Thank you, James! I didn’t look at the thread you refer to, but I have just read this excerpt ( by the way, I’m not familiar with this book, I know and actually have Exploration into Insight). I understand now why you used this image of the explosion, the thing is one must be careful about how Krishnamurti used some language. Here I think he simply meant that one must not try to escape from an unpleasant experience, but instead stay with it and see what happens. He thinks that it may bring about an insight which he equates with some sort of explosion… But an insight is not an explosion! An insight also cannot be invited, it’s more like a revelation, I think. And a ‘partial insight’ I think doesn’t exist at all.
How do you know Jess? K often spoke of insight as being an intense perception of the mind, as having a dynamic character. He linked what he called the ‘religious mind’ with insight, and said that religion is the gathering of all energy to find out (through insight) the truth.
The religious mind is the explosion of love.
A religious mind is a creative mind; it has not only to finish with the past but also to explode in the present.
Thought shattering itself against its own nothingness is the explosion of meditation.
K also often talked about the importance of passion, and linked this passion with having an insight into the nature of suffering. This was the context of the discussions in India referred to earlier. A couple of extracts (from elsewhere in those discussions):
P: You have said that in the depth of sorrow is the summation of all energy. This must be of the same nature.
K: I understand what you are saying. Last night K said sorrow is the essence of all energy, the quintessence of all energy. All energy is focused there…
P: We are trying to discover how in this maximum energy-quotient which arises out of despair, death, sorrow; what is the chemical alchemy which transforms the energy which is seemingly destructive and hurtful into what you call passion…
K: When energy is not dissipated through words, when the energy of the shock of some great event is not dissipated, that energy without a motive has quite a different significance…
And
P: Krishnaji, you have spoken about holding the quality of anger, fear or any strong emotion, without the word, in consciousness. Could we probe into that? The wiping away, whether it is a hurt, fear, anger or any one of the darknesses within one, is only possible if what you are talking about takes place…
K: You can hold the feeling of anger, fear, without the word; just remain with that feeling…
P: But what do you do exactly?
K: When fear arises from whatever cause, remain with it, without any momentum, without any movement of thought.
P: What is it then?
K: It is no longer the thing which I have associated with the past as fear. I would say it is energy held without any movement. When energy is held without any movement, there is an explosion. That then gets transformed.
In his discussions with David Bohm K talks about the significance of this explosive passion and its relationship to insight (5th Conversation The Ending of Time):
K: I want to have this passion that will explode me out of this little enclosure. have built a wall around myself, a wall, which is myself… I `want’ is this centre to be blasted. You understand? …
The ground says, whatever you have done `on earth’ has no meaning. Is that an idea? Or an actuality? … So, one must be very careful to see that it is not a concept; or rather that one doesn’t translate it into a concept or an idea, but receive the full blow of it!
How do I know, James? Of course I know by definition! An insight is something sudden that comes to you totally clearly putting together as a whole some glimpses you had of something before, it’s not something that can happen to you from moment to moment! I remember, when I was participating in some dialogue on education, that at some point, we heard Krishnamurti say that a teacher must always teach out of insight!!! Of course you cant’t take this to the letter, it just doesn’t make sense. We have to understand what he means, as when he also once told a young man (this episode I think is in Prof. Krishna’s book) that he shouldn’t think, being so young, just settle down in life, he told him to do something that he had a passion for, even if it was stealing (I think he said steal, it could be another crime, I don’t remember well). Of course he didn’t mean that the young man should be a criminal of some sort! Once he told a Vimala Thakar to put bombs under the members of a group of which she was part… He just used this kind of language because he wanted people to act out of their inner being, to see deeply inside and not just follow habits, and he could afford using this language because he knew people trusted and loved him so they would pay attention. He could speak like that in a certain and definite context, we just can’t do the same.
Thank you for the excerpts, I have come across all this in the many years that I have been studying Krishnamurti.
Hi Jess. Krishnamurti’s definition of insight is that it wipes out the self, empties consciousness of its contents, and is synonymous with the intelligence of love and compassion.
Has this insight happened to you?
