When we talk about K.'s teaching we all are bound to talk about abstractions, since we didn’t have a real insight on the matter like K. That is: when K. asks: “Can you be free of fear?” For him the mind free of fear is a reality, a fact, while for us is just an idea. But this idea is like a pointer which -if we are interested - might prompt in us an effective exploration into ourselves which eventually could lead to the insignt.
Now when Dominic asks more or less the same thing you rebuff his words as abstractions because you don’t think he is “illuminated” like K. This could be true or not, but the point is that even the words of Dominique can be a pointer to a reality we can discover.
Das that make sense to you?
Yes, I agree that self is the knowledge, the memories, the ideas of countless so-called individual selves, and also its movement, its reaction, its momentum, as content held in the brain, with the question of can it end related to the fact of that content, and the content being wiped, so as the mind can be emptied and function properly which is also what Krishnamurti spoke about. Likewise, as you say, a quality like love, which is only another idea for the brain, cannot be held in the brain, which cannot be considered to be in touch with it.
My point is, when it is said that there is love, or there is other, which is not in the brain, but outside, which the brain is not in contact with, that means the brain is effectively shut out, and so shut in with itself, and so attention needs to turn to what it is for the brain to be shut in like this, which the self finds disturbing and unpleasant. This in turn is related to self seeing itself.
In the world fashioned by humankind, in something it knows as nature, self is having something it is reacting to as other, other than itself, which is logically impossible, given that it is itself, but still this is happening with terrible consequences, and great suffering. The matter of self ending, and content being wiped is related to this, but just as with the issue of a response I need to be in a world dominated by psyche experiencing this split (someone trying to kill me) is an immediate requirement, so this split in self as self/other is an immediate requirement. The question of ending of self over all is still there, but the vehemence of the split is too, and it is not a matter of either/or, it is both together as it were. These two perspectives are part of a whole. Do you follow what I am saying thus far?
There is always danger: the danger posed by the cliff edge, the steep flight of stairs, all of which require attention to be paid, and there is the danger of the deadly poisonous snake. But though there is danger, does there have to be fear? Ordinarily it is felt danger causes fear, but it may be seen that fear is its own thing apart from danger, and that the two are not of necessity related. So it may be possible to meet danger without fear, to meet the snake, know exactly what the snake is and needs in that instance, and the snake can go on its way.
There was a story told in one or other of the biographies of Krishnamurti I think, in which he was being driven through a nature reserve where there were tigers in the wild, roaming about the track or road, and one passed by the car with its open window, and Krishnamurti went to stroke its back, and the warden in the car with him, grabbed his arm and pulled it back. Now, I don’t know what was going through Krishnamurti’s mind and whether he saw the danger but felt it perfectly safe for him to stroke its back, but the warden probably knew fear, and responded to a perception of danger through that fear, thinking there is one response, snd one response only, in a situation like that.
We are starting from a wrong preemise here, the example of the snake has nothing to do with fear as K. intended, i. e. psychological fear. K. has stated clearly that “physical” fear (my wording) is natural and necessary because it help us to escape a danger or face it. (Thanks to the adrenalin it produces which enhances our reactions, run away or fight) And there is no problem with this kind of fear as it ends naturally once the danger is over. We cannot eliminate it and it is not advisable. People who have no fear, for instance of the sea can easily get drowned. What K. spoke about is the fear of something which is not present here and now but that we think it mght happen. I. e., i’m afraid I can be ill, or that I can loose my job, etc. This is a product of thought and is commonly called anxiety. So here we have another word K. used with a personal meaning.
Then we have fear of death. We must distinguish here between anxiety of death as something in the future, and so again it’s a product of our immagination. And fear of something or someone who is threatening our life, which is a fact. This belongs to the first cathegory, the "physical"l fear, which is natural, but the beaviour of poepole in front of a danger can be of two types: a “positive” or functional fear (adrenalin) which makes our senses more awake and so help us to face danger in a intelligent way.
Then we may have panic which is just the opposite: one feels paralised physically and completely dumbed mentally so that one is not able to face the situation and/or react emotionally and irrationally.
Is panic a product of thought? Perhaps.
