What you have shared is interesting, but - as you yourself say - it isn’t distilled into a single question or comment.
As far as I have understood, you mention two things: 1) the danger of using totalising statements.
And 2) the importance of remaining with (so as to let flower) strong emotion or feeling (jealousy, envy, anger, violence, etc).
Correct?
If we can bracket the issue of totalising statements (which, as you imply, may simply have been K’s pedagogical style, and certainly ought not to be imitated uncritically by his listeners/readers), the central issue you seem to be raising is whether or not we are able to remain with strong feeling-states, so as to give them freedom to flower - right? And whether, in dialogue, we can give each other this freedom - yes?
Now, the challenge as I see it is to find out whether it is possible to remain - through highly sensitive observation - with these feeling states as they arise within us (during dialogue), and not collapse this sensitivity into the normal channels of justification or condemnation; as these latter habitual processes move us away from the feeling-state into postures of defence or attack, shame or projection - right? Because these latter reactions are obviously detrimental to dialogue.
And so we must be aware that this is both a subtle and difficult challenge for us in the group, because as soon as one person “falls off the wagon” (as it were) of sensitive observation (the act of remaining with strong feeling-states), the whole group is liable to be charged with reactivity - and this can impede or even sabotage inquiry.
Forgive me if you’ve already explained this elsewhere - or if I have misunderstood what you are saying (or if you feel that you’ve said enough about it already and want to move on) - but I understand you to be equating
“interest” with the fact that we are always “responding through knowledge”,
and you are saying that these activities do not produce, or are not conducive to, real “listening” (whether to others or to ourselves). - Have I understood you correctly so far?
And then you go on to ask something further, which is to ask whether we are…
Right?
So, you are asking a slightly paradoxical (or impossible!) sounding question, right? which is:
can we listen to the fact that we are not listening at all?
Or, put differently:
can we listen to the fact that we are always listening through the filter of our interests and our responses from knowledge?
And you are saying that the ability to to this - to listen to the fact that we are not listening at all - is the foundation of dialogue (the point at which we cease to merely discuss from past knowledge and begin actual dialogue).
I agree with this, and agree that this is fundamental to real dialogue.
However - and this is my only reservation with the way you’ve expressed this - we cannot take this deep listening for granted, can we?
Do we not begin from where we are - which is listening through our interests and our responses from past knowledge - and then, in the process of relationship (our dialogue) we might naturally, effortlessly - if we get that far - become aware of this false listening?
And then, if we become aware of our false listening, our interest (as actual concern) is then the outward expression of this real inner listening - correct? (so that there isn’t a contradiction between responding, as expression, and receiving, as passive listening).
Right? Is this what you are saying?
So - we begin with discussion but end in dialogue… if (during our conversation) we can become aware of the fact that we are not listening.
Have to get to work so a quick reply. It will be hurried so please don’t hold me to any of it .
With regard to interest, I would say personally I am interested in prejudice, bias. I look around me and see prejudice everywhere. However, my own I find very difficult to spot. An indication of this difficulty is a feeling of dullness, insensitivity which I experience on occasion. This I remember feeling in the dialogue group when James Wood? brought up the question of death. How easily it is to block out the very real fact of our looming death and alter reality to suit.
My interest then is in wondering if it possible to see things as they actually are, without bias. I mean simply so, not in some metaphysical sense. Now the only way I know to ascertain what is going on around me is the way I currently do, I suspect - but do not “know” - that I am routinely filtering reality and therefore have no idea what it would mean not to do so. When I bring it down to this real level , for me then it is quite the puzzle, and can be fun. How do you go finding out if you are filtering reality if you are filtering reality. I am not going imagine some state where I am not doing so, that is obviously silly. So all I can do is start where I am and look intently with interest to see if I can spot how - or is it where? or why? - I am altering reality. Of course, this would be of no interest to anyone who does not have this suspicion. Who feels confident that what they see is the case, or that whatever changes are being made are not an issue. The fact that I also suspect this filtering is causing real sorrow in myself and in others adds urgency to the matter, but I also see that I am dulled to that. Can’t remember how I put it above, but it now seems to me that what we are calling listening is looking without prejudice. The only way I can see to approach that is by trying to unearth my prejudice in action as objectively as I can. Which of course is a conundrum, observer, observed and all that and where the question of learning comes in. For the vast majority of my day that interest is in abeyance, if there at all. I view the dialogue group as an opportunity to bring it to the forefront. An invitation to meditate if you will.
Thank you Dev - that’s really well put! (emphases added):
My interest then is in wondering if it possible to see things as they actually are, without bias… I suspect - but do not “know” - that I am routinely filtering reality… How do you go [about] finding out if you are filtering reality if you are filtering reality?… all I can do is start where I am and look intently with interest to see if I can spot how - or is it where? or why? - I am altering reality… The fact that I also suspect this filtering is causing real sorrow in myself and in others adds urgency to the matter, but I also see that I am dulled to that… The only way I can see to approach that is by trying to unearth my prejudice in action as objectively as I can.
When we are inattentive, aren’t we ‘filtering’ . At that point, that is our ‘reality ‘.‘ Reality being all that thought has put together ‘ .
When we see / feel that we are inattentive , what happens ? If we then try to analyse the inattention … is that still more Inattention ? If so, then we haven’t seen that we are inattentive … just been partially aware of some disturbance ? If we really see we are inattentive , surely it must stop /end ., and there is attention ?
Totally agree that attention - as defined as absence of agenda/filtering - if present, would render the whole problem of inattention(filtering) a moot one. There would already be seeing without filtering so the work is done.
There appears to be two schools of thought with regard to this in our group. Some take the Gordian knot approach (it’s the self, stupid!) from which it follows that “trying” to be objective - analysis as K puts it - piecemeal is a fool’s errand. Others are of the viewpoint that we need to begin where we are and get to the point where the nature of examination naturally morphs from analysis to attention in the way you are using it.
