The created

Kinfonet Discussion
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Ojai 8th Public Talk 2nd July, 1944 | J. Krishnamurti

“When you ask you will receive but you will have to pay for it; according to your demands you are answered but there is a price for it. Greed replies to greed. When you ask out of greed, out of fear, out of want, you will have an answer but you must pay for it and you pay for it through wars, strife and misery. The centuries of greed, cruelty, ill will, ignorance manifest themselves when you call upon them. So to indulge in prayer without self-knowledge, without understanding, is disastrous. The meditative awareness of which I have been speaking is the outcome of self-knowledge in which alone there is right thinking, and it is this that frees the mind-heart from the dual process of the observer and the observed, for they are a joint phenomenon, a joint occurrence. The observer is ever conditioning the observed and it is extremely difficult to go beyond the observer and the observed, to go beyond and above the created. The thinker and his thought must cease for the Eternal to be. I have been trying to explain in my talks how to clarify the confusion that exists between the observer and the observed, the thinker and his thought, through self-knowledge and right thinking. For without self-clarification, the observer is ever conditioning the observed and so can not go beyond himself and becomes imprisoned. He is caught in his own delusion. For the realization of that which is not created, not made up, thought-feeling must transcend the created, the result, the self; thought-feeling must cease to demand, cease to acquire, cease to be distracted by any form of ritualism and memory. If you will experiment you will discover how extremely difficult it is for thought to be wholly free from its own chattering and creation. Only when it is so free, only when the observer and the observed have ceased, is there the Immeasurable.”

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I don’t think the folks dabbling in the “Law of Attraction” have been informed about this part of the equation.

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Can anyone explain how they understand the “0bserver is ever conditioning the observed”?

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The problem with explanations is that we use them to condition the known - either by agreeing or disagreeing

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Maybe but the ‘problem’ it seems according to him is that the “observer is ever conditioning the observed”…does that make any sense to you? It’s his ‘explanation’ and if you agree with him….I do and want to ‘tear it apart’ a bit as he suggests, in order to clarify it and If you think you understand what he means by it or anyone else here, I was asking in order to clarify if possible my own understanding by listening to the understanding of others…I could be wrong!:face_with_monocle: (It has been the case in the past)

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Also if anyone agrees with the need for experimentation here, what form could that experiment take?

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Nature, all of nature, is a reflection of human nature. By observing nature while I am in complete attention, I discover secrets of my own nature in totally unbiased forms because nature is not bound to time, there is no time in nature. On the other hand, if I asked the world a question about human nature, I would get millions and millions of different answers, whereas nature, despite its vastness, has only one. And this is because the world is bound to time, relies on years of experience, is none other than a projection of human conditioning, whereas nature is free from the illusion of time. Nature was already there when I was born – I did not invent nature – the world, on the other hand, is the abstraction of a visual experience that is constantly changing because of the continuous bombardment of influences coming in from everywhere in the form of feedback.

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Thoughts and attention(observer) shape perception (observed). With attention, one becomes the creator.

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Thanks Ceklata:
“ Thoughts and attention(observer) shape perception (observed). With attention, one becomes the creator.”

As I see this, K is saying that when I view the world around me from this dual perspective of ‘me here’- ‘other out there’, that what I see is the “created”…my creation. The ‘prison’ is me as ‘observer’ isolated from the ‘observed’? And this is a “delusion”? The observer / observed duality is a delusion?

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In the video about attention, the message is that you are the way you choose to see things, and that’s one way of saying the observer is the observed. But the video says nothing about choiceless awareness or complete attention - it only advocates choosing to focus attention on pretty, pleasant, positive things, which is what therapists tell their depressed, angry, anxious, distraught, obsessive, etc., clients, to deter them from what they’re doing.

We don’t really know what choiceless awareness and complete attention are because we’re always focusing on what we desire/fear because it’s all we know: pretty, positive things and ugly, horrible things, and that’s our prison.

Krishnamurti speaks to us through the bars to awaken us to how our conviction is our prison, and how our desire to be free lengthens our sentence.

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I am afraid in the cellar, the cellar is perceived by me as frightening.
The last time I met an acquaintance, I felt insulted by him. The next time I meet him I have a reservation - I am on my guard. Even if he were kindness personified this time, I am unable to meet him anew, the memory plays into our current relationship.

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Well put, Utes: The memory plays, or shapes or conditions our current relationship. That makes the meaning clear for me.

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There is also another, different sense in which K uses “the created” which to me is also important to understand.

Ojai 5th Public Talk 1946 | J. Krishnamurti

"Questioner: Cannot one think about the Uncreated, about Reality, God?

