Krishnamurti said transformation does not happen in the future, it can only be now. He also said that seeing the truth in the false and seeing the false in that which has been accepted as truth, is transformation. Consciousness of oneness arrives with a convincing ring of truth rendering the previously accepted “truth” of our separate individuality as false. What is this convincing ring of truth? What is this dynamic of transformation? Is insight behind it all?
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Excellent question, and this first point needs to be considered, is important, methinks
Does freedom from the known depend on my grasping the correct doctrine in an adequate manner?
Did someone give Buddha the correct teachings before enlightenment was possible?
Was K’s teaching/understanding based on his grasp of someone else’s doctrine?
Is my effort to accumulate the good stuff actually leading towards the final solution most wished for, or merely the habitual drive that is being pointed at?
Is insight dependant on my one day grasping the right words or thinking the right thoughts? on my coming to the magical conclusions?
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When one of my “previously accepted truths” is overthrown or upended, it isn’t because I recognize the “ring of truth”, but because I’ve been relieved of the burden of a belief.
Did K use the phrase, “convincing ring of truth”, or is that yours?
That which rings gets attention, but why trust conviction?
We talk about having the courage of our convictions, but is it courage that sentences one to be a convict in the prison of presumption, or is it obstinance?
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Thanks, Doug for the open door with all those great questions. But I will drop in with this thought: Based on my observations there is no final destination, nor conclusion. And as we saw from the K quote on transformation, truth fluctuates depending on perception. In the end, it may be as Inquiry said,
Belief is too much of a burden to drag through this life. As for belief in K, he set us all free when he said find out for yourselves. I feel K was closest to truth when he was in love and that was most apparent in the 1930s.
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I give this a 
too - as I am glad we all see that the accumulation of “correct” knowledge, or identification with some theory or doctrine does not necessarily lead to transformation of our relationship with reality (aka freedom from the known) - though I would also give a 
for this :
Coz I don’t get it - but maybe its not relevant to this conversation?
Here’s one of the sweetest love stories ever told, compiled discreetly by Nandini’s and Papul’s daughters: Walking-with-Krishnamurti_E-Book.pdf (krishnamurtis-welt.com)
So transformation is about what is happening now. Not about our effort of accumulation, not about a progress towards some end goal.
So what does seeing the truth now mean? Does it have something to do with waking up to the reality that we are experiencing right now. Now meaning this everchanging moment?
Is the core of this transformation based on simply noticing the state I’m in? If, for example, if I’m in some emotional conflict due to the situation I think I’m in - does seeing that this is the case immediately transform the situation?
Presence now is devoid of psychological thought. There are no thoughts of the past or future in choiceless awareness (presence now). Is that transformation?
Maybe.
Can you say a bit more about what you mean? How does it happen?
An example of this kind of thing in everyday life? Or some metaphor, or even a logical argument, whatever you want.
So to be choicelessly aware is to be transformed because conditioning is not reacting, not distorting, denying, or dismissing actuality.
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Second wind is an unmotivated occurence that happens to long distance runners and boxers (and probably different athletes) via negation of the self.
They don’t set out to achieve any special state of consciousness, but merely by not believing (or not obeying) their own thought/feelings as they arise during their athletic effort, the suffering self sometimes dissapears.
For example, the thoughts of : “I must stop running or I will die”, “if I just started walking instead of running for a little while, all my pain will end” etc are simply ignored as they keep, continously arising during painful effort. Until suddenly the sufferer dissapears. Suddenly there is no more pain nor effort, just the movement of the limbs, the hair in the breeze, the landscape moving past.
Absence is also devoid of psychological thought. And it can arise through the negation of this present experience.
But surely this is only for crazy people? like zen monks and marathonians.
It may be. But what is new here is the absurdity of exchanging my thoughts for the thoughts of someone else and thinking that is some sort of progress.That is what goes on in ‘religions’ so the brain is always secondhand. We all have basically the same brain, it’s the ‘stuffing’ that’s different. ‘Transformation’ in the moment is the ‘awareness’ of one’s stuffing, not my ‘self’s’ reaction to it aka, the conditioning (me), just a pure nonjudgmental awareness, …seems to me?
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what brings this about?