There has to be a place for thought, as we couldn’t live without it.
We may have come to understand that thought in the psychological area is the problem… this may be understood ‘Intellectually’ as it is quite logical if one has given serious thought to it. Then surely it follows that as ‘knowledge’ it must then be left as it’s clearly then a major part of the problem ( moving away from ‘what is’)
It’s a habit centuries old ,to seek an answer in knowledge. … so it is a habit that isn’t easy to break.
Dialogue is a good time/place to be aware of it … there is pressure, as we may fall victim to the habit of allowing thought to dominate… but it’s also a relatively safe place … to see if we can ,as we’ve been urged … see our reactions… see that inattention … without ‘measuring it’ . Maybe we’ll be stuck with nothing to say… so what?! Or maybe we’ll tell jokes ! More likely is more space… , quiet. Perhaps some interesting things will come up… coming from really seeing rather than knowledge … just thought in it’s right place —following seeing if necessary , rather than thought first and then more thought. The potential is there, the ‘sorrow of the world’ seen as the unrealised potential .
“I” can’t do anything, but something can be done.
Hi James, I hope you don’t mind, but I have folded my further elaboration into my response to you.
Yes, with the main thrust being, why do we foreclose on another simply because we find ourselves to be momentarily unsettled, interrupted, confused or confounded by something unusual or uncomfortable? If we simply were to ignore anything unfamiliar, confounding or just plain odd, then it would be nothing outside of a short miracle that Krishnamurti was even read at all, what with statements like, “there is no conflict between the true and the false,” or “there is a movement out of stillness; out of non-movement,” or “the observer is the observed.” And indeed, some folks did read these statements and then did immediately walk away without any further consideration and concluded that either K was quite mad, or perhaps simply confused. Why don’t we give this same attention to each other? For example, take K’s most famous pronouncement that the observer is the observed? Now, it does seem to me that an orthodox subtext is at work underneath such sayings, which colors, dictates and invisibly controls even the way we apprehend this statement as a paradox; even the way we misunderstand it. That is, there is metaphysic at work that lay hidden and settles the way in which this statement is perpetually unsettled. It decides the way that this statement is undecidable. It fixes the way in which this statement is to be unfixable. And resolves the way in which it is to be unresolvable. It knows exactly how “the observer is the observed” is unknowable. Ostensibly, this dictum is to be appreciated as a failure to resolve one pole into the other, namely the subject pole into the object pole. Or its to be appreciated as our perennial failure to see its ultimate subsumption of the observer pole into the observed pole through mystical (re)union; the one into the other. The illusion into the actual. We can’t do this, and oddly enough, we know why it is that we can’t do it.
But, then someone says look, uncontaminated seeing or having the grace of pure sight, is not what is at hand here. More critically, do you see that you, yourself are the seen? Do you realize that when you touch, that you, yourself are the touched? Or when you affect, that you are the affected? That when we call out to another, that we are also called to call. That you author as you, yourself are authored? So do we see that we, ourselves are seen?
Or the observer is the observed?
You see, instead of the problem being a failure of knowledge to produce a collapse of of the subject into the object-world, the observer is preserved as that which has been summoned and conjured out the world. This renews its meaning, recontextualizes its situation and endows it with purpose. It is here for something. It does do something. Instead of the observer being cancelled or needing insight in order to see its own non-existence, that sense of self is repurposed and placed in answer to the world, which called it ‘to be’ in the first place, albeit as a temporal entity. Or the observer is in fact, the observed. (Peek-a-boo, I see you).
It feels like something to be seen, does it not? That is to be seen that you are seen is a sensation that cannot be selfproduced (self isn’t there yet anyway). One cannot produce this feeling on ones on without already finding one’s self within a world already. Just like one cannot tickle one’s own body and produce laughter. It isn’t possible. We can attempt this experiment of self tickling and it ends up being felt more as an irritation. We are summoned out of the world where we exist as “me;” (and by me I mean as "one of many; no one of any significance or consequence) in order that we are now addressable as “I.” Something comes from there, outside and touches me here on what is most intimate inside. It’s like a finger pointing to you with its selection, with its nomination, accompanied by self-consciousness and a feeling of indictment, “who me? How dare you wag your finger at me.” One can decline to exhibit reaction, decline to engage further, but one cannot decline a response. Like seeing the beggar on the street pleading for some spare change, we can refuse and turn away, but we cannot decline seeing them, and seeing that they see us. That is, even in declining, we nevertheless, have been summoned. You’re just simply summoned as that which refuses to answer. One declares, “you there, that’s right, you! No, not some other person, not him. I mean you. I see you there, and I see what you do.”
You, James are presently what summons me to appear before you now. You are what calls me to attend. “I” did not exist at any time before you pulled me out of the depths of the many in order to become answerable to you, the one who calls me now. There I am I. And I might call you Thou.
“A change in meaning is a change in Being.” --David Bohm
Yes, most definitely. I think I get what you’re driving at and indeed a chain of reactivity can be set off, when what we are asking for is suspension of reactions. But, suspension is not the same as suppression and all too often it seems that the need for suspension becomes an invitation for self-suppression. I do have some “shadow work” that needs to be done on myself. I know that. For example, I sometimes react viscerally to perceptions of flagrant hypocrisy and I find it difficult to allow the feeling to settle. Like some sort of indigestion occurs and sometimes I am unable to respond with care and affection. But, ironically, that might also indicate the great care that I do have, that we all have. I do not believe that the reaction and response to hypocrisy are things needing to be cancelled, or vanished within a field of awareness, but are needing to be understood for the meaning that they hold. A parallel example might be the eruption of jealousy. It’s not possible to become jealous without also having already admired and/or adored. Paradoxically, jealousy may at first issue from the excesses of my adoration, which heretofore, I was unaware even existed within me until you turned your attention to some other, and I now, for the first time discovered my own desire to always keep you in my gaze with your eyes likewise forever turned upon me. After all, when I first saw you, you were without compare. No comparison took place, for if you were comparable, then I would’ve never fallen captive you and adored you so. But its too late. I have already fallen.
