Has the self - which is you - ever suffered? Never mind the ending of it. Has it even begun to suffer? Neither Charley nor K can answer this one.
Paul, as this is your question, which honestly means nothing to me (at least not in the way you have developed it during this thread), I will leave it to you to resolve. You already seem to have answered it anyway, in the negative. If you are satisfied with that, alright.
Hello Wim. Like you, I never found Kās words offensive. He was forthright but always careful not to be offensive.
I think James pointed out, having spoken to quite a few people who were fairly close to K, that he was kind, sensitive and gentle in private. Is that right James?
Yes, thatās what Iāve been told. The person who he often was on stage - forthright, fierce, emphatic - was generally distinct from the person people met in daily life, who was gentle, shy, affectionate, modest. Itās not that there was a complete separation between the two (like two different entities), because there could be overlap between the person on stage and in daily life (the person in daily life could be blunt and direct too!); but there was a distinction. One gets a sense of this from the biographies as well.
I have lost someone whom I love dearly. Have I suffered the totality of loss or have I escaped from it into different forms of self-centred action? Has the self ever suffered anything right to the end without interfering? This is the nub of the question. It seems to me to be fairly simple, as it is stated. It becomes a little more complicated as we explore it, but that takes two.
Quite. It seems you have already lost Erik (with whom you began the conversation), and myself (with whom you continued the conversation), primarily because you want to hold the conversation on your own terms and your own terms alone, despite what both of us have said to you. Do you see that you do this quite often Paul? Both here and in the dialogues? I think it is due to a form of insensitivity of which you are unaware: you do not take the other person as seriously as you claim to do. You filter out what they are saying to suit your own agenda, your own approach. Doubtless we all do this to one extent or another, but you seem to be completely unaware that you are doing it when you are doing it. So people feel like you are not listening to them, that you are only talking to yourself. When there are two people, you have to move with both peopleās expressed concerns, not just continue with your own approach. Can you meet this fact (or what I sense to be a fact) that I am presenting you with, with the same completeness you have been asking about meeting suffering?
I donāt know why - for it seemed that we were finally on the same page.
But you came in to support Erik almost immediately. I didnāt have much of a chance after that to carry on talking to him.
Of course. Weāll start again from the beginning. But I have not been asking about āmeetingā suffering. Have we ever suffered? Thatās the question. But we can forget it and try another.
Paul,
Yes, within a week or so of having moved oneās cup full of compassion into contact with oneās own āsorrowā, and the ensuing end (healing - difficult to put that into words btw) of oneās own sorrow that had been in oneās heart, one had in oneās hand this book The Awakening of Intelligence by this guy called J. Krishnamurti. This was about 30 years ago. One had no real knowledge of even what the word guru meant, so it was a whole new way of seeing the world. And so began the emptying of the contents of oneās consciousness. Charley just looked at K as a friendā¦ All Charley understood when beginning to read K was that Charley never ever never wanted to suffer againā¦ Looking back, one would have to say that until one fills oneās cup full of compassion, there is no way to connect with oneās sorrow, or even to be aware of the existence of oneās own sorrowā¦
Having said that, I would say, that seeing what goes on here on this site, the majority of people here are full of sorrow.
People have such strange ideas (almost fairy tale ideas) about what compassion is:
But K said:
- āK: You see, then love is not sentiment or sentimentality. Love is something very hard, if I can use that word. You understand what it means? Not hard in the sense of brutal, it has no hypocrisy, no sentimentality, it has no clothing around it.ā
K: Beginnings of Learning, Part I, Chapter 1, Conversations with Students and Staff, Brockwood Park, 22nd May 1973
I would have to tend to agree with you here, on this.
At least, then, at the end of all this rather long rigmarole, we have some reliably accurate evidence from an independent observer that I am not mimicking K. Thank you for that.
Shall we close this topic now? Is this OK with you, David?
Yes, it is okay with me. But I dont know how to lock or close a thread.
Thatās alright - I can do it. Thank you.