Usually we drop the hot potato, to avoid potentially serious damage.
Whats tthe difference here? The long distance runner is in pain, but does not stop running. The zen monk’s brain finds solutions to their questions, but does not accept them as true, continues to doubt.
I think that what I see is true, why would I not react accordingly to what seems evidently true?
For example, I am right and someone else refuses to see that I am right, surely something must be done to address this injustice?
When I grasp the possibility that the reality in my mind is conditioned , not just because someone said it is conditioned and false but because my own conflict and suffering, fear etc as well as the human suffering and destruction going on in the world, brings home that something is wrong: that I’m my head things are unfolding in a ‘personalized dream’. You in yours and me in mine. That realization opens the door to looking at myself in a new way. My ‘stuffing’ isn’t better or worse than another’s. ‘Right and wrong’ are values that are only relevant to the society or
civilization I am living in and as we see, they are only
a sort of patina or veneer. We have to function in
society, as corrupt and hypocritical as it is but we
don’t have to believe in any of it or in what it has
molded us to be.
The feeling that something is wrong activates the attention needed to find out what, exactly, it is that’s wrong, or it stimulates speculating, theorizing, and choosing what to believe is wrong. The former is finding out, the latter is jumping to a conclusion. It isn’t enough to know that something is wrong.
For instance, neuroscientists believed that dopamine stimulates pleasure, but lately they have come to find out that it stimulates not pleasure, but desire. They knew dopamine was doing something but they got it wrong.
“Home” is not knowing that something is wrong - it’s only third base.
The long distance runner sees that their reality (ie.immediate danger of dying of pain and exhaustion) is not real - that continuing on regardless of the apparent facts of their experience can actually lead to a sense of achievement, gold medals, transcendance, glory etc…
As long as I feel that I am experiencing reality as it is, that I am a truth detecting machine, the self remains unquestionably dominant, is the whole of the law, all of reality.
Yes and someone comes along and says that that ‘you’, the ‘experiencer’ is an illusion, a trick, doesn’t exist. That what you are actually, is nothing. Let me see if I can find the bit where he states that, and I’ll post it.
YOU ARE NOTHING
You are nothing. You may have your name and title, your property and bank account, you may have power and be famous; but in spite of all these safeguards, you are as nothing. You may be totally unaware of this emptiness, this nothingness, or you may simply not want to be aware of it; but it is there, do what you will to avoid it. You may try to escape from it in devious ways, through personal or collective violence, through individual or collective worship, through knowledge or amusement; but whether you are asleep or awake, it is always there. You can come upon your relationship to this nothingness and its fear only by being choicelessly aware of the escapes. You are not related to it as a separate, individual entity; you are not the observer watching it; without you, the thinker, the observer, it is not. You and nothingness are one; you and nothingness are a joint phenomenon, not two separate processes. If you, the thinker, are afraid of it and approach it as something contrary and opposed to you, then any action you may take towards it must inevitably lead to illusion and so to further conflict and misery. When there is the discovery, the experiencing of that nothingness as you, then fear - which exists only when the thinker is separate from his thoughts and so tries to establish a relationship with them - completely drops away. Only then is it possible for the mind to be still; and in this tranquillity, truth comes into being.
(J.Krishnamurti; excerpt fromCommentaries on Living-Series 1; Chapter 38, “Self-defense”.)
Is all mental and physical activity grounded in the felt-sense of being a self a form of escape?
No-self, no-thing; self, some-thing?
[quote=“rickScott, post:19, topic:2391”]
Is all mental and physical activity grounded in the felt-sense of being a self a form of escape?
No-self, no-thing; self, some-thing?
[/quote
My thinking about this this morning went like this: we are a very different animal here with our evolved ability to survive and thrive and looks like there’s no end to our ingenuity in sight …Somewhere along the line we began to ‘glorify’ ourselves, explain our superior abilities as a gift from ‘The Creator’, that we were sons and daughters of ‘God’. To paraphrase Bohm, ‘we did it because we could.’ But interestingly now with the advent of AI, we see that our abilities ; our arts and sciences while amazing are not outside the possibility that a machine can take them farther and faster.
Isn’t K’s ‘Nothing’ pointing away from this whole phenomena of how we view ourselves?