Hi Clive. Thanks for the “Likes” and enthusiasm. If you find the above selections from K interesting, then you may also find this exchange, which I will post below, interesting as well. This selection addresses the question of whether thought can see itself and its own limitation.
…
April 22, 1983
David Moody: I wonder if there is not some fundamental intrinsic difficulty about this which escapes us. The thought itself doesn’t want to be observed.
Krishnamurti: No, you’re asking a question sir, which is, can thought observe itself?
DM: Yes, sir.
K: That’s the question you’re asking, isn’t it?
DM: Yes, sir.
K: Right? Answer it, sir. Can fear, anxiety, watch itself? Right? It’s the same thing.
DM: It doesn’t seem like the same thing. The fear, the anxiety, which is an emotion-the feeling-one can observe.
Krishnamurti: No, no. Can that feeling watch itself? Not, I am watching the feeling. You understand?
DM: Yes.
K: Can that thinking be conscious of itself? Am I putting–you understand what my question is?
DM: Yes, sir!
K: Go into it, sir, step by step. I see, for example, institutions, organizations have not changed man. I have examined the institutes from all over the world for the purpose of changing and making him better.
Institutions is say, going to the priest. I am suffering, I go to him and he gives some palliative. Some kind of silly comforting words. I leave him but the suffering is there when I get home. So, I realize, thought realizes–thought realizes, thought itself realizes–it has not helped.
DM: Yes.
K: Are you quite sure of this?
DM: I think so.
Krishnamurti: No, no, no, no, – don’t play with words. Thought created the priest, the organization and thought went to it and said “please, help me.” When it gets home it’s still their-- suffering.
DM: Yes.
Krishnamurti: So thought is aware of its own activity. You are getting it what I’m talking about? So thought is realizing it’s own activity, right?
DM: Yes.
K: So thought is aware of itself. So, I’ve learned something tremendously important. Thought, which is consciousness, can become aware of itself. Not, I am aware of thinking. That’s a tremendous discovery isn’t it? Sir, do you realize that very few people have realized this? That thought can be aware of itself. Thinking can be aware if its own thinking. And therefore consciousness, which is the movement of thought can be aware of itself. That’s all I’ve said. If thought realizes this fact, something tremendously important has taken place–like a blind man suddenly seeing the blue sky. Naturally sir, do you understand?
–the Unconditioned Mind by David Moody, pp. 110-111
It’s possible that I haven’t followed all that you’re saying here - when it comes to these matters my preference is to be as simple as possible so as to avoid any confusion! However, here is my attempt to understand what you’ve said:
You begin by questioning why we have a tendency to “cancel” another person when they make us feel uncomfortable. This is an entirely reasonable question. You then link this to K: you point out that if we always “cancelled” others for making us feel uncomfortable, then we would never have listened to K in the first place (who said a great many things that were unusual and discomforting).
This then leads you into the topic of the observer and the observed. At this point I may have somewhat lost the thread of what you are trying to say, but you seem to be suggesting - and I could be completely mistaken here - that instead of interpreting K’s teaching (about the observer being the observed) to mean the
that we ought instead to understand it as meaning that
and that
Right?
So, rather than collapsing the observer into the observed, or dissolving the observer so that there is only the observed (or what is), you are interested to reverse this sequence of collapse, or at least reformulate it, so that what remains or persists - as that which is “called out” - is the observer.
Correct? Have I understood you properly?
So you are giving value, importance, to the observer - which becomes an I to another’s Thou, a Thou to another’s I, and so on.
Now, without wanting to get into the weeds of European philosophy here, this sounds a lot like Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas, right? This might be why it is a little difficult to follow without understanding the context.
According to K, as you know, the observer is unnecessary, a movement of inattention that occludes what is, filters what is, traduces what is. Whereas, in your framing the observer has “meaning”, “purpose”,
Now this is quite a different framing from the one K uses, right? - and so will most likely create confusion in the group. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong or bad - only that one shouldn’t be surprised if it causes general bafflement in a K dialogue!
So, if you are not using the word “observer” in the same way that K intended it, I wonder if you are perhaps using it instead in a more metaphysical sense; perhaps as something related to Heidegger’s philosophy of “Being” (which influenced Buber’s and Levinas’ thinking)? Or maybe you are employing it as a synonym for consciousness (the way “consciousness” is framed in the philosophy of mind tradition; which to some extent is the same principle at work in the European phenomenological tradition)? - That is, there is of course the fact that all experience (and therefore all objectification) arises from the point of view of an experiencing subject. The Vedantic tradition, as you must know, makes hay with this general principle, and subsumes everything to the metaphysical subject of all experience. - Is this what you mean by the observer?
If so - the danger is that (in K’s language) the observer as a fragment of thought, is liable to identify itself with the concept or image or memory or experience of the metaphysical subject, and thereby falsify experience, and perpetuate an illusion. This is not to say that there cannot be metaphysically meaningful states of attention (as beauty, love, insight), but only that as soon as the observer (as the past, as a fragment of thought) appears, the attention that had been “called out” in relationship - is no more.
As K taught: only when the self is not, beauty is.
I didn’t find the quotes particularly interesting in themselves ( not needed)but that they were made , and the way people interact.
Regarding thought understanding it’s limitation… this has interested me for some time. I do see thought as being ‘a response of memory’. So, I’d say that when thought first stops when there is a full seeing that knowledge cannot revise an ‘answer’ at all, but there remains an urgency to see. This series is not one of knowledge… but the fact is then recorded… so on a future occasion thought, as a response of memory can ‘know’ it’s limitation.until/unless I discover otherwise, that appears to be it.
