But you can seek out the cause of suffering and eradicate it by understanding it, being aware of it, not running away from it. Since you have run away from suffering through various escapes, look at all those escapes, put them away and come face to face with suffering. In understanding that suffering, there is a release. Then the mind becomes free from all thought, it is no longer the product of the past.
12th Public Talk 28th March, 1948 | Mumbai, India
This sounds like the “how”, the method, the means by which to be free of suffering. But it can also sound like an investment of time and energy that could be more disappointing than liberating. It depends on whether one is suffering enough to try anything.
Then the mind is tranquil, without any problem; it is not made tranquil, but is tranquil, because it has no problem, it is no longer creating thought. Then thought has ceased - thought which is memory, which is the accumulation of experience, the scars of yesterday; and when the mind is utterly quiet, not made quiet, reality comes into being. That experience is the experience of reality, not of illusion, and such experience gives a blessing to man. Truth, love, is the unknown, and the unknown cannot be captured by the known. The known must cease for the unknown to be; and when the unknown comes into being, there is a blessing.
There needs to be an awareness of the ‘resistance’ that meets ‘negative’ memories or negative thoughts when they arise. The resistance to them is the suffering, the wishing that whatever the memory is, hadn’t taken place or that the thought of a future experience, won’t take place. The ‘moving away’ from the memory / image is the suffering. Not facing it (the fact) and escaping it (what is) is the suffering.
I think Dan is referring to a specific event that was never resolved and remains as reactive content.
Fear is the feeling of danger, whether imagined or actual. Usually, the feeling of fear is a false alarm, but because we can’t live without awareness of danger, we can’t ignore fear even when it’s a false alarm.
Yes especially psychological fear. The reaction to the image presented by thought. The machinery of fear. The image , the reaction to it: “I don’t want that to happen! “ in the practical world, it’s necessary to look ahead, to head off problems before they arise….but in the psyche it is misplaced. In its most intense form, it’s paranoia.
Fear is a necessary emotion when the brain isn’t conditioned, but since the brain is conditioned, the question is, When is fear a response to actual danger, and when is it a reaction induced by psychological content?
The conditioned brain can’t tell the difference because it is unawakened to intelligence.
My feeling is it’s often misplaced in the psychological realm. But there are exceptions. For example, imagine there is a person you have a loaded relationship with, they push your buttons, trigger harmful emotions. This pattern is longstanding and nasty. Were you enlightened, this might not be an issue. But for the unenlightened it’s an act of intelligence to recognize these patterns and stave them off.
I think there can be actual danger in the psychological realm. The body and mind are intimately intertwined, you can’t freak out the mind without ripple through in the body.
I asked the teacher Toni Packer once how she felt about her fame, whether she took pleasure and pride in it. She said I feel neutral toward it, should feelings of pleasure and pride arise, I recognize clearly how foolish and potentially dangerous they are, and they dissolve.
Toni was slated to be the next Roshi of the Zen Center (after Philip Kapleau), but she discovered Krishnamurti and did her own version of the Dissolution of the Order of the Star, left the Zen Center, and started a center grounded in Krishnamurti teachings. She is like a kinder and gentler Krishnamurti.