I can bring a practical example of something which happened to me personally. I was sailing alone in a small sailing boat when a storm arrived. I’m not a brave and daring person and usually I try to avoid bad weather when sailing. But this time it came unexpected and it was something which could easily make you loose your mind. The wind and the waves were too strong and threatened to capsize the boat. I had no choice but to stay at the helm and face the gusts and the waves steering in order to avoid to be crushed. No distraction was allowed, any mistake in steering the boat could lead to catastrophe. Contrary to my temperament I didn’t feel any fear. I was extremely alert, aware of everything going on in the boat and in the sea/air. After four hours I managed to reach a port safely. I think awareness of danger (and so adrenalin) and the absence of thinking - I had not time for thinking: every action had to be done instantly - saved me. Once I was safe in the harbour I started to think about the whole experience and about what it could have happened. At that moment fear (panic) arrived. Had I had those thoughts when sailing I would have been lost! So, the first is the good kind of fear (which produces alertenss and intelligent action) the second was the “bad” kind of fear which puts us in trouble.
I had read the eposode of K. and the tiger and to me it didn’t seem a mistery. K. could read the mind of people, it’s something well known, so I think he knew that the tiger had no intention of harming him.
P. S.
To go back to the snake example: one can react with good physical fear and so act intelligently to save his life (either run away or kill the snake) or can react with panic (probabily produced by thought) and so being paralized and so being bitten by the snake.
Dominic (re: your post #134 or 133, I have a hard time telling which posts the numbers belong to), the brain has many functions and remembering, thinking, reasoning, imagining, are some of them. The brain also has many other functions. In essence, as I understand it, the brain regulates not only itself but all the other bodily functions, processes and organs. So personally, I don’t see self and consciousness as the TOTAL content, function or activity (I don’t know which word is better) of the brain.
K and Bohm had the following exchange about awareness:
The awareness of which I have been talking is a choiceless state in which you can see things as they are and not as you wish them to be, in which you can know exactly what you are, without any choice; and that awareness is intelligence.
And in looking inwardly, it is clear to me (I may be mistaken) that awareness is not something I can deliberately “do”, love is not something I can deliberately “choose” to feel or not feel, and intelligence is not something I can deliberately “acquire” in the same way that I can acquire knowledge.
So a question which arises for me in this regard (not that I’m trying to answer it) is whether awareness somehow extends beyond the brain (or includes the whole that is beyond and within the brain). And I must not (cannot) wait for a life-and-death moment to start questioning self, the illusory divisions, psychological fear, and so on. When it is life-and-death, one acts immediately. There is no pausing the situation whatever it is.
And it is clear to me that intelligence is not limited to the brain. As I see it, intelligence and order can be seen in the cosmos, including the brain. Clearly “I” have nothing to do with this intelligence, order, energy, creation, and so on. And there is naturally a connection or relationship between that and the brain. This connection or relationship is blocked by “self”, isn’t it? So yes, I also see it that the two perspectives or aspects are part of a whole which has been divided by the illusion of the imaginary self.
I’d be curious to know how you arrived to that, pratically. Because I’ve discovered the same thing about physical awareness. My job dealt with sensor-motor awareness, which is awareness of the internal body movements. Both experimenting with myself and with others, I understood one basic thing: the moment you think you are aware you are not.
This leads us to the question if awareness can exist without the body.
In another thread DanMcD quoted an interesting passage of K. which seems to confirm this thesis:
"The unadorned naked awareness that is always there, rarely heeded, is what you always have been, always will be. "
Strange concidence, I posted an experience of “life-and-death” I had just above in this thread.
But fear itself is not just an idea, is it? We are intimately aware of fear. Even when we pretend we are not afraid, fear IS there and, if we are honest with ourselves, we see it there. And I’m not sure that K is (was) free of fear in the sense that he never ever felt fear. I think that he understood fear thoroughly - its genesis and the processses which keep fear alive. And understanding it thoroughly, the understanding freed him of it when it did arise. He did not carry fear over in time, he did not cling to it or TRY to be free of it. He observed it, understood it, and still observed it.
When K. asks: “Can you be free of fear?”, it is a pointer yes. But the pointer can be approached in 2 different ways that I can see.
Either that pointer awakens the hope, desire or will that there is a way to be “forever” free of fear and can K please tell me what is the way to be free of fear — in which case it is self/fear itself trying to find a way out and there can be no understanding. No?