Initially I read or heard that thought was limited etc… but only later actually saw it …the truth of what I’d heard.
Too many words prevent seeing… as thoughts also do.
James, respectfully I disagree. The context isn’t “european philosophy.” The context is relationship in dialogue. The context is now. The context is a game of peek-a-boo with an infant. It’s a finger pointing through the lens in a zoom meeting. It’s a traffic accident. A jealous lover. The pensive look from an anxious father. If someone thinks they need to read Heidegger or Levinas or Buber etc. in order to understand that when one is looked at, one becomes self-conscious and a sense of “I” emerges then…I don’t know, maybe they should be evaluated to see where they are situated on the autism spectrum.
You then go on to show that, in fact, you do follow and understand very well, very clearly and quite simply. In fact, you understand with such clarity that you begin to compare and reference other thinkers and teachers. You demonstrate that there’s nothing too complex at all. You have an interesting way of insisting that much of what is easy to understand is quite complicated and then show that it isn’t at all. That is odd. But, it’s that very insistence (not necessarily from you) that obliges these explications that I write rather than just allowing one to say, “I don’t choose, but nevertheless I am chosen,” without somebody (not you) audibly groaning, visibly sighing and gesturing their shared displeasure and dismissal with their partner. And quite frankly (im an American, one of our virtues is being brazenly obnoxious and candid), I don’t need that dreck from someone purporting to run a Krishnamurti blog site in order to explore “non-reactivity” in dialogue.
Yes, you do, but while you’ve recapitulated the ‘what I’m doing’ and the ‘why I’m doing it,’ the ‘how it’s being done’ is not mentioned in your replication.
Again, I must respectfully disagree. I do not consider this to be a departure from K in any way, shape or form. And it’s surprising that anyone feels that it is. K was just as often to say that you are the world and are what is most important. He also spoke of non-movements that will not remain still. An emptiness that is overflowing. An anger that needs to flower. Likewise, he spoke of no self but without its being absent. He spoke in paradoxes and was often accused of being inconsistent with his language. But I disagree. If the metaphysical K is kept separate from the K of exercises (and about 90% of K is psychological exercise done in reflection) then what appears to be fallacies of equivocation simply vanish.
Bafflement is fine and actually is quite welcome.
Foreclosure, on the other hand, is a different matter altogether.
Emphatically, No! And I’m fairly well known for insisting that the “vedantic creep” not absorb K such that he becomes folded into the Advaitin tradition and his subtlety is lost. Krishnamurti was way, way beyond the purview of any vedantin. It might be a shock, but I’m downright puritanical on this issue and I can and have argued the point in Ojai (with a modicum of success, btw). In my opinion, Vedanta is a heresy and the two are non-compatible. Krishnamurti, for me anyway, is the first and the last. If anyone wants to discuss how the two differ, give me a call.
I’m off to bed. See you tomorrow more than likely, in dialogue.
You have an interesting way of insisting that much of what is easy to understand is quite complicated and then show that it isn’t at all. That is odd.
Hey, wait a minute there - I am doing my best to understand you, and in order to do so I have to take what I find confusing or complex and break it down into simpler structures. This isn’t unfair or odd is it? I wonder how many disinterested readers would take the following passage from your earlier post and make immediate sense of it?
For example, take K’s most famous pronouncement that the observer is the observed? Now, it does seem to me that an orthodox subtext is at work underneath such sayings, which colors, dictates and invisibly controls even the way we apprehend this statement as a paradox; even the way we misunderstand it. That is, there is metaphysic at work that lay hidden and settles the way in which this statement is perpetually unsettled. It decides the way that this statement is undecidable. It fixes the way in which this statement is to be unfixable. And resolves the way in which it is to be unresolvable. It knows exactly how “the observer is the observed” is unknowable. Ostensibly, this dictum is to be appreciated as a failure to resolve one pole into the other, namely the subject pole into the object pole. Or its to be appreciated as our perennial failure to see its ultimate subsumption of the observer pole into the observed pole through mystical (re)union; the one into the other. The illusion into the actual. We can’t do this, and oddly enough, we know why it is that we can’t do it.
This, for me at least, reads as a rather complicated series of assertions that require interpretation, elucidation, and questioning. Remember that the initial post of yours that I was replying to had been concerned with totalistic phraseology and the flowering of strong emotions, and not - at least not obviously - the observer and the observed; which is then a wholly new topic. You then write:
But, then someone says look… do you see that you, yourself are the seen?… It feels like something to be seen, does it not? That is to be seen that you are seen is a sensation that cannot be selfproduced (self isn’t there yet anyway). One cannot produce this feeling on ones on without already finding one’s self within a world already… We are summoned out of the world where we exist as “me;” (and by me I mean as "one of many; no one of any significance or consequence) in order that we are now addressable as “I.” Something comes from there, outside and touches me here on what is most intimate inside. It’s like a finger pointing to you with its selection, with its nomination, accompanied by self-consciousness and a feeling of indictment, “who me? How dare you wag your finger at me.” One can decline to exhibit reaction, decline to engage further, but one cannot decline a response… That is, even in declining, we nevertheless, have been summoned. You’re just simply summoned as that which refuses to answer. One declares, “you there, that’s right, you! No, not some other person, not him. I mean you. I see you there, and I see what you do.”… You are what calls me to attend. “I” did not exist at any time before you pulled me out of the depths of the many in order to become answerable to you, the one who calls me now.
And, in your latest post, you give some further examples of what you mean:
The context is a game of peek-a-boo with an infant. It’s a finger pointing through the lens in a zoom meeting. It’s a traffic accident. A jealous lover. The pensive look from an anxious father.
