An alarm clock…
For the right kind of listener, it might be exactly what’s needed to wake up. Me, I’ve never been an alarm kinda guy.
I was being facetious, but your reply provokes mine:
You often remind us of what kinda guy you are. Each one of us is unique, this or that kinda human, so it kinda goes without saying. But when I have to remind myself and others that I’m too special to question what I am, what kinda guy am I?
Shall we look into this a bit? If you want, I propose that you choose the best (or worst might be more accurate) example from those that you mentioned above - and we can look at it in context for starters.
The kinda guy who doesn’t understand the question. Try again?
Sure! How about: “We live in constant conflict and struggle.” My objection is not to the assertion that we live in conflict in struggle, I think we often do. It’s the hyperbolic ‘constant’ that gets me. That would mean there is never a moment in which conflict and struggle aren’t dominant.
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When I describe myself as not an “alarm kinda guy”, I’m saying I don’t trust alarm because so many alarms are false, and that’s cool…
This all began with your reference to K’s “rhetorical device to jar an audience awake”, implying that you don’t need to be jarred awake and find his hyperbole superfluous.
Yes, I find K’s hyperbole annoying too, but I have to keep in mind that he was speaking to humanity (at least everyone he could reach), many of whom were unfamiliar with subtlety and might find K’s teaching going over their heads instead of shaking them up.
If that sounds like I’m making an excuse for K’s hyperbole, I probably am, but find it better to give him the benefit of the doubt than to think he was too stupid to rein himself in.
I was being silly. (It happens.)
I am by no means awake (in the spirituality sense). Often I’m content with being sleepy, but when I want to be more alert, I appreciate wake-up calls. Rhetorical methods are tough for me, they remind me of manipulative advertising, which I loathe! And exaggeration is especially hard for me, there is often an undercurrent of dishonesty or ignorance driving it.
I’m leaning more towards a similar interpretation, thanks largely to ChatGPT.
Please share the best of GPT. We can all benefit from its wisdom
Okay - lets go look for the speech that the quote comes from and post it.
Context and meaning being more important than our judgement of 3 or 4 words on their own, right?
For example with “thought is time” - just looking at that out of context, obviously thought is not time - so K would be wrong, just like Einstein would be wrong to say “matter is energy”.
But the thing is : atom bombs.
What the words are pointing at and imply, in the context of the concepts that are being put forward, might be demonstrably correct.
Surely we are not bound to say “thought is thought” only, or at most “thought is a mental narrative” (or whatever the dictionary definition is)
PS – The “core of the teachings” is too succinct, not enough meat.
I found the above - it mentions “constant conflict” - is this the kind of claim we want to look at?
Or maybe the following is better, he explains what the conflict is :
The observer is the past. As long as there is the observer, he will inevitably translate everything he observes in terms of the past; therefore he is the maker of time. He divides the observed and the observer; in that there is conflict. When there is observation without the observer, there is no conflict, no past, there is only the fact and you have the energy to go beyond it.
As long as there is a centre, the ‘me’ or the idea of the’ me’, with all its attachments, that very centre creates a space round itself. Where there is a centre there must be a border. The border may be extended, but it is still limited by the space which the centre has created. Meditation means to come upon that space in which there is no centre, therefore no direction, therefore no time. Without meditation and the coming upon that thing which is not experiencable, which is not to be put into words, which has no time, which has no continuity, life has very little meaning. You may have a lot of money, or no money; you may be attached to your property, to your wife, to your friend, or you may worship your particular little god which thought has invented; but as long as you live there, there will be suffering, pain, anxiety, and violence. And that has no meaning in itself - obviously.
We live in disorder and by observing that disorder without the observer, there is order. Order implies no conflict; no division, outwardly or inwardly. This division as the ‘me’, and not the ‘me’, is disorder.
K Saanen 1974
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Fair enough. I’m fine with poetic license if I’m expecting poetry, but if I’m expecting ‘objective’ information, I usually look for literal exact communication. Krishnamurti can be brilliantly clear and literal. When he switches gears and takes poetic license or uses rhetorical devices I sometimes get mixed up, don’t know how to interpret what is said.
Again, my issue with “We live in constant conflict” is the ‘constant’ qualifier. You could say: Relax, he’s just saying that to bring his point home. But he makes sweeping statements like this often: We are unable to love. We are unable to create. We are trapped in the past. We are lonely miserable dull-witted asleep petty unintelligent. To me statements like this have an absoluteness about them that seems distorted, rhetorical hyperboles meant to persuade.
Perhaps these were not exaggerations for Krishnamurti. Perhaps he genuinely felt that we (presumably he was not included in this ‘we’?) were constantly conflicted, every waking moment, utterly unable to love or create, utterly held hostage by the past. Perhaps he felt he knew true serenity and love and and creativity and felt that the rest of humanity did not.
You (and GPT) are saying that. I’m saying that if you look closely at the 2nd text (K saanen 1974) “constant” is not hyperbole. It is an accurate qualifier.
Maybe I am interpreting from memory of different texts and experiences, but K’s description seems clear and consistent. The conflict for self is necessarily constant.
Using Krishnamurti’s reasoning (via my interpretation), if there is a self-center, there is conflict. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, this is true. (I don’t know if it is.) “We are always in conflict” would mean that we (normal folk) are never ever non-self-centered. Not even for a brief flash. That seems wrong, everyone has moments of non-self-centered-hood, non? Fleeting, perhaps, but not non-existent. “We are often in conflict” would work much better for me, it feels way more honest.
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Agreed. eg. Staring into the fire - wordlessly. But are you, the thinking agent known as rickScott present in those moments? (which is not the same as the moment when you realise that you have lost a few moments zoning out with the flames, and think “waoh thats cool, I wonder if etc…”)
The important thing being pointed at, is that I am necessarily in opposition to, and acting upon (from need & separation) my situation/environment. My experience is always one of the knower, whose knowledge compels it to act on behalf of its future wellbeing.
Being Poetic for a second, may I be allowed to say that as we lovingly dissapear into silence and spaciousness, the whole universe is also being this state of freedom and innocence.
This we might call unashamed awareness promoting hyperbole
nb. please don’t make me defend this claim as I will have to resort to arguing for the fundamentality of the one mind multiverse
Yes I feel he covered that in a discussion about ‘insight’. That which we call having an insight into ourselves isn’t actually insight; that a true insight into our situation would mean, not going back into it.
Like seeing that the snake is poisonous, you stop playing with it?
Determining that would require the mind to register and record the absence of rickScott. I don’t know whether that’s even possible? If I had to guess, I’d say rickScott would be largely absent during those moments, perhaps lounging (sulkily) in the background.
Fairly rolls off the tongue!
Limitless.