You can hear what you can’t see. The self is just noise, sound and fury, signifying nothing but what the brain chooses to believe.
if you can’t see the self, how do you know that you are a stream of consciousness, the babbling brook that holds, something you’ve never seen?
No one has seen the stream of consciousness because there’s nothing actual to see. It’s all words, concepts, images, voices, mental content the meaning and significance of, the brain decides.
Has any human being ever heard something in a vacuum?
Does not seeing mean there is nothing to see?
As I understand it, intellectual expertise is based on knowledge alone. In the example I referred to as an example of intelligence in my previous post, I mentioned awareness, sensitivity, empathy, and great understanding. I think all of these are involved in the kind of intelligence K spoke of.
Despite the fact that we are all conditioned, I’d say that there is the possibility of intelligence emerging from time to time. Maybe conditioning is like a strait jacket which we occasionally slip out of?
There is this book ‘The Awakening of Intelligence’ where one can understand what Krishnamurti means by intelligence. The very word ‘awakening’ implies that it is for us to awaken, not that intelligence in inaccessible to us, on the contrary. One reason why Krishnamurti says we need awakening to intelligence is the fact that people are negligent when their action in general becomes habit, so the mind gets dull, or people live just on concepts and again hinder the flow of intelligence in much of their daily activity.
This is a key point (at least for me), and who knows maybe one day we could look together at why so many people who have listened to or read Krishnamurti lock themselves in a psychological prison, coming to the conclusion that our ignorance (conditioning, thought, memory, experience, etc.) will never allow us to contact that intelligence/awareness so that we will never be free from conflict… using Krishnamurti’s “Bible” to support their thesis.
By the way, this is not only happening in the Krishnamurtian world, but also in the Buddhist, Christian, etc. world.
Yes I think that our moments of insight are exactly that. We are conditioned to think of ourselves as individuals and K comes along and says no, “You are the world”. We are conditioned to feel that we are observers of the world around us and he says no, “The observer is the observed” …we’re conditioned to feel that we are the author of our thinking and he says no, “The thinker is the thoughts”….he’s pointing at the conditioned brain and asking it to look at itself , not to change how it is but to look at our situation without judgement or condemnation with a choiceless awareness of how we are. That I think is the awakening of intelligence.
What then prevents the person who has come into contact with Krishnamurti, who has listened to him, who sees all that you have just described about what would be asked of him, from stepping forward into the unknown and awakening to that intelligence?
All the ‘spiritual’ traditions promise a payoff at the end .a reward of some kind and our greed is attracted to that. That also allows the idea of a psychological time when this ‘enlightenment’ might happen…We pick up the K message in the same way and try to fit it into the traditional pattern.
We interact with the teachings in a scholarly manner - at the level of words and ideas to be grasped.
Nothing pushes us to make the step - either we don’t understand what that step entails, nor why we should take that step.
Maybe we should ask : what does “taking the step” mean/entail. ie. what is freedom from experience, or the scary sounding version : psychological death?
My guess is that if such a radical change is possible, it would take seeing clearly the danger we are in by NOT escaping from the ‘burning house’! We don’t. He said it clearly enough: “Freedom is born with the perception that freedom is essential.”
Wil it not be write to say that self is a vertual entity created by brain for security, that over time, it began believe it is actual - a case of self hypnosis it is trapped.
There’s wiggle room in the straitjacket of conditioning.
Anyone who believes that has moved on from Krishnamurti to some other hope for humanity.
Awakening is a natural process - it is not “stepping forward”.
When intelligence awakens, the life-long dream of myself is a fading memory.
True. Now, could we say that this going round and round at the level of words and ideas would be a way of escaping our responsibility after having listened to Krishnamurti, and see that what my own attention asks of me requires a responsibility that I may not be willing to have, seeing that it entails a certain ‘disconnection’ from the world that has surrounded me so far (what the thought translates as ‘loneliness’) and all that it entails, without having any certainty that it has to lead me to a ‘better place’ that also does not depend on someone else, but only on me?
One should then, and this is my view, be serious enough with oneself and ask himself seriously what it is that prompted him to go first to listen to Krishnamurti, to feel that ‘my life cannot go on like this’ through the observation of His words, and eventually to prevent an action that was not of thought.
Yes, that’s right… but I also think that in the end we corrupt the whole thing, including this so-called reward, convinced that it will be the liberation from everything that gives me dissatisfaction, while I will be able to keep everything that gives me pleasure and satisfaction.
Yes, awakening is a natural process after one has ‘stepped forward’. Like a child’s first step, or Buddha’s decision to remain seated under the tree until he found the truth.
And you know this because you have awakened and “stepped forward”?
I’m not sure what this responsibility is.
Are we speaking of a socially imposed responsibility? eg. Do no harm
Or my inner responsibility based on pleasure and pain? ie.my suffering
Would this be our expectations? What did I want from the teachings, what benefit, what security, what power?
Our expectations being of course part of ourselves, and thus we could say that the reasons we sought out K are the same ones preventing us from letting him and our suffering go.
I went to him hoping for answers, hoping he would sooth my pain?
Please pay attention (to what the other person is saying and to your reactions) - we are just speaking together. “stepping forward” and “awakening” are words we are using to speak about the process of psychological death (of which we may know nothing - like alpha centauri, or the back of my fridge, or quantum)
There’s no real need for fear and mistrust here. Mistrust and hatred just make things more unpleasant.
PS. I’m well aware that fraggle can get pretty spicy too