It depends on which matters most - the noise or the meeting. If the meeting takes precedence, the noise is in the background and the meeting in the foreground. It’s not an all-or-nothing situation.
Good question, Paul. You are asking me to question my motive for being here in this forum. Do I have an agenda, one which takes precedence to being together with you in the same place to explore?
I don’t have an agenda; however, I did have something to bring in and that is my belief that it is not possible to live entirely without fear. And I am willing to take away anything you have that can dispel my belief.
Are we good to go? Can we explore now?
Which is yet another shackle, because you have ignored the question altogether and gone straight to an answer formed entirely of images. Yet you still maintain the image of Inquiry. None of this makes much sense.
Yes, it is. Any noise in the background, however slight, is the noise of fear. If we push the noise aside and ignore it in order to meet, it is still a meeting based on a reaction to the noise.
Where is the fear in your life? Is it there now?
I told you. The fear of experiencing dying is always there in the background. As I pointed out, it is not a neurotic fear that upsets my daily life. You may call it a noise created by thought conjuring a future event but I regard it as a matter of contemplation. Krishnamurti implored us not to push it away but to hold fear in our mind - like a jewel in our hands - watch it and see it flower and die. So far, it has not died.
Krishnamurti’s own experience of dying was no picnic in the park. He was administered pain-killers until they had no effect on the physical torture he suffered. I would not want to wish that on anyone. Krishnamurti probably took more care of his bodily health all his life than I. His vegetarian meals were prepared with the finest organic ingredients by those living with him. He did no chores - like shoveling snow or peeling vegetables with sharp knives - that could hurt his body. And all the physical work he did was to exercise by taking long walks. And yet, he was not spared.
I am in the same place with Krishnamurti with regard to not pushing fear away in order to live entirely without it but to pay attention to it. I have been attending to it and asking “Why do we have to suffer the experience of dying?”
Do you think I am doing it wrong? I am not shackled to my place and quite prepared to give it up and join you in your place if you are living entirely without fear.
More of your sophistry. The noise of fear in the background, like the background noise of traffic, does not make the meeting “a meeting based on a reaction to the noise”.
Why do you call it an experience? We have never been through it before and we will never be able to repeat, amend or improve it, so dying is not an experience at all. It is the end of all experiencing. What you are really talking about is the effort of the mind to protect itself from future painful experiences while living. It has nothing whatsoever to do with dying. The body takes care of pain at the beginning and at the end of life. There is very little for the brain to do. What you are really asking is: why should I go through the rigmarole of radical change if I am still going to suffer at the end? So it is an excuse not to change: ‘What’s the point if I am just going to die painfully at the end of it all?’ The point is, can we die right now to all experience? Let’s hold this in our hands and look at it.
Then come out into the open and meet me. The dialogue forum is now up and running. You have no excuse.
Your presumption that you are the master of “meeting” is risible.
With respect @Inquiry , you might be overthinking this.
Surely it is possible to suspend the entirety of your thinking - even momentarily - for the sake of investigation. By suspension is meant not to look from the ‘you’ that feels this, that or the other. Suspension is not suppression. To not look from the noise of me is not to suppress the noise. The one has nothing to do with the other. There is no foreground or background. There is only the content of consciousness. No doubt every human being has experienced a kind of spontaneous quiet at one point or another in their lives - like when they encounter something that really, really interests them.
Scientists must do a form of this all the time, suspend their bias as they observe experimental evidence, otherwise there would be no novel discoveries. Emotion has to be removed from the picture altogether for an accurate reading. Bias comes from emotion which comes from me.
I personally find it difficult to look in this way but I don’t take away from that failure that it is impossible to do so. I am more inclined to feel that something crucial is missing in my understanding. Or that the pull of me is too strong.
Quietude is difficult to come upon perhaps because (as I think K proposes) the self is empty at its core and needs distraction in the form of constant thinking to continually affirm its existence. Fear of being nothing is probably the most fundamental affirmation. Fear is a powerful indicator that I am indeed alive if not so well.
I think the question, “Is it possible to live entirely without fear?” is a wrong question because it comes from the desire to live without fear. A better question is whether we can live with fear without deciding it should or should-not-be.