You also condense these “explications” into a rather obscure (for me at least) dictum:
“I don’t choose, but nevertheless I am chosen”
Now, all of the examples you’ve given are - you finally clarify - different ways of saying that
when one is looked at, one becomes self-conscious and a sense of “I” emerges
This is your central point as far as I can see. The phenomenon of self-conscious, or intersubjective, awareness; which for you has a metaphysical significance. That is: there is - you claim - no self before there is self-conscious awareness.
Now, with respect Philip, this does both sound and feel a million light years away from what K is teaching with the observer is the observed. You vigorously reject the notion that your language has anything to do with European philosophy, and I’m not denying that you think this, but yet you might be interested to know that the way you are using this language - of “being seen”, “being called out or summoned by the other”, etc, - has multiple echoes in 20th century continental philosophy (and, for all I know, might be an unconscious influence on your language if you have been through higher education - but this is a moot point).
For example, Sartre famously argued that this experience of being seen - the experience of being looked at by another, being observed in a moment of unreflective activity - calls out my “I” and makes me self-conscious - in a way that (for him, as well as for Buber, Levinas etc) has tremendous metaphysical implications. In Being and Nothingness: An essay on phenomenological ontology, he writes:
Someone is looking at me! What does this mean? It means that I am suddenly affected in my being and that essential modifications appear in my structure … First of all, I now exist as myself for my unreflective consciousness … I see myself because somebody sees me
For Sartre this moment of being seen by another establishes the observer’s existence, draws it into being as it were, “summons” it, and is the foundation of all subsequent intersubjective behaviour.
However, what is the experience of self-consciousness, shorn of all metaphysical poetry? Isn’t it merely a modification in the movement of thought?
That is, the observer attaches significance to a moment of recognition or ignominy - becoming self-conscious about it - either because it wants to repeat it (pride) or because it wants to deny it (shame), etc. Either way, the observer distorts what is actually happening to unconsciously further its own existence, thereby denying a direct perception of what is taking place (what K calls observation without the observer).
So, when you say…
I do not consider this to be a departure from K in any way, shape or form. And it’s surprising that anyone feels that it is. K was just as often to say that you are the world and are what is most important
…I’m not sure that this is true. Certainly, in the example you’ve given here (that you are the world) K was not saying that “you are the most important”, is he? K is merely pointing out that so long as we are envious, fearful, aggressive, hateful etc, we are contributing to the violence and darkness of the world: that we are not separate from the world of violence so long as we are violent. - Right? As K says
So long as you are caught up in [hate] you are a part of that world of ignorance and fear. Then the world is an extension of yourself, yourself duplicated and multiplied.
Yet K also implies that if one were to cease to hate entirely, one steps out of the world. One would then be “alone”, without self-consciousness; and so self-consciousness has no meaningful place in aloneness.
I’m not so sure about your motives here. I don’t feel an exploration in order to undersstand is happening, but rather you seem more interested in deducing the sources of my insights and inspirations and parading them about. Now, perhaps I am wrong, but I feel like you’re making great sport of now watching me dodge these looming figures of Heidegger, Levinas and now Sartre as I furiously attempt to cast off their heavy anchors you keep attempting to hang around my neck before I sink to the bottom. You’re making much to do out of some stylistic borrowings and familiar poetic flourishes and that certainly is not all that I have offered up on your chopping block James. Not by a long shot. Much that I’ve written, you will not find precedent for, at least not that I am aware of. And so, I’m not so sure that there isn’t some other agenda at work.
James, David Bohm often said, “A change in meaning is a change in Being.” But wait, that was Hegel. Should we now dismiss Bohm and throw him overboard because of the possible contamination of Germain idealism? Krishnamurti repeated ad nauseam that, “the word is not the thing.” But wait, he borrowed that directly from Alfred Korzybski and did so prior to even his meetings with Bohm. Should James also give him the deep six because of a contamination from general semantics? Or how about Krishnamurti’s favorable impressions of Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra? Or passages that are identical to Nagarjuna as K was well versed in the Mahayana tradition would see the Lord Buddha in visions. Heck, I can even show you passages from very early K that sound like classical Husserl and Hegelian dialectics (quite remarkable really, where the hell did he get that stuff)?
You’re making much too many assumptions about me James and you’re wasting my time. I would advise caution against presuming what my education is, and it’s influence on apprehending K. If anything, K influences how I read the others and not the other way around.
Again, I would strongly caution against assuming what readers here can and cannot make sense of. Partially because aware that for many, it just isn’t as you think. I’m not here to complicate matters, nor are you here to save them from complication. That’s quite the roll you’ve assumed for yourself.
By using the word thought without discerning the two aspects in which K would use the word, you’re begging the question via equivocation and you seem to be unaware that such a move installs a hidden subjectivity that houses the intention to modify prior to even self-consciousness. Do I have you correct as saying at least once, that you’ve been studying K for 20 years, correct? Do I have you right? Or do you just mean that you’ve been at “this” for 20 years?
Now, this is interesting for me and a point that we might have explored much more thoroughly, as you are someone that I do respect and have affection for. But, and I may be have you wrong, I feel that you have an axe to grind and until you put it away, you’re wasting my time.
I have taken quite a bit of time and patience to understand what you are saying. Rather than respond to the content of my attempted distillation of your thinking, and some of the questions I have (perhaps wrongly) with your thinking, you are now imputing to me motives for even attempting this. Is this necessary?
David Bohm often said, “A change in meaning is a change in Being.” But wait, that was Hegel. Should we now dismiss Bohm and throw him overboard because of the possible contamination of Germain idealism? Krishnamurti repeated ad nauseam that, “the word is not the thing.” But wait, he borrowed that directly from Alfred Korzybski and did so prior to even his meetings with Bohm. Should James also give him the deep six because of a contamination from general semantics? Or how about Krishnamurti’s favorable impressions of Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra? Or passages that are identical to Nagarjuna as K was well versed in the Mahayana tradition would see the Lord Buddha in visions.
