Excuse me Charley but isn’t there a ? behind that first sentence. And then ‘seems to me’ is not a rock-solid conclusion but a consequence of the question in the first sentence.
I am very selective in what I reply to and if you would really bother to get to know me, starting to label me pro or contra is not the best start.
I don’t get this Charley. We were on speaking terms in the not too distant past (only last month in fact!). A few days later we had a conversation about the topic of “experience”, to which you reacted very strongly; since when you have openly unfriendly towards me. Why?
It seems to me that you have merged and elided two very different things: the actions of a person legitimately challenging you on things you have asserted; and the actions of those who may have made personal attacks. These are two quite different things in my mind, so to conflate them is incorrect.
As you yourself say here, it is part and parcel of being in dialogue - and in relationship - that we challenge each other. I am challenged all the time by others. Yes, sometimes it can feel personal (and sometimes it clearly is!), but most of the time the challenges are entirely in keeping with what I would expect from a forum like this. We are here to discuss K, discuss our questions and perceptions, and part of this involves mutual, hopefully affectionate, challenges and questioning.
And I have challenged some of the things you have said - both at the level of trivial details (you may recall our conversation from a while ago about the distinction K made in an earlier period of his teaching between “sincerity” and “earnestness”!); but also at the level of the claims you have frequently made for yourself (that you are undergoing K’s process/mutation, that you are an arhat, that you are living in truth, etc).
Apparently you are conflating all of this with “personal attacks”. But isn’t this to be expected on a K website? - K said to question everything, to question people who say “I know and you don’t know”, etc; to refuse to accept something that one has not seen with one’s own intelligence. This is all I see myself doing.
And there is, it seems to me, an obvious contradiction worth pointing out between - on the one hand - the claims of a person to be living a selfless life in harmony with the whole, who is supposed to be empty of images, who is undergoing K’s process, who no longer has dreams because their mind is so free from thought (all things that have been stated openly on the forum); and this other person who apparently does holds grudges (presumably based on images), who is inclined to be unforgiving and uncharitable in their comments, who is frequently impatient, hostile - and yes, personally rude; and who walls themselves up behind mountains of K quotes and K rhetoric, while all the while talking about love and intelligence, as if these two approaches were compatible.
If you observed all this taking place in another person, would you not question it?
As you yourself have written, intelligence is impersonal. So there is surely a way of discussing all this factually, objectively, with affection even. But you seem only to want to discuss these matters - or rather assert them - on your own terms, without lending legitimacy to the voices of anyone else who challenges you or questions you.
Relationship means being vulnerable enough to admit that you are not perfect, and to meet other people on equal ground. Even K did this, throughout his life (I have met people who knew K, and they all say that in person he was a modest, gentle person who never held grudges against other people - even though others held grudges about him).
So, basically, I feel that you are doing everything you accuse others of doing Charley. I may be mistaken in this, but it would be dishonest of me not to point this out. You have called me and others petty, ignorant, foolish, a “piece of work”, absurd, “blathering”, “scary”, etc; and yet you seem to accuse anyone and everyone but yourself of launching personal attacks.
And yet, this does not - for me - detract from the many insightful and useful things you have to share (your positive contributions do not go without notice). It just makes you human, like everyone else on the forum.
Give the anger (frustration, fear, envy, bias, <self> hatred) that causes the nastiness free reign, go with it, don’t resist it. Explore the dark side, let it out, observe it. Dare to show you.
I still think it is worth attempting to dialogue in as open and free-spirited a way as we feel able to.
Some degree of fractiousness and friction is inevitable - it is as much the case here as it would be offline, in person - but so long as we continue to hold out the possibility of resetting any of our relationships here, there is always the possibility of a different quality of dialogue emerging, that we all know can and does happen sometimes.
It is of course difficult, if not impossible, to be vulnerable when there is conflict in the air - but we can’t wait until everyone is agreeable to begin to show ourselves. We would have to wait forever…!
Don’t underestimate the power of the dark side!*
I wonder if part of the reason why this darkness takes on energy and power is because we have been taught, consciously and unconsciously, to judge it. This is not to excuse actual malevolence or cruelty, which needs to be called out. But, as you say, it is important to see or sense these seeds of fear, anger, envy and violence in ourselves, as they are in all their shocking truth - and one cannot do this if one is consciously or unconsciously sitting in judgement of these qualities.
But it requires sensitivity to do this. The seeds of darkness will become actual darkness unless they can flower in the right way.
*this is a Star Wars reference for those who never had a childhood 
.
Very powerful is the dark side! It takes intelligence to let if flower in a way that doesn’t do more harm than good. I don’t know if I’m up to it, if any of us are up to it. It’s risky to experiment with, egos will get bruised, dark energies will be summoned. We’d need to stay aware of all of it.
(Charley responding to quote above). “This is an incorrect assumption, hypothesis. As inquiry is something that is done alone, and is in no way dependent on what others participate in. So, this insinuation is misleading.”
