Have you now realised that its not about effort ?
Meditation is not about effort. Freedom from the Known is not about effort. Run as hard as you can, you cannot escape.
1 Like
Sounds like youâve made up your mind.
I have no idea. Iâve done it for so long Iâm really not conscious of it. And I never did it with the expectation of results. Also it just occurred to me while I was writing this that I have done this, being intently aware of my surroundings, since being on sweeps (recon patrols) in Vietnam 52 years ago. Especially, when I walked point (lead guy in a line of other grunts (soldiers). Everyone had to be alert but in the point position awareness/attentiveness had to be especially acute because you had to see that booby trap or possible ambush site before it killed you. Tremendous incentive to be attentive and alert.
I think the appeal from K to be alert to your thinking and surroundings is part of what really appealed to me about what K pointed out when I finally read something by him a few years after the army experience.
Actually, thatâs not what I meant when I wrote, " How else would you have watched it"
I realized that Krishnamurti got me barking up the wrong tree. Effort is a volitional attempt to bring about the desired result. Everything we do requires effort. If you do it right, you succeed instantly, and âeffortlesslyâ; otherwise, you keep at it like a fool exerting effort without getting anywhere.
Perhaps not, but it takes time even if it is for an hour. Unless one has time to waste, meditation - to me - is just sitting around doing nothing.
Not about effort? This has not been my experience. Freedom from the Known, to me, is to rid oneself of knowledge about reality. I know that the Earth rotates and revolves around the Sun. How do I rid myself of that? I know that I am my fatherâs son. How do I rid myself of my family identity and relationship?
I did escape and it was not without tremendous effort and emotional pain.
I think K was talking about âpsychological knowledgeâ. Freedom of knowledge of right vs wrong and should vs should notâŚknowledge of ideals âŚbeliefs. And freedom of knowledge in relationshipâŚâhe is my friend or my enemyâ. Comparison. I think a new thread may be warranted here. Freedom from the known in relationshipâŚwith my neighbor or familyâŚwith myself. How do I understand myself? Through the screen of knowledge? Not talking about knowledge of my height or weight or where I live.
1 Like
Douglas, isnât the âsurrender â that you speak of , the realization by thought itself that it is its own movement that is the âproblemâ it is seeking to resolve? That leaves it nowhere else to go and gives up even if only for a moment?
Haha (my turn to laugh). Do you think Krishnamurti was talking about âpsychological knowledgeâ? You wish. If it were that easy, a subscription to Psychological Today would be the educated way to go instead of airy-fairy alternative spirituality. Or get a good therapist if you can afford it.
Where we live is a world of height and weight and time. Itâs the world which we suffer in terms of war and poverty. If it were a land of milk and honey, would we still be sick in the head?
Krishnamurti was horrible at clarifying what he said. There were many occasions when I found it torturous to follow his dialogues with Bohm and Buddhist scholars. Krishnamurti did have something authentic to say, but he couldnât lay it out logically regardless of his emphasis on going âstep by stepâ in repeated explanations to those highly educated intellectuals. If nobody had gotten it after 60 years of teaching, I lay the blame at Krishnamurtiâs feet. But then, he wasnât educated and could not lay it out âstep by stepâ in the way a college professor in physics could.
Krishnamurti writings are erudite and poetic (I do wonder if he wrote them himself), but to understand the nature of the self, we need a blueprint, not aesthetic prose.
Well, youâre spouting total nonsense and I donât see the point of going further into it with you. As I see it, it very much IS about psychological knowledge. Itâs that which has conditioned us to violence and division and war. And no , of course itâs not easy to be rid of the conditioning which has taken over human consciousness. No one said it was.
So your center, the ego, the I is proclaiming that it escaped from the center, the ego, the I? Oh well, congratulations, I guess.
Was it K who set you wrong or did you accomplish that all by yourself. You know what you are saying here about effort and accomplishment is not what K was pointing out at all. Those are, clearly, your own opinions so if you âfailedâ it appears reasonable to point out that you are the architect of those âfailuresâ.
Have you ever heard the quote from K that, âTruth is a Pathless Landâ? To me that means that there is not only no path, method, to truth but also that there is no particular âplaceâ where truth resides. So attempting to get there is futile and contradictory.
Oh darn! Once again you have misunderstood what K means by âpsychological thoughtâ. Why donât you actually try to find out what K means by this, not what you think it means? It would be doing you and all of us a huge favor. Then we wouldnât have to waste time covering the same topic again and again.
Possible - maybe there are many circumstances that can lead to the âgive upâ moment - If we consider the Kensho moments brought about by Koan practise - it would seem that this is brought about by exhaustion due to prolonged and intense doubt.
Then why do it? Is it a compulsive habit, an addictive personality associated with PTSD?