Krishnamurti: The created cannot think about the Uncreated. It can think only about its own projection which is not the Real. Can thought which is the result of time, of influence, of imitation, think about that which is not measurable? It can only think about that which is known. What is knowable is not the Real, what is known is ever receding into the past and what is past is not the Eternal. You may speculate upon the unknown but you cannot think about it. When you think about something you are probing into it, subjecting it to different moods and influences. But such thinking is not meditation. Creativeness is a state of being which is not the outcome of thinking. Right meditation opens the door to the Real."

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I experience what is projected by my brain. That experience is stored in memory and used to further condition my reality.

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My suffering is apparently not the whole story - although it may feel like it - sometimes my preoccupations seem to take up all the space.

The Buddhist 8 fold path to liberation talks of Right concentration, Right action, right understanding, etc - Wrong means self centered action. Right obviously has something to with freedom from the self.

Jesus said that whenever any of us gather together in Love, he will be present. Love is forgiveness, it is the death of the self.

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Yes, Doug. One is also aware of humanity’s great suffering outside of oneself. And yet we are “tethered” to our personal view as being the natural, obvious, justifiable centre of life. Me against the world, me needing to use all my mental faculties to struggle against the world, in order to obtain what I deserve, what I am entitled to. It is mostly this intellectual approach to what life “throws” at us that guides our every interaction with “the world”. There are moments in which we seem to partially realize on some level that there is more to this great mystery of life than this self-centred approach. But it still eludes our understanding in our many many moments of conflict. Then we totally lose sight of any understanding. Then we are fully “me”.

It seems to be this conditioned, skewed perception or view of our separateness from the world and from thought which routinely responds to life. It is our limitation. It is seen - at least it seems to be seen - and yet we are unable to act without it. As I see it and like I said recently, Buddha, K, Jung, the great philosophers, educators, leaders and scientists have not been able to help us. I feel that even they, who spoke so passionately to “something” unconditioned within us, were not totally free of the conditioning. They were not in an immovable state of understanding in every living moment. I’m not saying it’s so. It seems so to me.

So we live, we do our best to the best of our understanding in the living moment. Each one of us is definitely on his own to figure life out. No one can provide the answer for us. No one can make us see the truth (and vice-versa), whatever the truth is. That seems clear.

And if we stumble and fail, so be it. Those who question the human condition and life as a whole do so because it is in their nature to question it. But not seeing the whole Truth ourselves, we cannot convey it to those who do not seem to question or care to question. If anything, it seems that only the Truth itself can act, and not our partial, momentary, fleeting insights and understanding.

In every case, we are born, we act according to our understanding - right or mistaken - at every moment in all our relationships with life, we suffer, we experience joy, pleasure, fear, anger, and so on, and we die. To me, there is no word to really describe or encompass or explain that inexplicable, passionate journey.

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A Mongolian woman reaches out from the porthole of a crate in which she is imprisoned, 1913 - Rare Historical Photos

I came across this photo some years ago. I don’t want to frivolously intellectualize it. It is haunting. It is a death sentence, I believe. To me, it represents all the horrifyingly, incomprehensibly “creative” tortures Man has devised throughout history. This woman and all the victims of torture and even naturally-occurring disasters clearly have no choice but to endure what they are experiencing. They are totally isolated, clearly no choice or recourse possible. The rest of us seem to believe that we HAVE a choice and control in ending our personal suffering in our relationships (or that if we fail it is because of our own incompetence). But do we?

I don’t know what, if anything, my point is here.

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We ‘think’ there is a choice in the same way that we think that we exist…as ‘me’ …but probably not. It’s interesting to consider the possibility seriously that I don’t exist and that the ‘feeling’ that I do is real but has gotten confused with the self-image. So feeling ‘I AM’ is real… feeling as ‘me’, is not real, a delusion. Everything living has the ‘I AM’ feeling, it’s nameless of course but words like Awareness, Intelligence, Life Force, Love etc point at it. ‘It’ can’t be ‘grasped’ because it is what is doing the grasping! Experimenting with this idea lets things ‘fall into place’, the diversity yet the ‘oneness’ of it all. The Self has been called evil not only because of the horrible atrocities it has committed but because it has locked Humanity out of “participating in the Immensity “.
Our birthright?

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Or “colors” our current relationship with whatever we’re observing.

If I know how lighting (or lack of it) affects perception, I know how the past impinges on the present and I’m aware of how perception reveals as much or more about me than what I’m attending to. I take a dim view of certain things, see some things through rose colored glasses, see other things as darkness itself, and I’m blinded by the trauma of unresolved events.

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I can always find a choice for myself, even in the midst of suffering. In suffering I can choose to either commit suicide or do nothing; or I can choose something in between, that is, I can choose to embrace the suffering, understand it, love it, and be with it until it is finally over.