I’m not criticising you (or others) for having influences: I am merely trying to understand what - to me at least - is not an intuitively self-explanatory point of view. The only reason I brought in European philosophy is because, having studied it for my undergraduate, I was picking up certain linguistic traits in your exposition that sounded similar, and was trying to find out if this is how you are using certain phrases. You don’t think so - that’s all. I was wrong.
With the greatest respect Philip, who here is making assumptions about who, so as to “foreclose” what they are saying?
Look, Philip, it feels to me as though you are reacting to my questions rather than responding. I’m not aware of any axe to grind - but from much of what you have written above, it sounds a little as though you may have one. I know it (the axe) isn’t against me personally (because I’ve only known you very recently); so I’m making an assumption that it may have to do with other people in the K world, with a “K orthodoxy” you have mentioned on several occasions, or maybe with K himself?
But really, Pax Philip - maybe we can take these matters up when there is more calm between us. - Or, if even later you still feel I am “wasting your time”, then we can just leave it at that. I have no interest in wasting anyone’s time
Ok - one last attempt to understand the core of what you have been attempting to communicate - or at least what it has made me reflect upon - and then I promise to drop the matter!
The context is a game of peek-a-boo with an infant. It’s a finger pointing through the lens in a zoom meeting. It’s a traffic accident. A jealous lover. The pensive look from an anxious father.
One implicit question, for me, in what you’ve written (and I recognise that you haven’t asked this question in the way I’m going to, so forgive me if this is not what you intended) is:
what is this quality of personality, life-force, vivacity that we see in people and animals, etc? What do we mean by the light in someone’s eyes, the smile in their eyes, or the look of worry, sadness, wonder, etc?
In one sense this is a question about the self; but I don’t want to immediately reduce it to that (I’ll return to that at the end). And, if you don’t mind, I’m not sure that K’s observer is the observed is the correct frame through which to investigate this question.
So, before I get to K (or my understanding of K), I just want to mention a possible context for this question.
Schopenhauer once wrote:
Look at your dog, and see how cheerfully and calmly he stands there! Many thousands of dogs have had to die before it was this dog’s turn to live; but the death and extinction of those thousands have not affected the eidos of the dog… out of his eyes there shines… the archaeus.
Now, if we don’t subscribe to a belief in an eternal soul or atman, what then is this thing that shines out of the eyes of the living?
We know pretty much what ordinary science tells us, and what some European philosophers have called our physical life-force. But what have other cultures thought about his?
In the atheist Sankhya system of ancient India they proposed a very subtle form of material energy called buddhi, which we could roughly translate as “intelligence”. It is not permanent, and dies with the body; but it is also the lightest, thinnest veil for a further non-material principle of nature they believed in called Purusa.
And in ancient (also atheist) Chinese culture they had the notion of shen, which they understood to mean (from what I’ve read) both heart (as a locus of our mental faculties), and as a pure or subtle energy - which is likewise physical and impermanent, and so disintegrates with the death of the body (although, in some sense, it is at the same time re-absorbed into the mysterious Dao). Everyone is born with this quality of shen, but - like the healthy brightness of youthful intelligence - its vitality can be lost even before death.
So what does K say about it?
I’m not sure that K addresses this question directly in his teachings, but there are a few indications that might be briefly remarked upon:
sometimes K spoke about a potential for insight - for intelligence and love - that we have even though our minds are largely, or completely, mechanical; which sounds similar to the Buddhist idea of bodhicitta.
in his language concerning the mind and the brain, which developed particularly during the 80s, K spoke of the mind as something “outside the brain”. This has similarities with what Aldous Huxley called “Mind at Large”, the view that the brain acts as a “reducing valve” for input from this much broader universal Mind.
If we take this Mind outside the brain notion seriously, then perhaps the buddhi or shen (the shining of a dog’s eyes) mentioned previously are simply that aspect of the brain or nervous system that temporarily cathects with the broader field of non-individuated energy (of Mind at Large). And when that particular brain-nervous system dies, the shen or buddhi dies too (although the timeless energy of Mind remains).
That is: expressed differently, what remains is not-a-thing:
So the nature, the inmost nature of the self, when you have gone through all the layers of the self, the essence is nothing. You are nothing. Right?.. That means facing, observing nothing. That nothing is not a thing. You know nothing means, not-a-thing. Thing is that which has been put together by thought. I wonder if you see all this. Nature has not been put together by thought. The tree, the stars, the waters and the lovely evening and the beauty of sunlight, it has not been put there by thought… So then what is love? Is it a thing of thought? Is it a fragmentary affair? Or when thought is not then love is… So the self and the structure of the self is based on nothing. The innermost depth of the self is absolutely not-a-thing. And love is not nothing, not-a-thing, but love is only possible, the beauty of it, the greatness of it, the magnitude of it, only when thought realises it has no place in relationship and therefore love is. (from Public Talk 5, Madras (Chennai), 1978)
I thought we had an agreement to cease and desist and after all, I felt we had a perfectly enjoyable little dialogue yesterday, don’t you? Why stir the pot again?
Well, which is it? Is this the last attempt to understand “the core of Phil” (lol) or the first attempt to ask me a sincere question, because if this is your last attempt, then I don’t recall ever applying for reconsideration. Let’s remember that I’m the respondent here, not the plaintive and I thought you had agreed to drop all charges and let me go free. I mean, you sound positively exhausted with having to submit yourself to, “quite a bit of time and patience.” I mean if its that arduous of a torment, why continue? C’mon, you’ve got to be kidding me. Did you have to go back and drag out your old undergraduate textbooks on comparative religion and continental philosophy? I really doubt that. Okay, I’ll stop. I’ve had a glass of wine this evening, so I’m provably prone to be a bit…“cheeky”? (that is what they say back across the pond, right?) And you’ve written a lovely post and I think that does deserve a reply.