[/quote]
Charley, in the 15 words you quoted from James above, you talk about an “insinuation”. The word “insinuation” has a connotation of something unpleasant or bad. You have, of course, every right to challenge James’s statement but the aforementioned quote is merely expressing an opinion rather than insinuating anything.
False insinuations,
There was no “reaction”, that was a false insinuation. Just because one responds emphatically is not a reaction.
You have never challenged the contents of a post of Charley, only challenged the person of Charley with false statements.
Calling a person “toxic” is not a challenge, it’s a clear personal attack.
Forgiveness, charity are Christian ideas, has nothing to do with K
as you have previously called Charley “hostile”, while Charley was just being impersonal, the contents of the posts were in no way “hostile”, Charley doesn’t have to behave in the way that you like, and your interpretation of how Charley moves away from a convo (as being impatience) is your personal interpretation, Charley had other things to do so moved away from a convo is all.
K never called anyone “toxic”, never called anyone “hostile”, never used demeaning denigrating language as you have done.
Never called you personally “petty” not once, if so, please cite…if you take the contents of one of the K quotes re: pettiness and infer that one is attacking you personally, that wasn’t it.
No way, Charley isn’t K in no way. I don’t have to make friends with anyone on here. It is not my job. Only in private will Charley open her heart chakra. We have no relationship, never really did, which Charley saw the moment you began to ignore Patricia’s responses to you.
Actually, it was Charley who challenged you re: sincerity, not the other way around.
I find it fitting that your long, preachy, speech, is followed by Krishnamurti speaking of “tremendous honesty”… "which means no deception at any level. And deception only comes when you desire, when you want, when you want to succeed, when you want to achieve something, to attain something, then the operation of will brings illusion”, wherein he describes your grandiose delusion.
Yes, if that sick person is doing harm.
A rabid dog is killed. A deranged gunman is killed. A pathological liar is elected President and begins dismantling democracy, and is voted out of office. Sometimes anger is appropriate and its energy is applied to a solution.
I am angry at those who believe they have undergone the radical transformation K spoke of, and instead of keeping this conceit to themselves, come to a forum like this to promote themselves. If it doesn’t make you angry, ask yourself why. Krishnamurti gave his life to awakening us to our self-centered existence so that we’d see this depraved, “sick”, condition for what it is, despite its being normal.
Fully awakening to this condition, according to Krishnamurti, is the end of the condition, a radical change, a transformation. If this is true, and others have undergone this transformation, would they spend their time in a forum like this, promoting themselves and playing the role of teacher? If so, transformation is nothing more than self-delusion, and is not only worthless, but more harmful than helpful.
Charley, I feel you are responding to an image of who I am, and not who I actually am. You are holding onto the image of someone against whom you need to do battle, someone you feel you need to condemn, someone you need to dismiss - someone who is your enemy. But I am not your enemy.
Yes, some of the things you have said, and the manner of your saying it, has felt toxic to me. You don’t seem to want to see this or own it - ok. Others who read your comments may feel as you do. I can only say that I do not. But I am not trying to persuade you otherwise. I only point out what I see and feel. If you want to call your behaviour “impersonal intelligence”, I can only say that I sincerely doubt it.
But I don’t see you as an enemy. I honestly don’t know who you are, because - as you say - you are rarely vulnerable. You tell interesting little stories about yourself (in the third person), but that is not the same thing.
I don’t believe that sharing one’s heart is a personal thing - love is neither personal nor impersonal. I have a sense of what a loving response looks like, because I have been fortunate enough to have been around a few people who genuinely communicated this quality, and it isn’t something one saves for a chosen few.
But I see that no matter what I say, we are just talking past each other. We are completely different people. This seems to be the limit of what can be achieved through this mode of online communication.
Whether these things provoke anger, fear, hatred, sadness, etc… is due to conditioned judgement, aka the self - they are not essential to dealing with the situation effectively - instinct, physical reflexes, and reason can also be the basis for action.
You state this with certainty, but you really don’t know.
Anger is just energy and can be put to good use. Ask any artist…
Yes, the effects of emotion are evident. This does not however address their cause.
One reason we may claim that our emotional reactions to certain events are probably conditioned, is the similar reactions people raised within the same culture might react to something, compared with those from a different culture.
Oups, I haven’t addressed your claim that emotions are essential in order to deal with stuff effectively - let’s just consider the claim for ourselves, no need to debate it right now.
I haven’t claimed “that emotions are essential in order to deal with stuff effectively”…that’s what you read into what I said.
You were questioning whether anger is necessary or useful, and I’m saying that a flare-up isn’t necessarily harmful, but energy that fades as quickly as it flares, and can be put to good use.
Anger is as good or bad as what follows in its wake.
Can I put it to good use by getting angry with you, for example ~ for what I perceive as your bad behavior? Would it help you? How could I be sure? (without some kind of magical dalaï lama style powers)
Unless we are merely aiming for effects like, trauma, conflict, or the strengthening of my ego?
