If you’ve never been flagged, you don’t have anything to worry about. I’ve been flagged more times than I can recall, and I usually tone down whatever it was I said.
Thanks for your honesty here ‘Inquiry’ and the assurance I have nothing to worry about unless flagged. Sorry you have been flagged so many times and feel you have to tone it down.
To me, it is just words, I dont know why people get so bent out of shape. We cannot physically hurt another on here, from words on a screen.
I do think it is helpful to try to be respectful and considerate of others, but at the same time, one should be free to question all.
Questioning is one of the most important things I learned from Krishnamurti. And to even question him. Otherwise, his teachings are the same as any religion or philosophy where one just accepts and believes it, which is the most dangerous thing to do.
So I appreciate posters like yourself who will question all, including Krishnamurti.
One might say that forum moderation takes care of itself when there is care for each other, care for the question, and care for ‘the looking’.
Forum moderation breaks down when care has been forgotten, and carelessness takes over (following your earlier metaphor of a garden being neglected).
We are each responsible (not in the sense of an ‘ought’ or a ‘should’, but just factually - because our responses literally create the atmosphere here) for caring, being considerate, etc.
Perhaps the challenge is when we see that carelessness may have taken-over a particular exchange (between two or more participants); and for the person who sees this (essentially a neutral participant, if they can honestly maintain this neutrality) to delicately (care-fully) engage so as to diffuse or objectively reflect the situation (‘reflecting’ to the participants how the garden is being neglected).
One might say that forum moderation takes care of itself when there is care for each other, care for the question, and care for ‘the looking’.
Yes!
Perhaps the challenge is when we see that carelessness may have taken-over a particular exchange (between two or more participants); and for the person who sees this (essentially a neutral participant, if they can honestly maintain this neutrality) to delicately (care-fully) engage so as to diffuse or objectively reflect the situation (‘reflecting’ to the participants how the garden is being neglected).
Good example. Should be done skillfully, with kindness. Might take some practice.
If you want the forum policy on banning, you should speak with Dev.
Imo things like warnings, suspension, and banning should be considered when someone is clearly and persistently harming individual members or the collective.
Freedom of expression makes things messy!
But it may be the only thing the conditioned brain is capable of, since it is dualistic, which means that everything is either this or that, good/bad, right/wrong, true/false, etc. The conditioned brain is caught, as K said, in the corridor of opposites.
So we can’t help but believe or disbelieve K’s teaching, and this isn’t a problem the conditioned brain can solve, but an actuality to be seen and understood.
In other words, if the conditioned brain is more interested in its conditioning (self-knowledge) than anything else, it is awakening from its reality to actuality.
Words are dangerous . Unfortunately words have dominated the mind. You can see that when someone calls you a dirty name and drives away on the street. Logically words are words but we take that ugly word and turn it against ourselves. The guy is long gone but the mind keeps it alive in us. Why does the mind do that?
As I see it the self image is something like a hot-air pie. If someone comes along and sticks a pin in it, it deflates. It takes a while for it to inflate again. The upside of that experience is that it tells you that you’re carrying around, a hot-air pie!
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Words can’t kill one. Although they may deflate the self-image, as Dan says.
If what is said is nonsense - ignore it.
If it touches a nerve - understand why. What one looks at about one’s own reaction is no-one else’s concern - and it is a valuable learning experience.
Psychologically words are dangerous because they prevent direct perception which is essential to survive. Words also distort emoticons and feelings. Physically words are useful because of communication.
Examiner -
Words communicate technical facts and technical images as technical thinking.
When the self is put together by thought, all those words and their facts and technical imagery become psychological opinions at the root of the self structure - what is termed ‘emotional imagery’, or visual and verbal hallucinations and psychological imagination - as they are not based in truth or fact. All they do is measure the measurer.
My vision for the forum is a trusted circle of friends looking and learning individually and together.