I’m familiar with some of the traditions you’ve mentioned above but only insofar as they pertain to the development of Advaita, which I ended up having to learn quite a deal while in Ojai as the new breed of Western non-dualism (neo-Advaita) had colonized the KFA and it became necessary for me to understand the metaphysical root (starting with Adi Shankaracharya and working forward to his surrogates and then backwards to his predecessors) in order to converse with them and disentangle it from Krishnamurti. After then reading quite enough of Nisargadatta Maharaj and Ramana Maharshi, I came to the conclusion that the Western white audience will listen to any babbling Indian as long as they’re almost naked and make close to no sense at all, but can still find at least 2 other people willing to listen to them. But then sitting here, I pause for a moment, swirling my glass and staring at the bottle from which it was decanted (a bargain cabernet/merlot blend called Burning Cavalier that I purchased up at the local trader joe’s for $8 bucks and some change out the door whose label features a horse jockey saddling what appears to be a giant war rooster while in the background, flames leap out of every window and roof of a chateau situated in an otherwise bucolic French countryside…, or is that a hen?) why the hell is he asking me about the soul? And then it dawns on me. Your question is not “what is the status of the soul” or “can I understand what he’s saying”? You actually already get me on that anyway. Your question should be, “what in the bloody hell is his point?” How does this change anything?" That’s the question.
The point is how to resolve and advance the Krishnamurtian project and overcome the inevitable meta-dialogue that arrests and prevents it from any further development. You must remember your own frustrations exhibited on one occasion, throwing your hands in the air and lamenting, “why can’t we do this?! Why?! I’ve been attempting this for 20 years, and why can’t we just stay together on just one thing.” I understand you reappraised this moment later as a loss of control and reactivity, but my thought in the moment was “this is awesome.”
The point is that, the self (as a particular subject, not necessarily as soul, which is a slightly different matter) with the rich bounty that the subject and its affectivity holds has (ironically) been locked out of discussion and in essence, that is what has been preventing it’s advancement. The problem is one of orthodoxy (mentioned earlier), of vedantification, of K’s clumsy use of language, of absolutizing, of selective editing and finally of extrapolating metaphysics of out of teachings that were never intended to be interpreted as such. With that in mind, it might be useful to remember (not necessarily you James) that Krishnamurti is not a philosopher in the usual sense, proposing a metaphysical system through which reality is to be understood, but concerns himself almost exclusively with experiential problems. That is, it is in subjective experiences of separateness, incompleteness, relativity of being that he addresses his teachings. Otherwise, to suppose that Krishnamurti is answering questions that he is not posing will necessarily lead to misreadings and resulting in bad metaphysics.
So, what are the benefits of allowing re-admittance of self and its affectivity? Well, It puts an end to the unresolvable Krishnamurtian meta-dialogue that is based in an epistemic language game and a politics of grammar (like those folks that demand that all speech be disabused of first person personal pronouns, y’know what I mean). It provides a space in which “affectivity” opens up and offers deeper excavations, broadens the emotional palate and finds tones, timbres and textures that add more intimate passages to our symphony of dialogue; still being composed, still unfolding and heretofore has been locked and held captive inside monster abstractions like “observation,” or “choiceless awareness.” It means that, carried within its over-arching metaphysic of space-like presence, the word “awareness” (or “observation”) harbored and hid personal affect like a fugitive hiding from the law. In this case, that law, was the law of awareness, which comes to kill anything it touches so that it might live timelessly.
And finally, “how is this done”? As mentioned above already, by realizing that the established orthodoxy (and yes there is one) is an impoverished reading of K that essentially (among other problems) commits an error of equivocation by failing to notice the distinctive aspects being used by the word “thought.” As I indicated above, attributing the origin of self-consciousness to being merely a modification of thought installs a hidden subjectivity that houses the intention to modify prior to even self-consciousness. But this is a circular argument. Why? Because self-consciousness is itself where intention is housed and where it is born. Let me ask a question: isn’t relationship prior to and more fundamental than reaction? All life is relationship, is it not? Whether it is violent or peaceful, sane or chaotic, full of fear or serenity etc, all life is relationship, right? Now, follow me on this. When do you have an experience? When you’re conscious of it, right? And you’re conscious only when you’re challenged, correct? When their is a conflict, right? Which means, as uncomfortable as this sounds, there is a “you” prior to “I.” (try not to think of Martin Buber)
“Now, what do we mean by consciousness? I am not asking this question irrelevantly. It is directly connected with the question itself. What do we mean by consciousness? Consciousness, surely, is challenge and response, which is experiencing. That is the beginning of consciousness - challenge, response, and experiencing.”
–Bombay, India. Public Talk, 29th February, 1948
"Krishnamurti: Go slow: This brain is a machine which registers. It is a tape-recorder that is registering everything all the time. You come along and challenge the brain. It will respond in terms of like, of dislike, you are a danger and she is not a danger. In that instant is born the ‘me’‘’.
–Tradition and Revolution, Dialogue 24 Bombay, 6th February
"Krishnamurti: I would begin very simply. When am I conscious?
Pupul Jayakar: I am conscious of this discussion.
Krishnamurti: Let us keep it simple. When am I conscious? Either through sensory reaction, through a sensory shock, a sensory resistance, a sensory danger, a conflict in which there is pain-pleasure. It is only in those moments that I say I am conscious. I am aware of that lamp, the design; I perceive that there is a reaction and I say it is ugly or beautiful. Is not that the basis of all this? I do not want to speculate. I ask myself ``when am I conscious? ‘’ When I am challenged, when there is an impact, conflict, pain, pleasure, then I am conscious.