Being intently aware of oneâs surroundings is the karma of a bird; not a raptor, a bird of prey but a sparrow, a prey itself. For a potential victim of misfortune, the state of alertness has to be constantly kept up. Looking here and there, up and down, left and right, and back again refocusing attention every second. And if there was a momentary lapse in alertness, it would instinctively take flight to evade disaster. Such is its lot. I know this from watching the birds in my garden. You must have suffered a similar fate in Vietnam. My grandfather was there also. I still have the pack of Survival Cards (For South East Asia) he brought back. The effect of war on him was not the acquisition of an incentive to be attentive and alert. My mom told me that he would stay alone for hours in the dark in the basement after he came home from WW2. He was the commandant of a Japanese prison of war camp in the Philippines. He recovered from his dark spells and went on to serve in the Korean and Vietnam wars retiring as a colonel.
Being alert is not a bad thing. Situational awareness is essential in a contested domain vulnerable to infiltration by the enemy. How does this equate to absolute security when the self is not?
It would seem that the brain provides 2 types of awareness - attention to detail (when the bird distinguishes between the seed and the gravel) and an appreciation of the whole (which is what helps with reacting to prey appearing out of nowhere) - carried out independantly by the 2 hemispheres of the brain at the same time.
1 Like
Yes I am alert and attentive to my surroundings and I am comfortable with that. I live in the Rocky Mountains most of the year and in Ojai, CA in the winter. Both areas are extremely attractive. Both are full of wildlife especially the Rockies with bear, puma, wildcat, turkeys and so on. By being alert I see so much more than someone blinded by their erroneous belief in their own intelligence.
K was also extremely aware of his surroundings and alert. I had many opportunities to watch him in public and private settings. But more than that he was aware of otherâs around him reactions. He would actually jerk his body and or head at sudden loud noises. Your opinion that you have to be prey to be alert is no more confused and mistaken than most of your other opinions.
You know the last thing I need or want is psychoanalysis from someone who is as confused and generally mixed up as you obviously are.
And the fact that your grandfather was in the military gives you absolutely no insight into my military experience. Let it drop before you embarrass yourself more than you already have.
This is another sorely mistaken and random view based on ignorance if you think raptors, hunters, arenât aware, alert to their surroundings. You canât hunt successfully without rapt attention to everything that is going on around you. How do you think a hunter finds itâs prey? Have you ever thought about writing a reverse encyclopedia? One where everything in it is incorrect?
Sree asks: Then why do it? Is it a compulsive habit, an addictive personality associated with PTSD?
Jack replies: Once again someone has to explain to you and to inquiry that there doesnât have to be any reason, motive, end to certain actions. Itâs done because itâs the right thing to do. But neither of you can understand that. Are you two actually the same person? Itâs hard to believe that there are two such grossly ignorant people on here with a nearly complete disability to learn anything new.
1 Like
I would make a distinction between the consciousness and me, its virtual spokesperson. So, itâs the consciousness - not the spokespersonâs consciousness but the human consciousness â proclaiming that it escaped from masquerading as me, an individual human being living among other individuals on Planet Earth.
I guess it was me because I took Krishnamurtiâs word for it. He did say that I was âto question the speakerâ. I didnât do that from the outset but later when things didnât check out. There is an element of trust among people and one doesnât go about suspecting everyone is a crook. If Krishnamurti came across to me as a two-bit guru from India, I wouldnât have barked up the wrong tree.
I didnât know what Krishnamurti was pointing out and you are right, they were all my own opinions of what he said. Everybody who read Krishnamurti has his or her own opinions of what he said; otherwise, someone would have âgotten itâ.
I humbly disagree. Life is miraculous and I am that miracle; otherwise, I would not have given up everything to find it by digging through the muck we have accepted as true.
Human consciousness has escaped from you? And is now addressing us on Kinfonet? Is this what you are saying?
You are not paying attention. I said that I was watching the birds in my garden. When a thought arises to insert the brain into the equation, it wrecks the observation. Just look, and dismiss all knowledge (itâs a robin or a male finch, itâs yellow or red, etc.) about what you see. Then, you become the bird and feel that anxiousness of being vulnerable. Then, empathy is just an empty word.
Yeah, blah blah.
I donât mean to be disrespectful. You canât live when the mind is stuffed with information even when it is not needed on a cool summer morning in the garden and the self has vanished.
Weâre not watching birds in your garden
You told a story. I commented on it. Then you passed judgement on that comment.
Are you even aware that your response has nothing to do with my quote that you are apparently responding to?
Right back at you with your own rude words regarding everything you put on here.
Pretty much. It is not magic when you have awakened from delusion to become aware of the illusion of the self. The mad actor is one who has become the role and is unable to get out of character.
Letâs say, you and I are two of the seven dwarfs in a ballet of Snow White, the fairy tale. I am Snoopy and you are Dopey. After years and years playing that role, I give it up and walk off the show. You tell me that I canât do that. And I am telling you that you can also drop the act of being Dopey. Look, I am not the only case of thinking out of the box. Go watch the Woody Allen movie âPurple Rose of Cairoâ or Jim Carreyâs âThe Truman Showâ.
Krishnamurti who spoke Telugu as a child was born in Madanapalle, Andrah Pradesh. He insisted that he was not an Indian. What was he? Did human consciousness escape from him? What was he saying?