Relationships

Kinfonet Discussion
365

DavidS,

That is your interpretation, you understand - interpretation !!! Interpretation is an exercise of thought, psychological thought - at that. The organized religion of Buddhism and its outgrowths (Zen, etc.) were all invented by people who didn’t listen, just listen, to what the Buddha had said. All one had to do was listen, and that was the transformation, as one had stated before. And so all these proverbs, ko’ans are all invented by people exercising very clever thought, and they do that to prevent people from just listening, because it induces analysis and thought, and interpretation. Meanwhile, the whole point of listening is to move beyond thought into a field of not knowing, and that is where Buddhism is dead wrong, and absolute rubbish.

Insofar as following goes, to follow what someone is saying is listening. That is what it means to attend to what someone says. It doesn’t imply that one turns the person who speaks into some kind of guru, or become a follower to their personality, etc.

Originally, one recalls, in beginning to read K, one stopped and thought, what if this guy is nuts, what if this guy is just some looney crazy “religious” maniac, like that Mahesh Yogi guy who one had read about in the newspapers. Then one thought, well, it’s a risk, a big risk, one could just be wasting one’s time, and one also thought, yes one thought - well, what have I got to lose. So, one decided to do what he says, he said something to the effect of letting his words “sink in”, and Charley thought at the time, well, if it isn’t true, eventually what he said will eventually fall apart, and then one will know if he was a fraud or not. So, Charley risked and let his words sink in, deep within. Fortunately, Charley had a rich and abundant ground, and interestingly enough, Charley also met all of K’s criteria for someone to do the Teachings. Charley still had no idea as to how far she could go with this… But, the seed was planted, so to speak, and without realizing it, this seed took root. And then Charley forgot about those words. And then a year or so afterwards, an occasion happened in one’s life that had nothing to do with K, when the magic and mystery of having really listened occasioned the fact that the meditation began all by itself, naturally, and hence the transformation which altered Charley’s life forever. So, believe me or not - belief is irrelevant. What is important is that it’s all up to you, to the listener, either to listen or not. That’s all there is to it.

Insofar as going all the way, Charley has no idea if that is really possible now. Charley is old, and Charley was born with an anomalous heart structure, which eventually landed Charley in the hospital, and for many years Charley was on medication. Because of all the meditation that one has done, all that work, it is now more than 10 years, that Charley stopped taking the medication, with no ill effects, and one owes all of this to the work one has done within. However, saying this, one is still careful, because one was advised of one’s inherent physical fragility and weakness at around age 16 by a doctor at the Royal Vic Hospital. Charley almost died physically during one intense session of the “process” and that which is most holy intervened. I do not know how far Charley can go, because of a lifetime of physical weakness. Will see, eh?

366

Charley, as is often the case with you, you have picked up one statement out of the many statements I have made, and seek to problematise it when there is no problem. As David explains, the proverb to which you have taken offence is a well-known saying. It is only your ignorance that makes it “unconscionable”.

You seem to be unaware that K himself often used well-known sayings as part of the way he communicated, and frequently referenced proverbs and stories from different cultures - including Chan (Zen) stories - to convey his teaching.

In this case the proverb - which is supposed to jolt people out of their complacency (so your reaction is perhaps not wholly unwarranted) - is a reminder that truth does not lie outside of oneself in the authority of a teacher, or in any concepts one has created oneself of a teaching, but must be discovered directly each moment anew. It is not meant to be taken literally.

Let me make it clear, if I have not made it clear enough before: I am not a Buddhist. I do not subscribe to orthodox Buddhist belief or practice. But, as I have had the good fortune to travel and live in different parts of the world, and have friends from many different countries, I value a cosmopolitan outlook. So I do not see truth as something that only people reading K have a monopoly on - and neither did K.

This means there can be insightfulness in things that other people from other cultures have said, without one needing to accept everything else those cultures have themselves believed.

As I’m sure you are aware, there is a current of anti-intellectualism running through US culture that gives people like Trump (and others on the political right especially) a license to reject out of hand anything they do not want to hear, anything that challenges their worldview. They have made their ignorance into a virtue. But, as you must know, this celebration of ignorance merely cloaks an insecurity they have about themselves, because they know deep down that they are not the only people on earth with claims to culture, to insight. There is a world beyond their awareness that challenges and threatens everything they believe and hold to.

