The Brain Must Have Complete Security

Krishnamurti’s use of the word “fear” has to be clarified. He’s not referring to rational fear, a conditioned response to danger that enables survival, but to ideas and images that arise and induce anxiety or panic. Perhaps we are to call this “psychological fear”. In any case, if the mind can secure itself against this irrational, upsetting response, that could be the security he was speaking of.

Too often K’s words are parroted as if they were the words of the one parroting them. That is, if I repeat something K said and I don’t make it clear that I’m quoting or paraphrasing K, the reader might assume that I’m speaking from my own experience and not from my knowledge of the teaching.

Parrots?

When I quote K such as I did above that “Thought is fear”, I put it in quotes because those were the words he used. But now I know that thought is fear, and as he said as I recall that once you see the truth of something, it’s yours. Yes of course it goes without saying, that the fear we talk of here has nothing to do with being chased by a tiger. We’re referring to the psyche. As with ‘time’, it is the psychological aspect of it as in past,present,future, etc. But back to “thought is fear”…psychological security can never be as long as psychological thought continues. As he said somewhere, “thought-time must have a stop.”

My point is that K’s words point to something that isn’t real until you know from your own experience what he meant. Then, if you can’t find your own words for your realization and must use K’s words, attribute K, lest the reader think you’re appropriating K’s words.

Yes perhaps, but the mind cannot be secure as long as the ‘thinking process’ continues.

The entire thinking process or just psychological thought?

No we still have to tie our shoes :wink:

Right. But as in the case of K’s use of the word “fear” for irrational fear, his use of “thought” for psychological thought engenders confusion and misunderstanding, so it’s best to be specific. It might be alright to be casual about the distinction when talking to other K-fans, but it’s a bad practice if you want to include others.

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If your words pointed to something that isn’t real until I know from my own experience what you meant, must I attribute you if I can’t find my own words for my realization? While this is the rule we practice to avoid plagiarizing and appropriating intellectual property, why is your experience or Krishnamurti’s to be protected? Nobody can express and say it the same way just because you or Krishnamurti said it first?

While this is the rule we practice to avoid plagiarizing and appropriating intellectual property, why is your experience or Krishnamurti’s to be protected?

When someone repeats K’s words without quotes or attribution, the reader doesn’t know if the writer is appropriating K’s words or conceding that the writer can’t find his/her own way to say it.

Thought is most of the time fear
Fear is thought
When you think things, they can cause fear but they actually are fear themselves.
Have you ever felt afraid from the things you thought?

or

“Thought is fear.”

Does that mean that the “reader” will view the words differently if they are informed that they are words by K. than if they are just words uttered by the poster? So K.s words then, are what, more valuable, more important than the posters? He spoke often against that kind of authority…The “reader” who comes here, can read all the literature, videos, available prior, but why this constraint on us “K fans” to make clear what we have gotten from him and what we through our work have found in ourselves?

The reader will know that they are K’s words and not the writer’s.

This is a good example of when K’s words need to be explained.

from: J. Krishnamurti Second Conversation with Professor J. Needleman in Malibu 26 March 1971

116 K: I really don’t know. But I am going to find out, in the sense not wait for me to find out. The content of my consciousness is my unhappiness, my misery, my struggle, my sorrow, the images which I have collected through life, the frustrations, the pleasures, the fears, the agony, the hatred - that is my consciousness, my gods. Now, can all that be completely emptied? Not only at the superficial level but right through the so-called unconscious. The unconscious, the hidden, through dreams - you follow? I won’t enter… - all that completely emptied. If it is not possible, then I must live a life of misery, I must live in endless, unending sorrow. That means there is neither hope, nor despair - I am in prison. I can invent a hope - oh, that’s all too childish. So the mind must find out how to empty itself of all the content of itself, and yet live in this world, not become a cuckoo, and have a brain that functions efficiently. Now how is this to be done? Can it ever be done? Or there is no escape for man.

117 JN: I follow.

118 K: Because I don’t see how to get beyond this, I invent all the gods, temples, philosophies, rituals. You follow? All the entertainment, all the muck comes in. Sorry! So I must find out. You understand, sir?

119 JN: I understand.

120 K: This is meditation - you follow? This is real meditation, not all the phoney stuff. To see whether the mind, with its brain, the brain which has evolved through time, the brain which is the result of thousands of experiences, the brain that functions only in complete security, it functions efficiently, the brain that has collected, you know, wounded, hurt, all that, empty itself, and yet have a brain that functions like a marvellous machine. And also it sees love is not pleasure; love is not desire. When there is love there is no image; but I don’t know what that love is. But I only want love as pleasure, sex and all the rest of it. There must be a relationship between the emptying of consciousness and the thing called love; the love, the unknown, and the known, which is the content of consciousness.

121 JN: I am following you. There must be this relationship.

122 K: The two must be in harmony. The emptying and love must be in harmony. And it may be only love that is only and nothing else.

So, Krishnamurti is the authority; and after him there is nothing? Krishnamurti said what the Buddha said: the self is an illusion.

What makes Krishnamurti’s words authentic and mine a copy? “Freedom from the known” is a powerful turn of phrase. Who coined that?

What makes Krishnamurti’s words authentic and mine a copy?

If I coin a phrase and you repeat it without attribution, you appropriate it, use it as if it came from you and not from the one you took it. It’s not a crime, and a lot of people would say it’s nothing.

Even Krishnamurti did it. When he said, “We have met the enemy and he is us”, he was appropriating a line from Pogo, the cartoon by Walt Kelly.

Thank you @JBF for bringing the Needleman conversations…So how is this critical “emptying” to be done? We understand that it can’t be a method carried out over time right? Yet the brain as it is with all the hurts, past sorrow, etc has to be emptied for there to be this “love”. What does he mean that there has to be a “harmony” (relationship) between this emptying (of the known?) and this love (the unknown? Does anyone have any insight into all this?

But the issue at hand is not who has the authority to coin the “Krishnamurti phrases”, it is about telling lies. It seems that we all believe Krishnamurti and no one else. If this is the case, then those who corroborate what Krishnamurti said are perceived as pretenders. What does that make the rest of us gathered here?

The “emptying” may be that content being relocated to another network of the brain so that it doesn’t influence behavior. It isn’t dissolved or deleted (because it is part of one’s history), but archived, put in its proper place.

Of course the brain won’t bring this change about if it doesn’t see the need for it, and it could be that it can only be seen during meditation, a state of mind wherein the mind is choicelessly aware and completely attentive.