Or do you only know what K called partial insight? That is, we’ve all had small insights into things,
But you said previously that partial insight is worthless, or even non-existent:
So I think there is some confusion here? Your comments about K’s language (in your examples with Prof. Krishna and Vimala Thakar) are interesting, but K’s language about the importance of passion (rooted in an understanding of sorrow), the energy of total attention, and the explosive power of the religious mind, is repeated throughout his teaching career. One cannot just dismiss it as a colourful way of speaking, which you seem to be doing here.
When something ‘explodes’, it no longer has the boundaries that it had. It is no longer ‘contained’ in the form it was…staying with the energy contained in anger say without the movement of thought to dissipate it or continue it, it ‘explodes’ out of the ‘anger’ form and is transformed as just energy or sensation?
Yes, I think this is correct. The energy that has been confined within the habitual border of ‘anger’ is liberated from that boundary, and is free to broaden the field of the mind’s attention.
Elsewhere in a continuation of one of the extracts referred to above, K talks about the energy of anger, and how it can be transformed if the mind can remain without it without moving:
I am angry, furious because I have given my life to something and I find somebody has betrayed that, and I feel furious. That fury is all energy. You follow? I haven’t acted upon that energy. It is a gathering of all your energy which is expressed in a fury of anger. Can I remain with that fury of anger? Not translate, not hit out, not rationalize, just hold it. Is it possible? What happens?
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Is this esoteric alchemy: turning lead into gold?
James, what is this you’re doing here? I must say I’m surprised, I told you one thing and you just change it as you please?! Are you trying to patronize me, why? I said that I know the meaning of the word ‘insight’, it isn’t ‘partial insight’. Earlier, I think, I had already said that partial insight doesn’t exist. Now, I add that I think partial insight sounds contradictory in itself and I can explain that if an insight is a sudden clear and total or thorough vision of something it can’ t be partial at the same time. I would say that one can have an understanding of something that is so consistent that one feels that one has the right perception though it isn’t the whole of it, it’s an understanding, not a partial insight. Either there is an insight or there isn’t an insight, that’s how I understand it. We know Krishnamurti uses several words giving them his own definition and interpretation. It happens with ‘meditation’ and many others. Well, in order to understand what he wants to convey, it’s important to know in what sense he is using the word. But there isn’t a krishnamurtian dialect and when we are talking freely we are talking the language as it is generally known. That’s it.
Something like that. As you know, K talked about things such as envy, fear and sorrow as “jewels”. Obviously, at first glance, they do not seem to be jewels 
at all! But he seemed to be pointing to this energetic transformation of what we label ‘envy’, ‘fear’, ‘anger’, and so on. Because, at root, all these movements are forms of energy, habituated or confined forms of energy - and if that energy can be released or liberated, then it becomes (according to K) passion. And we need passion to find truth.
There needs to be passion to go beyond thought.
Jess, there is clearly some misunderstanding here. Perhaps you have not heard Krishnamurti talk about partial insight before? He used to say that artists, scientists, poets, musicians, etc, all have partial insight. By partial he didn’t mean that the insights of artists and scientists etc are not real insights - an insight is, as you say, a sudden clear understanding or perception of something in its entirety, as a whole. But they are, according to K, insights into a limited area. Whereas total insight - the kind of insight that interested K, and that he called true insight - he said covers the whole of life, the whole of the mind. In relation to this kind of total insight partial insights have no value, no place. So K rejected the value of partial insight in understanding the whole of the mind, the whole movement of life.
And so when you say that
the very fact that you say the understanding doesn’t cover “the whole of it” means, necessarily, that this is a partial insight, not a complete or total insight in the way K used this word.
I should say that it is not a matter of being patronising. Everybody is doing their best to understand what the other is saying within the limitations of a text-based form of communication. I don’t expect you to have read or properly comprehended everything I’ve written (i.e. on a particular thread), and I hope you don’t expect me to have read or comprehended everything you have written.
The way I understand Kinfonet is that each person attempts to put into words one’s own understanding, and then, through a process of dialogue, find out if it is a complete understanding, or a wrong understanding, or if it can be understood differently, or clarified better, or articulated more efficiently, and so on.
Even without the limitations of a text-based communication there are liable to be misunderstandings - and so one can expect this even more so when our communication is limited to a few words.
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