So when K speaks about eschewing knowledge, he is not talking about embracing this kind of narrow-minded ignorance that is proudly closed to other cultures (and makes a virtue of such close-mindedness). K was interested in what other people had to say, he didn’t wall himself off from the insights and observations of others. But he was always critical of anyone making what others have said (including what K has said) into an external authority, an external security. This is all the proverb you call “unconscionable” is saying.

367

On the topic of love, do you not see the contradiction between what you say here…

… and what you say here:

You have labelled me as “someone who speculates, theorises”, and, secure in that image, you then feel free to dismiss anything I may have to say, you reject any possibility of communication. Your image captures an aspect of what you believe me to have been in the past, and stretches this single aspect (which is an abstraction you have created from your memory of previous encounters) to cover the whole of the present relationship. This dominance of the image, and reduction of another human being to the image, is not love. Obviously. It is not the love “that holds all life together”. Your image of me is not me.

368

Another contradiction I think worth pointing out: in your reply to David, you say

And yet this sentence is immediately followed by:

This too is an interpretation, is it not? It may be a correct interpretation or an incorrect interpretation, but it is clearly your own view of the situation, is it not? As an aside, the Buddha died several centuries before Buddhism came to China, so who were these people supposed to listen to? - I take it that some of them may have listened to themselves, and made discoveries from there (or they may not have done).

When you talk, for instance, about the homeless situation in Victoria - which includes an analysis of how “rich folk” buy up properties to house them so as to keep them out of sight, and the “4th industry” of social care which indirectly funnels money to “shrinks” by passing on homeless people as clients, etc - this is by all measures a social analysis of poverty. As with all social analysis it is based partly on empirical observation, and partly on the interpretative analysis that links these observations together into a coherent whole. It may be correct or incorrect, but it is your interpretation of what is going on.

But apparently it is only your interpretations that are acceptable. When another person who you do not like makes a salient observation, you dismiss it as “theorising”, “interpretation”, “analysis”. Do you not see the contradiction?

Another thing I find strange and contradictory - and I wouldn’t mention it were it not very much central to how you communicate - is that everything is filtered through this third-person figure of “Charley”. The main subject of many - if not most - of your posts is “Charley”; always presented, I might add, in a flattering light. For instance, in one of your posts above you say

Ok. So there is a man who goes around saying “I love you” to Charley. So Charley has some kind of history with this man that is apparently significant to us. But Charley doesn’t recognise the love that this person talks about, because such love is not true love. Yet part of the message I take from this - my interpretation of what is being conveyed - is that Charley is someone special, someone different, someone who is both loved in the conventional sense and yet who is beyond such love.

And in your most recent post you write:

That is, when Charley first read K she wasn’t like an ordinary person who reads K - her mind was already specially prepared, ripe. The seed fell into wholesome ground, and has borne rich fruit, because Charley met the right “criteria” for understanding K. Which again - in my interpretation - seems to give some special significance to this person called “Charley”, some special authority that makes her interpretations, her opinions, her judgements and criticisms, more worthy of note, more salient than another’s (another like David, for instance).

You then draw attention to this specialness of Charley’s again when speaking of “the process” (using K’s language):

Here Charley is again claiming for “Charley” some kind of special relationship that only she and a few others have to that “sacred” thing that K sometimes talked about. This is stated by you as though it were an objective fact: “Charley” has undergone/is undergoing K’s process, and what K called “the sacred” has a vested interest in “Charley’s” good health. But is this not your interpretation?

All this may sound like unfair personal criticism. But Charley has made “Charley” the centre of everything we are discussing here. Maybe there is no way of discussing K’s teachings without being personal, maybe we are all doing this implicitly or explicitly. Maybe there is in fact something inherently special about “Charley” - who can know for sure? But nevertheless this personalistic language communicates to me - according to my interpretation - a kind of unconscious vanity that doesn’t sit comfortably with everything else you are saying (about truth, about meditation, about impersonal intelligence, love, etc). Maybe Charley is mistaken about some of this, right? Maybe she is not experiencing exactly what K talked about when he spoke of “the sacred”, “the process”, etc.

