Liberation is not a departure from suffering but a transformative understanding of its nature.
1 Like
Yes as I see it, the difference is that the brain understands the necessity of being silent, empty, of not being occupied by the past….The past will still surface from memory but the brain will not hold on to the ‘suffering’ as it did before. It will not resist it but it will not ‘indulge’ it, it will let it go. It understands, perceives, in K’s words, that “freedom is essential”.
My brain says: To be fully alive I need to be neither unmoved by the past nor controlled by it. There is too much richness in my relationship with my past, too many vibrant experiential colors to simply drop the whole of it. And there’s way too much delusion and suffering to simply give in to it.
Brain A:
Brain B:
My brain says why doesn’t brain A simply admit that it hasn’t had a total insight into the nature of suffering, which is why suffering still arises?
And why is brain B so attached to the past? How much richness can something have if it no longer exists?
Of course, that is the case with everyone so the brain stays ‘occupied’ by the past. In that there is no freedom, is K’s message. But there is suffering and conflict. He saw that the brain must be free of the limiting past in order to “participate in the immensity”. And that the perception that freedom was “essential” brought about that freedom. The past would continue in memory but that it would no longer ‘occupy’ the mind in the way it does now…the brain could be silent and that possibility could allow it to ‘be’ Mind.
The brain acknowledges that being empty of its psychological content is being silent, still, totally awake and aware of what it has been heretofore determined to never be aware of and, like it or not, is still determined to never be empty, silent, or aware of anything beyond itself.
It isn’t enough to agree with what K has said because knowledge of K’s teaching is no substitute for self-knowledge, and self-knowledge does not require knowledge of K’s teaching.
How do we know what Krishnamurti saw Dan? And why do you make it sound like a melodrama? I feel you have become obsessed with this quotation about freedom, obsessed with “the immensity”, and are no longer willing to dialogue with anyone who questions what you are saying. Why?
This is memory. There is no you (or me) to “drop the whole of it”. The remember-er is the remembrances.
I guess you have now joined the holy ones Rick - the preachers who preach and do not submit to being questioned by the plebs who have doubts?
It’s difficult to give up the past if one has convinced oneself of its reality. Like Marcel Proust, one can live in a cork-lined room and spend a lifetime picturing the past, recalling it in all its detail.
But the past is past. It lives on in memory only.
Emotional memory has some significance in remembering our friends and relatives, in caring about those near to us. But there is a danger in sentimentalising it too much, in getting caught up in too much attachment and the suffering it brings.
Death is the ending of the past. So why not bring death forward and die a little bit every day? Then one can live today, and not be bound by the past (which is already dead).
Suffering is made up of memory. So if one has truly emptied the mind of the psychological past, one has ended suffering too. And if one has ended suffering completely, then one has also emptied the mind of the psychological past. They go together.
So has one done this? Or is one talking about what should happen according to one’s ideal image of ending?
Has one ended suffering, psychological memory, the ego? Is one talking from a place of ending?
Or is one talking from a place of continuity of the past, continuity of psychological memory, continuity of suffering, continuity of self-interest?
Which one is it Dan?
Good hangin’ with you guys again. 
Hanging by a thread? 
1 Like
Hanging by, with, and in a thread? 
1 Like
For my brain the richness is in, as I said, my relationship with my past. How the past manifests in the present. There is poignance and power in feeling memories. Pain too. And for you?
Aside from history - the ancient Chinese, the ancient Egyptians, the ancient Greeks, etc - which is of course interesting to hear about, I have never really understood why people find the past so significant.
As I understand it, the past is dead. It is over, finished. It lives on in memory, but subtracted of its essence which was originally a living person, a living moment. The past is not living.
So to live in the past is to live in memories, to live with ghosts, with old photographs and nostalgia.
I don’t see the attraction of it. Not only the attraction, but the reality of it. The past is not real like a dog or a cat, or the wind knocking at the window.
Does this sound too harsh?
Good theme for a future thread: To explore the relationship between the past and the present. In what way is and isn’t the past real, existent, manifest?
Does this sound too harsh?
I would say it leans towards (but does not fully embrace) either/or thinking. But if it’s how you genuinely feel, it’s how you genuinely feel, harsh or not.
Now that’s harsh!
I made this thread for musings, I think of it as a virtual campfire around which we can sit and share views and stories of self/world/reality/whatever. I see it as an alternative to the type of inquiry that is used in most of the other forum threads. A different way of sharing.
Everyone,
I am trying to find a way to maintain a presence here without rocking the boat too much as has been my wont. I’ll strive to keep my musings within this thread, which is appropriately stored in the Members Lounge rather than in the main Kinfonet Discussions. I’ll also stop posting obsessively.
All are invited to share (in a trusted circle) their insights, views, stories.
2 Likes
It does if you take history and archeology seriously enough to be a historian or an archeologist.
The apple that I hold in my hand and bite into this moment is real.
The apple I held in my hand and bit into a week ago is not real, it is just a memory.
This is the way I look at it.
You missed out on some ranting of mine over the last week or two. I am anti-preachers at the moment 