Correct me if I am wrong, you say this seems to be the limit in this mode of online communication, but this probably happens also in zoom or in person dialogues, right? Unfortunately, it seems to be a problem for most humans, to be able to communicate with each other without talking past each other.
In a sense this online forum should enable one to take their time to really think before responding. At least that is an option. In person or zoom dialogues happen in real time, so there is even more of a chance for quick reactions to what is said.
It seems the best we can do is try to meet everyone without letting the past images interfering too much in our relationship. To try to be aware of what is really happening. We can do the same in here, but this constant talking about it or trying to get others to see this, is probably a waste of time and energy in my opinion. The best we can do is just be as aware as possible on our end.
There is no magical means of relating to another, but at least with in-person communication any misunderstanding that occurs can be immediately addressed and resolved in a way that is impossible with text-based communication (at least for me - I can only type so fast!).
Obviously such immediately resolved misunderstandings do not happen when there is a large group, because in a large group one cannot ask everyone who speaks to clarify their meaning, as this would be seen by others as taking up too much conversational space. But in a small group, or one-on-one, misunderstandings can be addressed in real time, as they happen.
Also, with in-person communication there is a plethora of non-verbal information that is often helpful in contextualising a person’s remarks. One gets a quicker sense of where a person is coming from, what their non-verbal intentions are, etc, which doesn’t happen here. And, of course, people are generally more respectful in person: the image one might have of another is subject to real-time correction and adjustment, so it is less common to be as dismissive as we can be when it is just a series of written words we are responding to. I owe written words nothing, I can project onto them any image I choose - but a real person, in space and time, I cannot so easily dismiss.
I think it is this dismissive attitude that I find so alienating about some of the people one meets on a text-based forum like this. People are constantly talking past each other and never meeting. There are a few participants here whose only relationship to another involves pouncing on a stray word they have used, and using this to form a straw-man image of the other. This leads to black-and-white thinking, dogmatic thinking - a kind of autism of the understanding - in which hard and fast images are created very quickly on the basis of just one or two words.
This is the breeding ground for fundamentalism - an atmosphere in which words can only have one meaning or another, this meaning or that, black or white, with no nuance permitted.
Most of the problems I encounter on Kinfonet fall into this category. As you know, K-fundamentalists use words in a very limited way, with each word treated as an article of faith. There is even a different fundamentalism for each era of K’s teaching, so that people who are used to K’s earlier public talks will gamely join battle with those who are more familiar with his later talks! Certain words create a strong reaction, a negative image, while others create a neutral or positive image. This word-fundamentalism is especially deadly to online, text-based communication, because it becomes the chief filter for the entire relationship. All other human feelings are sacrificed on the alter of the one permitted usage of a word!
This is why I find it so strange that - on the one hand - there are people here claiming to be free from thought, free from self-interest, who no longer even dream, and who therefore must have the most capacious intelligence, the greatest sense of love, compassion, etc; while - on the other - these very same people are tearing strips off another, or contemptuous of another, because of a wrong way of using words!
Such people have taken K’s words and made them into a religious idol. They are so identified with those words that any “wrong usage” of them provokes fierce reactions, outrage, hostility, contempt. Even a simple word like “sincerity” will do the trick if K has used it in a certain way during a certain phase of his public talks. Or the word “experience”. Good god, the reactions such words can create! Relationships can live and die on such words apparently.
I find this word-fundamentalism so foreign to real spirituality, so lacking in true humanity - which is not to say that one ought not to be precise in one’s use of words, to strive to be as clear, as accurate as possible, etc.
And text-based communication exacerbates this.
I understand better where you are coming from in regards to text based communication.
I wonder if it is possible then that those who are having difficulty communicating on this forum, if they can meet and discuss at Kinfonet zoom dialogues or set up one on ones. One can just do audio if they dont want to be seen. James seems very open to discussing with anyone.
As a somewhat objective participant, not too involved nor a follower of any of the posters, I just dont see much change happening or meeting going on. I still see the same misunderstandings and images being formed and conflicts continuing.
I do hope there is some breakthrough, somehow, at some point, whether via through this forum or meeting on zoom dialogues, etc.
And lastly, I am totally against any fundamentalism, including K fundamentalism.
I have read and re-read your post a few times now James, and I have to say it seems quite spot on, your observations of what happens on this online forum. I personally have noticed the same things happening you described.
I have also noticed these same things happening on any online forum I have been on over the years. A couple of Buddhist forums I was on, the same sort of fundamentalism was happening too. It is very frustrating to me to see so called loving wise Buddhists trash each other over the use of a word or wrong use of a teaching.
Also instead of trying to understand each other and learn and see things with more clarity, a good portion of the posters would engage in battling each other and focusing on the poster rather than discussing what was posted. It is really a strange phenomenon, this online forum discussions.
Thanks for highlighting many of the pitfalls and issues that happen on these Krishnamurti online forums. It is helpful to read this and look into it, I feel. To shed some light on what is really happening and to possibly help us all to use this forum in a better, more constructive way.