To question such assertions is not a personal attack, it is calling attention to a potential blind-spot that may be actively interfering in relationship. A person like K would not mind having this pointed out.

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369

One of the recognised purposes of Koans is to demonstrate the limits of analytical thought.
And yes, all explanations that I know of regarding “kill the buddha if you meet him” understand it to be about freedom from authority.

370

Is that really what is going on?

Isn’t there a stage being created and maintained here by both the writers and the replyers?

What is going on behind all these words or is it just an exchange of hearsay?

Just some questions I asked myself after all these replies.

371

I honestly don’t know - but I think it is worth asking these kinds of questions of each other, because we may all be doing something similar in one way or another.

When I worked at the Krishnamurti Centre in England (as I did for several years) I met quite a few people who claimed to have had the same (or similar) insights as K, who talked about undergoing various aspects of K’s process, who believed themselves to be specially protected and provided for as K was, who claimed to no longer be operating from a conditioned brain, etc. And at least some of these people were clearly using such ‘experiences’ as a means of subtly separating themselves from other people, elevating themselves by giving implicit importance to their own special ‘experiences’.

If you recall, K and Bohm discussed this matter in their 1975 discussions (i.e. the potential dangers of claiming a ‘special destiny’ for oneself).

My sense is that these people had had genuine insights, albeit of a partial nature, but which the residue of their (as yet) uninvestigated self-interest (aka conditioning) had subtly (and unconsciously) distorted.

The potential danger of this is obvious. Such a person (I am speaking of those few people I met in whom this process was very evident) has built an invisible wall around themselves from which to relate to other people - a form of exclusivity - which becomes an impediment in relationship. It gives someone a license to dismiss anyone who dares challenge them (in relationship). It permits them to assert themselves under the guise of a unique authority granted to them by their experiences; to play the role of ‘teacher’ or saint who is no longer subject to the reflections thrown up by the mirror of ordinary relationship.

Such a person does not take kindly to being questioned or challenged. They would rather create an “us” and “them” paradigm, under which everyone else falls into the category of worthy or unworthy, good or bad, friend or enemy, with nothing much in between.

Anyone who ignores the danger of this has clearly not absorbed those admonishments that K made constantly throughout his life not to be attached to one’s experiences, not to make oneself into an authority, not to isolate oneself from the mirror of relationship (in which these kinds of questions and challenges inevitably come up). This is what I am trying to point out.

As I said previously, I don’t believe that K would mind having this pointed out to him. He never took the authority of his own insights and meditations for granted, and never accepted the special status these insights created for him in the eyes of those around him.

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372

Relationship, surely, is the mirror in which you discover yourself. Without relationship you are not; to be is to be related; to be related is existence…

If we look into our lives and observe relationship, we see it is a process of building resistance against another, a wall over which we look and observe the other; but we always retain the wall and remain behind it, whether it be a psychological wall, a material wall, an economic wall or a national wall. So long as we live in isolation, behind a wall, there is no relationship with another…

So long as you have a frontier, whether national, economic, religious or social, it is an obvious fact that there cannot be peace in the world…

There is no such thing as living in isolation—no country, no people, no individual, can live in isolation…

Relationship is a process of self-revelation… What is important is to understand oneself in relationship with another. Then relationship becomes not a process of isolation but a movement in which you discover your own motives, your own thoughts, your own pursuits; and that very discovery is the beginning of liberation, the beginning of transformation.

(The First and Last Freedom)

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373

But as K also mentioned many times: there’s no one to determine this, if such is taken place it’s a copy and not the origional. (my wording!)

I was present at his what later appeared to be his last talk in Brockwood.

Also there was a guy who claimed to completely understood K.

With a loudly voice he was a disturbing factor at the catering tent. In an attempt to investigate this claim i asked permission to use the at that time empty gathering tent to inquire him. It was amusing to see how even the organisation was trapped into a
Presupposition by first taking me for this guy and after that was cleared made the remark that only K was permitted to speak in this tent as if it was holy ground.