Or the question awakes within me and truly becomes my own question, a questioning without hope or direction. That is, observing what a dark force fear is in my life, observing that fear rules my actions and relationships, that fear is confusion and ignorance, I am truly asking the question “can I be free of fear”, and learning about fear - not just waiting for K to answer it for me.
I stick to what I said, that framing the question of freedom on how the mind that is free of fear responds is necessarily going off into abstractions and speculation. We/I can only observe what the fearful mind - my mind - does. As for me, I don’t feel that Dominic and I are opposed in this but it’s not for me to say.
Yes. This quote by K that T Stamp published has been questioned coincidentally by Huguette and others a while back. As I recall a problem she had with the above quote was with the words “rarely heeded”. … Unless Stamp is given a lie-detector test or something, a truth serum maybe, as to the ‘verbatim’ accuracy of what K said, we have to look at it as it stands. I don’t know if it was recorded. The video I posted of him speaking about his relationship to K, recently at Brockwood, is a testament I think, of how important he felt, that connection was in his life. I don’t think he would be careless in quoting him.
I can’t say. It is observed that I’m either aware or not aware.
I/consciousness suddenly becomes aware that I have been off in la-la-land, in fantasy land, actively pursuing thoughts and time. When I am in la-la-land, is there anything that can make me realize it and say, “Oh I must not stay here, I must not do that, I must not engage in trying to solve action or relationship”, and so on? When I’m NOT aware, inattentive, can I know it in the very moment and still BE inattentive? When I’m inattentive, I/thought/self is fully and actively in the inattention. Does the state of inattention realize it is inattentive. If it does, it is no longer inattentive or unaware, is it? Suddenly, there is awareness and it is not the result of a choice. No?
So I can’t say how attention comes about. It just does, doesn’t it?
It seems that when a topic brings too many answers and counter answers, we may lose the initial sense of the discussion.
Or maybe it’s me who don’t understand the logic of your speech here.
Allow me to examine it step by step and tell me when and if my reasoning might be wrong.
Yes, of course. But our discussion started from your affirmation that Dominic’s question was an abstraction, to which I objected. So, we have fear, which is a fact, and then we have the question: can the mind be free of fears? Which, as I stated before, for us is an abstraction. I said this because of your affirmation:
“If I fear, my response comes from that fear, and so my response is the response of the fearful mind. This can be observed. To ask what is the response of the mind free of fear is going off into abstractions and ideation.”
So we are bouncing back and forth between the actuality of fear and the “abstraction of asking what is the response of the mind free of fear”. Honestly I don’t understand what you want to point out.
I have to stick too to my initial statement that if you consider that an abstraction, THEN also many questions K. used to ask (sorry I can’t quote anything now) about what will it be our behaviour in such a case, or how do you meet violence in another, etc. is just an hypothetical question and could be considered an abstraction. To me it seems only a matter of trust, you accept every thing K. says because you trust him, but you disagree if an hypothetical question is asked by a common person. And to me the reason of your criticism lies in the fact that Dominic brought that argument to confute your defense of violent action of abused people. Am I wrong?
And you may feel now that you and Dominic are not opposed but when you wrote that sentence you disagreed.
We cannot be sure of anything, but in my view the freedom from fear is an unalienable part of K.’s teachings which is strictly connected with his central discourse about thought and intelligence. If you discard that then you have to discard also the rest. I’m suspecting that the misunderstanding here has to do with the kind of fear we take into consideration. I can see that there is a confusion just above in this thread about this point. K. has stated clearly that one can be free of psychological fear, which is a creation of thought and which deals with ideas, projections, of what might happen in the future (and which we should better call anxiety). Being a creation of thought, the moment you understand the nature of thought – and are free of its deluding power, you are also free of fear.
Instead in this thread I can see discussions where only physical fear is considered, the natural response of the organism when faced with a real danger. That cannot be eliminated.
Yes, but as I explained in my reply to you, that is not what I and Dominic meant.
Humm… it’s seems too complicate. My mind refuses to enter into it.
I think we should stick to simplicity. I don’t know when I am aware but I can know, immediatly after, when I was not. No need to do acrobatics.