‘Krishnamurti’ is for me a pointer to looking and learning. I’m much more interested in expanding my understanding of what’s really going on than in expanding my understanding of Krishnamurti’s views. Attachment to any teacher limits looking and learning. So all teachers are invited to the party, Krishnamurti and Buddha and Shankara and Spira and Whitehead and … , but there’s no ultimate authority.
Your vision?
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I agree with this (although ‘trust’ is something we have to build, both individually and together).
I can agree with this too (although understanding what Krishnamurti meant by the words he used and the insights he imparted is, for me at least, a natural part of understanding what is “really going on”).
I think I would slightly disagree here, as it would inevitably confuse the function of this particularly forum (Kinfonet) if we were to deliberately introduce a plethora of different voices all speaking in different languages (I don’t mean literal languages of course), while at the same time referring to them as though they had equal value to us. Clearly they do not (or else we would all be on a Rupert Spira website - or a Buddhist website - discussing these issues).
Alternative voices can be touched on in passing of course, but it is surely in keeping with the spirit of this particular space to retain the background indication of Krishnamurti’s ‘pathless land’ approach, as his teachings represent (in outline at least) the closest approximation to the truth that we presently need to initiate any enquiry.
This being said, I think it is completely natural to highlight teachings that have ‘spoken to us’ meaningfully, no matter the source, and even use them as a basis for dialogue - because truth belongs to no-one in the end, and can speak to us from trees and rocks and rivers and birds (so why not other people too?).
But the central authority is always going to be what we ourselves have seen, witnessed, observed and understood - an authority that cannot be stored up for the future (and so become authoritarian), but which must be continually rediscovered.
The forum is for human freedom.
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Speaking for myself, I actually wish there was more freedom to ask questions about K’s teachings. There are things that I want to ask about, but I refrain from asking because I feel that someone is going to come along and drop a Krishnamurti-bomb on me for having the temerity for asking it! Some people are intolerant of too much questioning - they see it as egotistic, ‘intellectual’, a display of self, etc - and so one feels forced to fit into a prescriptive formulation of K’s teachings that feels foreign, phoney, imposed.
I refuse to accept anything another tells me unless I can see or understand it for myself - and there are many passages where K clearly says this himself. So I don’t know why there is such a fear of asking questions on the forum?
So part of my ‘vision’ of the forum is to have a space free - at leisure - for asking any question that one has, but especially (for me) questions about what K meant by this, that and the other - because there are vanishingly few other places to do this in the world.
I agree wholeheartedly James. I did ask a few questions myself that I know might be seen as too controversial or wrong to ask in this forum. I took the risk. And sometimes no one even addresses or responds to what to me is a very important question that I want to look into.
I asked about K and Rajagopal conflict in your conflict thread and no one touched it, responded to it. I felt it was a wasted opportunity to really look into whether K had any conflict in his life or not. I also brought up banning in this very thread and only Rick briefly touched upon it and basically said to ask Dev about it. I wanted to hear what others felt about banning participants and what a K forum like this is really about, real freedom of expression or does it have to be basically toned it to fit into what K participants really think. This is exactly I think an example of what you are referring to James, about you want to be able to really question everything, including K, and have that freedom here.
I think most of us are second handed human beings. That is why anything we say is never new and not the outcome of fresh discovery … But on the other hand everything Krisnamurti said is always new and fresh . The question of authority comes in when someone don’t understand the teachings none verbally and accurately… I am not defending the teachings which would be silly. But comparing krishnamurti with other philosophers is silly and pointless…As far as “questioning the teachings” who is going to answer the questioning ? K is dead ! One has to question oneself and the answer to the question is in the question…
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I understand why you would think this, it is after all a Krishnamurti forum. As you know from our earlier exchanges, I question the pathless approach. I lean more towards the Buddhist raft approach: Follow a path until the path no longer serves its purpose. Dropping it too early can lead to stagnation.
This being said, I think it is completely natural to highlight teachings that have ‘spoken to us’ meaningfully, no matter the source, and even use them as a basis for dialogue - because truth belongs to no-one in the end, and can speak to us from trees and rocks and rivers and birds (so why not other people too?).