The other day this guy was forbidden to enter the site and as a result other friends of him put a flyer on the catering: “Free talks on Brockwood are as free as Brockwood ltd. limits it”.

Really this visit made a lot clear for me, how easely it is to get lost in swamp or jungle of life.

374

Permanency,

There is nothing permanent in this corrupt world, including relationships. Everything is change.

375

Were you planning a one on one talk with this person? With an audience or just the two of you?

376

Very clear post Douglas - if there had been an icon for one hand clapping, I would have used it here.

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377

No, there were a group of 5/6 persons who wanted to go in dialogue with him, i was the one who gone ask to use the gathering tent and at the same time creating less disturbing at the cateringtent. He was not accepted at the campfire afterwards whereby i enjoyed a long dialogue about the talk of K from that day.

378

There were a couple of these people who showed up on the old forum and were very aggressive until they were finally banned. John R there described them as having the “gladiator approach”!

379

This was not the case at this campfire, they only did not let him take the podium by which he disappeared to his camper. Afterwards i was told that he made his own podium there with 10/11 persons outside the Brockwood estate. I was invited but not interested because of his attitude towards those who didn’t agree with him.

380

Do you remember what it was that you didn’t agree with?

381

In this case, yes, Charley picked the wrong statement to highlight for sure. We all can see what the statement was pointing to, and was definitely in line with Krishnamurtis teachings. It would be helpful for Charley to do a google search on that phrase/koan and better understand it. Then you might appreciate why James shared it.

Yes, so true, K himself often used Zen stories and stories from the Upanishads, etc to convey his teaching. This is a very valid point and needs to be stressed. K might have put down Tradition in his talks, but at the same time, he had no problem picking and using stories from Tradition that he found helpful to share in his public talks.

This too is very important point. I highlighted it the other day myself in reminding people not to be too fundamentalist, for one can even become a Krishnamurti fundamentalist. There is great danger here, and one has to be on guard always for this happening.

Yes, I see the contradictions of Charleys words on love and then how she treats you. You have taken the time to point out many of the contradictions, as you see it. It is up to Charley now to look at herself and see if what you have pointed out has any validity or not. Krishnamurti himself, encouraged us to look and see if there is any truth in what another points out about us. This is definitely in line with Krishnamurtis teachings and approach.

I dont see what you are doing as a personal attack, but I can see how some might see it that way or even Charley taking it as unfair personal criticism. It is a fine line between trying to help someone see their potential blind spots and crossing the line into personal attacks. I even pointed out the other day and highlighted a short exchange between Rick and James in the Bohm Dialogue thread where James was doing the same thing to Rick, pointing things out. It could have turned ugly and reactions and images formed and no relationship. But in the end, Rick and James are now good friends and seem to really understand where each other is coming from.

I think that potential is here too with Charley and James. If they can just get behind these couple of misunderstandings and sticky points, they might actually enjoy speaking and communicating with each other. And even if not, and they both go their separate ways on this forum, they have tried to meet each other, understand each other, to have a relationship.

One last comment, this sharing about relationships, images, contradictions, etc is not just about Charley and James, it is for all of us to look into and see where we are doing it. I also see it is going on right now in another thread where Paul and Inquiry are going through similar issues. Inquiry was questioning Paul about certain issues that James has highlighted here in this thread, about someone who seems to understand and live Ks teachings and the other person questioning them if they really are. I also have seen this several times with others since joining this forum. So this is an ongoing issue and not confined to just one person.

382

It was his whole attitude, not so much what he said but how he said it and the way he reacted if you didnt directly accepted his claim. Also the way he left the campfire disappointed and a bit angry.

Still in my view not belonging to an enlightened one.

383

Yes. In the case of the two I mentioned though they could have been the same person changing their name after being banned, it was the violence I felt in the posts that they aimed at me and others. It didn’t feel right. But who knows.

384

It’s not only among participants but also among so-called representatives that we can ask ourselves if this belongs to the perfume of teaching?

At the same time, I sometimes wonder whether a person’s behaviour does not indicate such a similarity.

These kinds of questions keep me on my toes.
Non-verbal is a very undervalued part of communication!