The “bartering” stops when you stop putting lipstick 
on the pig 
and instead of trying to ‘sell’ it, you eat it?
No I’ve never asked myself that. I always assumed I did. I didn’t even mind falling asleep while listening as it seemed he’d reach a deeper level in me.
I am not attacking anyone. I am just speaking to you. When you read or hear K say ‘nobody listens’, do you think he is talking to you? For years, when I was reading K, I didn’t think that he was talking to me. He was talking to others. Then there came, not easily at all, an ability to listen that was fundamentally different. The next time I read K I was actually able to listen and I realized that he had been talking to me about not listening. When K says nobody listens he is talking to you. You don’t listen to K and that is why there is no transformation in your life. You don’t hear what he is pointing to. You keep trying to understand K through your own accumulated understanding. That is why you are stuck. I am speaking truth but you have to find out for yourself.
Knowing nothing about timelessness, all I can say about time is that it seems flexible, that it can go excrusiatingly slow, it can fly, and it never ends. To me, time is what water is to a fish. I’ve never known anything but time so I can’t talk about it as if I did. You, however, seem to know something about what can be done or what can happen without "requiring time.
When you ask, “Does ‘to understand’ require time?”, you implicate that you know something about time that few, if any, people know: that time is an illusion we sustain and perpetuate. If I could believe that you live timelessly often enough to know what a burden time can be when you can’t live without it, I would hail you as Krishnamurti’s successor.
Why do you say “not easily”? Whats that about? Any interesting story to share there?
First of all learn the art of listening to yourself and then you will not need to listen to any outside authority whatsoever. End of story.
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What do you expect to get from this question? Knowledge? a path? My story won’t be anything but entertainment, at best. How about an exploration into the source of your question?
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Aye, and there’s the rub. That’s what’s not being done.
Why is it not being done Bob? Why are we unable to listen to ourselves? There may be a thousand answers to why we are unable to listen to this movement of thought going on but will those answers ‘change’ anything? Sadly, questions seem to provoke answers and the very ‘answer’ only continues the movement of the ‘known’ …what we already know. But, is there a question that does not provoke an answer but rather creates a gap, a space from which something ‘new’ can spring? And can that ‘new’ quality be left totally alone to flower in its own way?
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Your short story elides the fact that art is doing nothing to interfere with, deny, or distort what actually is, i.e., learning to get out of the way.
The art of listening excludes nothing and no one - especially authorities - because choosing not to listen is not listening.
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This is what gets missed. It is why as I see it, JK referred to his “attention “ as a different “dimension”. A ‘jump’ into it?
A slipping out of oneself?
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Especially by those who think they’re doing it…
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Out of “a thousand answers to why we are unable to listen to this movement of thought going on”, a good answer is, “If the art of listening is an ability, is it the ability to do something, or the intelligence to do nothing but let listening have its effect?”
Sadly, questions seem to provoke answers and the very ‘answer’ only continues the movement of the ‘known’ …what we already know.
Yes, presumptuous questions elicit presumptuous answers.
But, is there a question that does not provoke an answer but rather creates a gap, a space from which something ‘new’ can spring? And can that ‘new’ quality be left totally alone to flower in its own way?
A good question does create “a gap, a space from which something new can spring”, but a brain full of answers abhors a vacuum and spews an answer before anything can germinate, much less flower.
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Until it is truly accepted that one is not listening, there will be no attention to it. The conditioned pattern of listening will continue. (reminder that it is not for necessary practical issues but the reference is addressing non-practical or psychological issues) When one truly deeply accepts that one is not listening, what happens in that moment?
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‘Slip’, ‘jump’,step’…some ‘action’ takes place?
Something happens, but calling it “action” suggests an actor, and unless I’m misreading K, anything I (the actor) does is just more of the same old game.
No, no actor. Language is set up that way. Something happens: slip, step, jump…the description is not the described.
Is it the question that provokes an answer? Is it habit of thought? Did you read the previous two questions without answering? without having a thought about them?
Which may be a good reason to listen to K when sleeping. There is no “I” there during deep sleep.