Yes, the question might also be is it possible to be fully conscious of fear?
Yes, without broader context the original question can set up a good-bad scenario. Choice - gauging how the what is stacks up against the what should be - is what makes us tick. But choice comes at a price. It effectively makes us mechanical – forcing our minds to attend selectively to this or that slice of life at the expense of the whole. Choice is what defines us. We are choice. It is not so easily rooted out by asking (or rephrasing) a question.
Meanwhile the miracle of life - which must be quite astonishing - is swirling all about, available for the taking in at any moment. and all the while we carry on our merry way, totally oblivious, uninterested in even glancing at it, fully absorbed with whatever is our current focus. My question to myself is, What makes it possible to be so narrow-minded, so dull, so insensitive? Or put another way, Why is the part so much more fascinating than the whole?
To get back to the original question of fear, I am pretty sure if you trace backtrace choice you will hit on fear.
Again, that’s all about the image you have formed. It gives you the perfect excuse not to come out of the box.
I call it an experience because dying is the breaking and shutting down of the body that all of us must go through. Even though I have not encountered it before, dying is a distressful human condition and it concerns me. The fact that we can do nothing about it is the issue. And accepting this condition and living with it is not the answer.
It is not. Experiencing of dying of the body goes on: one body after another again and again.
No, mentally blocking out pain is not what I am talking about. Taking pain-killers is easier.
Do you think the body takes care of pain? Pain affects me, not the body. I don’t think the body, including the brain, feels pain. I am the body’s caretaker. Whenever it is not well or uncomfortable, the body sends me signals in the form of pain: headache, tummy ache, fever, hunger, too warm, too cold, etc… It just doesn’t seem fair that I have to suffer pains of the body’s existence.
I am losing you here, Paul. What do you mean by “can we die right now to all experience”? Who is “we”? Are you appealing to the abstract impersonal consciousness of all mankind or the ego-consciousness of Paul and Sree?
How can I die to experience? Krishnamurti said that there is no how. But I am not asking for the way or method to die to experience. I am stuck to the body, the source of pain and suffering. There is no way out, is there?
Dying is not an experience. It is not something one goes through. Whether it is a physical or a psychological death, it is not an experience because at the end of it there is no experiencer; the experiencer is gone. There is no-one left behind who says, ‘Here I am.’
Does your image of me in a box make you feel better?
Dying is a process that may take days, weeks or months of suffering. Let me take you out of your head into the real world for a look at reality. Below is an excerpt from an article in Science Magazine.
Scienemag.org
As the number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 surges past 2.2 million globally and deaths surpass 150,000, clinicians and pathologists are struggling to understand the damage wrought by the coronavirus as it tears through the body. They are realizing that although the lungs are ground zero, its reach can extend to many organs including the heart and blood vessels, kidneys, gut, and brain.
“[The disease] can attack almost anything in the body with devastating consequences,” says cardiologist Harlan Krumholz of Yale University and Yale-New Haven Hospital, who is leading multiple efforts to gather clinical data on COVID-19. “Its ferocity is breathtaking and humbling.”
Hi Sree
Your posts have been bouncing around in my head, the caretaker of the body that you lay out as the source of ‘dread’. Some odd examples arose: watching a seed germinate and break through into the light and grow and leaf out and bud and then blossom and wane drop its flowers and bend and fall back into the soil and decompose…then imagine through that entire process there is an ‘entity’ in that flower that sees itself as a ‘caretaker’ of the flower somehow apart from it and has dreaded the flower’s ‘ending’. You could imagine the same situation with an 
. So to me this feels wrong. The ‘caretaker’ business. Unlike the plant and the 
we have a new brain that can reflect on and imagine the ‘horrors up ahead’…so given this gift / curse, we have to go deeper and look into and bring into question the 'suffering caretake’r. Does ‘he’ exist? Is ‘he’ anything apart from thought? Is ‘he’ a marvelous illusion that spoils life and keeps the possible ‘blossoming’ ( the silent mind?) from ever happening?
No. It has got nothing to do with me.