Agreed.
But the central authority is always going to be what we ourselves have seen, witnessed, observed and understood - an authority that cannot be stored up for the future (and so become authoritarian), but which must be continually rediscovered.
Maybe. But for me it seems that accepting this as true is part of the authority process.
I think you have to remember that there are only (at any one time) between 10 and 15 participants maximum reading and posting on these threads, so whether a topic speaks to them in that moment is largely a matter of chance. For some people the topic has not yet entered their awareness as a topic worthy of attention; while for others it may be a topic that they have already devoted a fair amount of time and space to previously, and they do not feel a spontaneous appetite to revisit it.
I went through a period of time several years ago when the biography of Krishnamurti was very much in the forefront of my mind, and I agonised over K’s relationship to the Rajagopals (I read several biographical accounts, including Radha Sloss’ book, as well as Mary Lutyens’ reply to her - Krishnamurti and the Rajagopals - and, more recently, Mary Zimablist’s memoirs/journals). But one can never really know what happened between them for certain. From what I read, it seems like the conflict was almost entirely on the side of the Rajagopals. K was perhaps naive, unaware of the consequences of his influence on the family. But it seems clear that Rosalind and Rajagopal were possessive, bullying, scheming and manipulative in a way that K appears to have met for several decades with impassivity and a lack of self-defence. And that it was only when Mary Z and others became aware of the situation that they attempted to proactively defend K through legal channels. From the earliest days of the Theosophical Society these power dynamics can be seen to have been in play, which continued after K was taken in by Annie Besant, and for long after his departure from the TS. These humans limitations are ever present - as we can see plainly on this forum - and they were clearly present in K’s immediate circle of confidantes as well.
My only criticism of K was that he seems to have been positively prudish about making public the nature of his relationship with Rosalind. There are all kind of reasons why he did not make this relationship public of course: natural discretion (whose business was it really other than K’s and Rosalind’s?); a reluctance to be the person to ‘out’ Rosalind as an adulteress at a time when that was still deeply frowned upon; a reluctance to cause Rajagopal shame or to tarnish his reputation; a probable lack of actual memory about the affair, given that K’s memories were often wiped out by his “process”; etc. But I cannot help feeling that if he himself didn’t feel a stigma attached to his intimate relations with Rosalind, he might have met the challenge of the Rajagopals sooner, and been ahead of their slanders.
However, the way that Rosalind and Rajagopal kept up this drama over essentially 4 decades - including posthumously through Radha’s prejudicial book (which reads like a Thomas Hardy novel: the first half being full of light and warmth, the second half being all slander and alienation) - reflects just how limited their minds were in the end. I do think that this affected K, causing him tremendous strain and heart-ache. But, at the same time, I think K was genuinely able to drop the whole toxic relationship as quickly as it presented itself, and so I genuinely don’t think he died with the feeling of conflict in his heart. The same, alas, cannot be said for Rajagopal, who seems to have been the one who suffered the most over his traumatic reactions to K, which may also have brought about (for him) an early demise.
But as I said, no-one will ever know exactly what went on in these people’s minds. And nowadays I really don’t care. It feels like agonising over the strained relationships between people in the Royal Family! - Their lives have nothing to do with my own.
You see, I find this kind of comment so unhelpful. What good does it do to compare ourselves with Krishnamurti or the Buddha? It’s so silly. Of course we are not K.
Again, it all matters what is meant by the comparison. If one hears two birds in a tree, singing their morning compositions, one has heard more than one bird.
Perhaps there are people who have only ever heard a single bird singing, and they don’t believe that any other bird can possibly sing as beautifully as the bird they know. The same motivation is the one behind all nationalism, patriotism, fundamentalist religion and sectarianism. Maybe your bird truly does sing the most sweetly, but revelling in ignorance as though it were a virtue is not virtuous.
K was a human being. I am a human being. There is nothing in humanity that is alien to me.