When I first came into contact with K’s teaching, I struggled to “get” what he was trying to convey to his audience because I could only guess at what he was saying. Then I read K’s dialogs with David Bohm and a lot was clarified because Bohm was better at articulating what K was trying to say…and I suspect K knew this and was grateful for Bohm’s contribution.
But I was still not sure what K’s teaching was all about, so I joined K discussion groups. In these groups I found that others were as confused and mistaken as I was about K’s teaching, and to make matters worse, we were more invested in our own notions of what K was saying than in finding out what he was actually pointing to. For years I was among the ranks of pompous prigs, K-parrots, true believers, doubters, and hostile fanatics that made a madhouse of every K discussion group.
Eventually, in the course of remaining with these groups (despite good reasons for abandoning them), it became clear to me what K was saying, and that what made it so difficult was the conditioned brain’s resistance to it. So after weathering the storm of my own resistance and the resistance of others to “get” the teachings, I now come to realize that AI could have prevented all of that wasted time, energy, and drama had it arrived sooner.
But this raises the question of whether it’s best to have K’s teaching handed to us on a platter of perfect clarity and simplicity, or to go through one’s own hell to get to the heaven of understanding. I don’t know the answer, but now that AI enables us to bypass the long, torturous (and revealing) way around the horn of our resistance/insistence, only time will tell.
I have listened carefully to what you say and there is something that has particularly caught my attention…
How did you know at the time that you were mistaken? Did someone tell you, or did you realize the teaching and then you saw that your previous view was mistaken?
On the other hand…
Are you saying that to understand what another says about you, you need an interpreter? … And what if the interpreter is wrong, or is biased, or even wants you to become his psychological slave through flattery and easy words? … Haven’t human beings had enough of the slavery created by those who set themselves up as the sole interpreters of Jesus’ teachings?
AI has help me understand more of Krishnamurti, especially psychological thought and what ends it. And here’s a GPT nugget from today, a new take on a familiar phrase: “When Krishnamurti said ‘the observer is the observed,’ he was pointing out the fact that our perceptions and interpretations of the world are inseparable from our own psychological conditioning, beliefs, and biases. In other words, our perceptions are not objective or neutral, but are shaped by our own subjective experience and perspective.”
If you have ever found yourself in a forest without a clue as to where the path is from which you have strayed, you know that someone who is a cheerleader for being lost has never been lost.
Funny you should, I was once lost in a big fairly isolated woods, and it was probably the most terrified I’ve ever been, actually couldn’t stand when we finally got un-lost, knees gave in!
True adventure is still available to us in this modern world ! - all we need is a big enough space we don’t recognise (if we are willing to leave home without a GPS)
I was alone when I had the experience and I was clueness as to what direction to move in since the tree canopy and cloud cover made it impossible to see where the sun was, and I couldn’t climb any of the trees since they were all trunk until they branched out much higher than I could access. I sat down for awhile to calm down, but it was getting late and I felt compelled to do something, so I walked in an expanding spiral until I stumbled onto the place where I strayed from the trail, and that was a moment for cheering - not the moment of being lost.
Proceeding without a path is not something to celebrate or feel good about because one’s authority says that pathlessness is the way. To the contrary, if you don’t find your own way out of your self, you’ve only found a way into another version of yourself. Yay!
Maybe this tip will help.
Drive down the forgotten highway in New Zealand, your GPS doesn’t work and sometimes the signs have disappeared. Despite ending up at a dead end a few times, it was the best ride of my life as far as I was concerned. My wife, on the other hand, was immensely relieved when we landed back in civilisation. Still, she too finds it a beautiful ride because of the nature .