–Dialogue 26 Bombay 11th February 1971 `Energy, entropy and life’
The sense of “I” is the last thing to come into existence (joining proceedings that are already underway). It’s the last thing. But that’s a temporalization, right? This self-conscious reaction of “I-thought” (which is just one sense in which K uses the word “thought”) arrives temporally late to responding. Just paraphrasing Krishnamurti quickly, when recorded memory then reacts, as in a challenge, that is when conscious thought is born, that is when “I” emerge. The recording/experiencing is going on prior to the sense of “I.” (this isn’t Sartre, James. This is pure K) That recording/experiencing prior to “I” is experiencing and recording relationship. So, in the beginning, there was already relationship, and as such you are presently constituted as the response.
Perhaps the “complication” for some might be to conceive of a time, prior to origin. Time as the observer is the result, not the cause. Separation occurs in a time prior to this time.
I don’t know. It’s the stuff of miracles, right?. It’s the stuff of creation. Like becoming a parent, one has no clue what that is going to be like until it happens and then you say to yourself, I had no idea I could feel this way, nor hurt this way. I sense that it is life showing us the “more to it.”
Well, that’s my best last shot James. Did I flunk? Am I not going to graduate? Is my driver’s license suspended? Are you refusing to punch my ticket? Are you going to find the portions that sound like Deleuze and accuse me of harboring some non-intuitive post-modern delusion?
I’m glad you’re around btw. You guide the dialogue better than I think I’ve ever seen anyone do before. Or maybe I’m drunk.
I’m really not trying to “stir the pot”, you know - I have time on my hands to interact with you on this forum, and am always interested in finding out whether apparent puzzles in communication - and many of the issues you bring up are both interesting and puzzling! - can be resolved into understanding or not. Maybe they can’t be, or maybe I’m not the one to do it. Or maybe our mutual misunderstandings give rise to alternative reflections that are fruitful in their own right. - Neither of us are under an obligation to reply to each other - it’s a genuinely open dialogue for me that can be dropped at any time.
I genuinely have nothing against the experiential, inward movement of affectivity as you describe it. I accept that it is critical to what Krishnamurti is saying (even though there is a misguided orthodoxy that seeks to throttle it with “monster abstractions”).
Nevertheless, the question for me here is really - as we were beginning to discuss on Wednesday - whether we are capable of distinguishing between a genuine response (of pure feeling), and reactivity (which, on some level, has been hijacked by our intellect). Not in order to judge the one as being “better” than the other, but simply as a part of learning about it, giving it space to flower. And surely, for this we need to have, at the very bare minimum, a quality of non-judgmental awareness - right? That’s not - to me at least - a controversial abstraction.
I’m not talking from the perspective of neo-Advaita.
That is: I may naturally find myself judging or rejecting a feeling or a reaction: but, at the very minimum, I’m sure you can agree that such a judgment is not helpful or intelligent in relation to giving space to our affectivity. - So some kind of non-judgemental awareness, choiceless awareness (or whatever word you would use for this) is pivotal to create the space for affectivity to show itself, reveal itself.
Then consciousness. Being conscious.
When do you have an experience? When you’re conscious of it, right?.. The sense of “I” is the last thing to come into existence (joining proceedings that are already underway).
Again, I agree with you on this. The sense of “I”, as you say, comes into existence as a reaction to a challenge, a conflict, a sensory or relational event. It comes after what has already been occurring (in feeling or thought), outside the purview of our awareness.
This leads you to rightly ask:
isn’t relationship prior to and more fundamental than reaction?
Again, I agree with you.
So then the question is to find out whether it is possible to distinguish this natural, pre-conscious movement of relationship (or affectivity), from the reaction of the “I”, of the conscious thought process (which follows slightly after, with a time delay as you mention), which adds reaction to the affect.
And therefore - is it possible for there to be a non-judgmental awareness of relationship (and it doesn’t matter at this point if by relationship we mean pure feeling or unconscious thought/emotion) before it is overtaken by conscious thought and reactivity? Or is such awareness only possible after conscious reactivity has taken place?
I think this is a question that can only be answered by direct experience, no? The whole point is to let what is (whether it is affectivity, relationship, reaction or thought) flower - no examinations/graduations are necessary!
Anyway, there’s no need to reply to this. I am posing these questions to myself as well, not only to you.
Yes, I couldn’t agree more. We need to ask the question of whether we are able to discern the difference between an order of response and an order of reactivity. Although, I think it is just as accurate (and perhaps more accurate) to say that feeling has hijacked intellect (rather than the other way around). We might need to also make another discernment between thinking and intellect. In one sense, K is asking us to learn how to think. We need to start.
The reaction must take place, because “I” arrives of-with the reaction itself and not before it. No anterior state of awareness is needed, possible nor desirable (it doesn’t exist anyway) lest we wish to foreclose on what reactivity is showing us about ourselves. For example, the excess affection that is found within my jealousy or in my envy. But, being shocked by the sudden disruption of adoration, I might reflexively attempt to cast off my envy, deny it as a “lack of awareness” and consign it to the realm of “illusion.” In so doing, I kill not only my envy, but also the degree of affection that was bound in adoration.
In spite of our attempts to issue a warrant and indict a “self” as the cause of envy or jealousy, we find that conscious-self is always-already the result of envy (never the cause). We then keep arresting the same impostor and then attempt to summarily execute them (expose them as illusion through a blast of calm “insight”) when really the culprit was the departure of someone else’s affection and like a jilted lover, we envy the place where that lost affection is now being received. Here I rise as the excess affection that could not be received. Like a love letter that either was never sent, or for some reason was never received and now winds up misfiled and lost in the mail. Self is this misfiling.
.
- maybe we can take these matters up when there is more calm between us. - Or, if even later you still feel I am “wasting your time”, then we can just leave it at that. I have no interest in wasting anyone’s time 