relationship? That’s where all our problems begin and end.
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For me, psychological and the psyche are the same with different ways of naming the thing.
What do yo mean by generic and what do you mean by accidental?
Relationship is the arena in which conscious awareness of the self can take place, and is a two way mirror revealing self and other to self, but it is not a panacea. The world is full of selves with their realtionships, which they spend their lives in, learning nothing.
If I am by and large insensitive or incapable of listening to another human being, then I can have all the relationship I like, but all that will ever amount to is a theatre in which to perform my narcissism. It won’t by itself bring about any self understanding.
Understanding what is actually going on, and what I actually am is not dependent on any finding out. Continually seeking to find out this, that and the other, may present itself as the natural thing to do, and somehow beyond reproach, yet it is really only an avoidance, and an escape from direct contact with what is actual.
If this has not been found out by now, then what has all the finding out been for, and what should that tell one about finding out, and the attempt to orchestrate still more?
Without going into the ‘nature of suffering’ but just reflecting on how one may approach it, it strikes me that one can repress suffering, push it away, hide from it, or try to face suffering in the sense of overcoming it which may just be another form of repression or escape. On the other hand there is release of suffering in the form of catharsis, or lastly, simply meeting suffering, touching something in the process or maybe something touches one. Catharsis it strikes me is not a fully conscious response to suffering, forgive me I’m groping for words somewhat. Some event, maybe something in a dialogue or even in a meditation touches some pain in one that maybe has been building up for some time. Next, one’s story we talked about on Wednesday starts up with stuff like ‘this has always happened to me, it’s hugely unfair!’ and in no time you realise that you are sitting on top of a volcano which starts to erupt. It’s a huge release but it leaves you shaken up and you may need to retire for a day or so. For me it doesn’t get to the root of the issue.
The other ‘response’ for lack of a better word is actually meeting suffering. This has happened only a few times in my life, the last one in dialogue just two weeks ago. In meeting that suffering there was the realisation that everyone suffers, everyone else in that dialogue is suffering and with that a feeling arose that I can only describe as love. I can’t tell you ‘how’ that came about or I’d do it again right now, it does on reflection seem to be something to do with feeling a part of everything, including the suffering of course…
Agreed. No-one is saying it is a panacea.
It is the ‘by and large’ that matters therefore, not the insensitivity. There may be a moment of vulnerability amidst all the arrogance - and that’s enough.
So this is where we differ because surely what I am changes from day to day, from person to person. This means, essentially, that there may be no actual me at all. In which case, our dialogue takes on a new significance and may take us all on a totally different journey unlike any journey we have ever been on before.
I think that’s the whole point. We enter into a dialogue not to discover what we already know and not to confirm our deepest suspicions and prejudices, but to find out what happens when we find ourselves cast adrift from what we know about ourselves and about the world around us. The fact that we are doing this together is what matters because then we may be in the one spot where it is possible to see both the origin and the ending of this suffering in the very same moment. A dialogue can do this. But we have to be in it together and be willing to go where it leads us, not take the reins and decide the direction.
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But this all is just the invention of thought is it not and taking refuge in something familiar while pretending to yourself it’s something new.
The more one pursues the illusion of being in control - finding out - the more one is bound by by thought. Krishnamurti exhorted his listeners to question and examine things, and to give their all to the process, but it was not a prescription for anything. He saw the brain was already engaged in this activity, and the point to taking it up with all of one’s energy was to expose the activity of thought as pointless. To carry on indulging it after this length of time, and never once allow oneself to be confronted with this shows things have simply become an entertainment.
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Yes, it may be invention, refuge, pretence and illusion of control - and anything else you wish to throw at it. So what shall we do? What’s your answer to it?
There is no answer, there’s only the fact of human being, which is so troubling most cannot bring themselves to look at it. This is why given the context, the notion of finding out is barren. Anyone concerned to maintain a diversion as elaborate as this is only going to find anything out over their proverbial dead body. For the brain to lose the notional control this activity affords it, is for it to be faced with that for which the stratagem was adopted in the first place. Do I really want to see when it means putting aside all my activity, all I have built around that, all I have invested?
No, not if the belief persists that there is a ‘you’ to put anything aside. It can only be the ‘grasping’ of the total picture of the condition, an integral awareness of what is going on in the moment. The ‘not-knowing’, the ‘stepping out’, the ‘freedom from the known’, ‘choice-less awareness’ or or whatever label is given to that state of being a ‘light to oneself’.
Oh, yes, there is an answer. We are doing it now. We are opening it up to scrutiny and just looking at it together without coming to any fixed and final conclusion about the nature of oneself and others, about what it means to be a human being. That’s all we are doing. The moment you call it troubling, you have shut the door on it and isolated yourself.
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Why such a reluctance to engage seriously on these matters. If the notion of problems in relationship can be considered a reality, why the attempt to distance from the reality of the human psyche as troubled. Krishnamurti did not baulk at the reality of these things. The human animal is fearful, is seriously disturbed, and deeply isolated, and everything it is doing is a reaction to that. All this wanting to look together, and merry-go-round of finding out is all because of this. Do you seriously think it is not? The function of this activity is clearly to preoccupy in order to evade, which is why proceedings remain at a superficial level all the time, embodying as they do inconsistency, and double standards. If one human being suffers, or is disturbed, then psyche is disturbed, in which case we are disturbed.
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But there is a you there, because there is something that reacts against the sight of things.
Yes there is a reactor or a reaction to ‘what is’. That is the “disturbance” , the “condition”, what JK has pointed to as the division thought created to give itself permanence, the ‘thinker’, the ‘experiencer’, the “observer”, the “me and mine”, etc. It is what is assumed to be a unique, individual ‘me’ or ‘I’. The questioning of the reality of that illusion was his gift to us. But the truth of it has to be glimpsed in oneself. What we ‘actually’ are can’t be known. He says we are “nothing” (not-a thing) …thought IS a ‘thing’, it is a movement, it is not what we are. So all that “finding out” can accomplish, is to bring thought to the wall that it has built for a false sense of security and permanence. It is a ‘prison’.
But as you say “there is a you”, a feeling that, ‘I am’. But that ‘I’ is not the thoughts, experiences, memories,nor the physical body,
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So do you suffer? Are you disturbed?
Yes. I am the outcome of disturbance, I am existing in relationship to suffering and to disturbance of all kinds. The entire field of human reality is this, and I have no other being. Even if it is considered better disturbed than nothing, which is disturbed at the prospect of being nothing, that is the same as disturbed, that is the same as suffering. Why would I be seeking safety in relationship if I were not disturbed, and trying to have something done about it?
You see, it all sounds very theoretical. I am not sure a man who was suffering could even articulate the problem.