It’s quite obvious that the future is an idea, right? It’s an idea based on the past, and the possibilities that we might be able to “think up”. So, then it is possible to see that the past is also operating as an idea, apart from our memories of the facts. And to go even one step “further,” “In the very moment,” “to be in the now,” is also operating as an idea. What K refers to as “naked awareness,” or “choice-less awareness,” might be some kind of perception when one sees how ideas are used to interpret “reality”. Before you react to this, watch how our idea of “the self” uses past memories to try and defend yet another idea.
“Creation is not for the talented, for the gifted; they only know creativeness but never creation. Creation is beyond thought and image, beyond the word and expression. It is not to be communicated for it cannot be formulated, it cannot be wrapped up in words. It can be felt in complete awareness. It cannot be used and put on the market, to be haggled and sold. It cannot be understood by the brain, with its complicated varieties of responses. The brain has no means to get into touch with it; it’s utterly incapable. Knowledge is an impediment and without self-knowing, creation cannot be.”
Krishnamurti’s Notebook
I see your experience while sailing as making the point I was trying to make, which is, is there in fact fear in danger, or is fear a movement of the past meeting a here and now and effectively preventing the response needed. When one looks at the biological response of the animal when there is the perception of danger, and the so-called fight or flight response, which it must be noted is itself a human construct, there can be a tendency on the part of an observer, who is psyche, who is fear, to ascribe fear to the animal in that situation, and to think fear is necessary when there is danger. Lasting fear, trauma, neuroticism are all responses of humankind, and mistreated animals can exhibit what we think is similar, but if danger needed fear, and you had fear as distinct from adrenaline when at sea, what would the be outcome?
From the public talk in Saanen, 14th July, 1977:
‘I’m going to investigate something totally new, and I hope you will have the kindness and the seriousness to listen, not agreeing or disagreeing but thinking together logically, sanely, rationally and with a certain sense of humility.
Skill becomes all important in life, because that is the means of earning a livelihood. Our universities, colleges, and schools are directed for that purpose. When one is totally educated for that purpose, that skill invariably breeds a certain sense of power, arrogance, and self-importance. What is the relationship of skill to clarity? And what is the relationship of clarity to compassion? (…) Clarity is denied when there is any form of fear. Most human beings have a great deal of fear -which denies compassion. Fear in any form, both physiological as well as psychological, distorts clarity; therefore a person who is afraid in any way has no compassion. (…) Fear also has many branches, many leaves, many expressions of fear that breed their own flowering and their own fruit, which is action. So one must go to the very root of fear, not take various forms of fears but the root of fear (…) When there is fear, there are many kinds of neurotic action. Most of you are lonely, and so you seek companionship, escaping from loneliness. Companionship becomes very important, and if you have no companionship fear arises. Or out of that loneliness you build a wall around yourself.(…) There is fear when there is measurement. (…) I hope you have clarity. Clarity means there is no centre from which you are functioning.’
So fear is a cause of isolation and violence and these are the main cause of the theme of this thread. Schooling directed to skill has a lot to do with it, and modern society is based on that.
I’m not sure to understand what you want to say here. Fight or flight response is a fact not a human construct. It happens with us and it happens with animal. The difference in us humans is that thought can interfere with this elemental response and so pervert the response.
But it’s not only that, to be alert in case of danger (thanks to adrenalin) does not assure us safeness. Intelligence is not an omnipotent faculty, and it can do nothing when the danger is much stronger than us (like for instance when you are attacked by a lion of by a terrorist). In this case the only intelligent thing we can do is face death without fear, if we are able to.
Then there also could be a faulty perception of the danger, and so also in this case our response will be not appropriate. We must realize here once again that K. had to simplify his speeches and explanations, so he didn’t embrace all what is implied in fear. And he had not any scientific background. His approach was a very simple one, maybe too simple in this case. His aim was that of dealing with fear in the context of spiritual and psychological deliverance. Fear (but only psychological fear) is one of the things which prevent intelligence, so getting rid of future, of anxiety, is functional for the awakening of intelligence.
I stated quite clearly what the outcome would have been in the last part of my account.
I see you are still using an imprecise terminology here. Physical fear is a wholly different thing from anxiety (or psychological fear). Awareness of danger produces fear. If there is not interference of thought (future and past) it doesn’t dumb the mind but -as in my case – it improves our faculties. You are supposing that danger does not need fear because you (and often me too) are thinking fear in the terms of anxiety – which is neurotic fear – or panic.
