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.
Did you ask Dev? He’s in control of suspension/banning afaik, so it would make sense to know his criteria for suspending/banning, what the process is, and so on. All we can do is block users, which hides their posts.
If you are thinking I’m still avoiding the question, you’re right! Limiting freedom of speech is a loaded issue, and I am not comfortable kicking off a discussion about it. What do you think about banning?
Ok. But I think we can discuss this, right? I am not saying that one should make one’s memory of previous observations, partial insights (‘seeings’), etc into an authority (either for oneself or for others). I am saying that the only logically reasonable authority (in ‘spiritual’ matters) lies in one’s own immediate perception and understanding. Anything else is inevitably going to be second-hand (from books, memory, or the pressure of others). I’m not sure that you would really deny this - but you might be sceptical that such truthful perceptions can actually occur (which is a slightly different matter).
However, if we make doubt an essential ingredient of all enquiry, then the problem of authority (inner or outer) is not insurmountable.
And then Charley and Patricia dropped K-bombs on you. You must be doing something right.
Thank you James for sharing some about the conflict between Rajagopal and Krishnamurti. And for addressing most of my posts. I lose interest quickly in the public forum if we dont go deep enough into these topics or my questions are ignored or lightly touched.
I am interested in exploring some of this with you in private messaging rather than sharing my deepest personal thoughts on the matter and be attacked for my questions and questioning. If you have any interest, shoot me an message and we can. I emailed you a long time ago and never heard back from you, so you might not do personal messages, I dont know. If that is the case, just ignore and I respect that. But on a public forum I can only say so much, it is just too limited and I dont want to start controversies or conflicts over sharing just personal way of seeing things.
Rick, no I did not contact/ask Dev, he reads the forum, if he wants to chime in, he is most welcome to and I would like hearing what he has to share. I am not into forcing people to speak/share unless they want to.
I had a sneaky feeling you were avoiding the question 
Yes of course limiting freedom of speech is a loaded issue and I too am going to not share about that publically. I already took a lot of risk in bringing up some of these issues and trying to get us to see what we are actually doing on this forum. I am comfortable now sitting out the rest.
Yeah, something like that. I don’t know if authority is insurmountable. I doubt it, but whenever I’ve thought I was beyond falling prey to authority, there it was again! Subtler, perhaps. And the authority itself perhaps smarter, some person or teaching of (seeming) true insight and intelligence.
But, yes, doubt is a useful tool for negating what deserves negating. With the usual risks: If you identify strongly with being The Doubter, there you are again back on Reified I-land! (Could be a belated spin-off of Fantasy Island, with guest stars Rupert Spira, Mooji, Pema Chodron, Swami Sarvapriyananda.)
Think I’ll use abbreviations:
ATQ - avoiding the question
TATAAA - too afraid to attempt an answer
AMP - above my paygrade
WWJS? - what would Jiddu say?
O::CFS! - Objection: calls for speculation!
LMQSFTMMVSS - Let me quote someone famous to make my view seem smarter.
LIT - lost in thought
ZO - zombied out
Thanks for your abbreviations in the next post
You seem like a fun, witty, interesting, highly read, insightful poster Rick.
I am open to reading anyone and learning from everyone, not just Krishnamurti. But Mooji, please tell me you dont watch Mooji, haha. Swami Sarvapriyananda is wonderful, well thought out, sincere, is not a Guru, but Mooji … I am pretty sure he is one of the Gurus Krishnamurti was talking about when he would go on his rants against the Guru business.
I haven’t listened to Mooji for years, but I was quite fond of him for a while. Smiley bearded imp, Jamaican accent, soothing vibe and voice, lazy man’s guide to enlightenment … what’s not to like? 
Positive thinking is the most dangerous thing.