Change brings suffering and death (of the known). The bigger the change the bigger the potential for suffering. When everything changes, as you said above, the suffering will be profound.
Now it might be that after an initial reactive period of suffering, positive things will result from the change, a rebirth of sorts. But it’s not guaranteed, whereas the suffering pretty much is.
So to be ‘all in’ means willing to undergo suffering. It’s the same deal in psychotherapy, to get at the root of neurosis, you have to be willing to suffer. And we don’t like to suffer, do we?
This is not psychotherapy. We have no blueprint at all. Suffering is perhaps one of the fragments of fear, albeit a pretty big one. But we are talking about seeing the whole of fear.
No, but given that we all have psyches, psychology is involved. And when you challenge a psychological reflex, you suffer, subtly or grossly.
We have the blueprint of a lifetime (or more) of conditioning. We can lessen the bias of that blueprint, but I doubt we can ever set it fully to the side. We are the blueprint, each of us individually and both of us collectively.
Again, we are not talking about challenging. This is all about seeing. Can we first just look and then deal with any challenges afterwards? There may be absolutely no challenge involved in any of this. But first we must look.
So we can’t say we are the blueprint until we have looked. We can’t say a word about what we are. And we can’t say a word about fear either. We can talk about it fragmentarily from this perspective or that perspective; but every perspective is distorted.
When we are quiet, is there fear? Are we afraid now? Are we afraid of one another right now? Of course not. Don’t kid yourself. Fear can’t exist without the thought of what may happen later. Right now fear is totally absent. Any little voice that comes in to dispute this fact must put forward fear as a hypothesis. So it’s then a story. Fear is a story.
This is not now a fragmentary perspective talking about fear. We are looking and seeing something, which is that we can’t find fear right now, however hard we try. It only exists in the future.
That’s right. I can go quiet and see that fear depends on the noise of thought: the memory of being hurt yesterday and the image of being hurt again tomorrow. That’s the story, an age-old story. But I can’t escape from that story by creating a new story about silence because every story embodies fear.
If I have a story about you and you have a story about me, we are going to be perpetually lost in a land of fear. So can the story-telling come to a complete stop? I don’t call you a friend, a stranger, anything. I don’t know what you are. But you are a living being. Let’s look at one another.
On my walk this morning I met a young deer. We looked at one another without any other movement. After a few minutes of looking at me, it walked away slowly, almost sinuously; and then all of a sudden it started jumping up into the air, little playful leaps, which must have been a signal to another deer hidden in the cornfield to go and play with it; and so they chased each other around the field and went off into the woods.
None of this is a challenge. When you want to play you play; and when you want to look you look.
We are looking, but your way of looking and mine are quite different. And neither of us seems to be willing and able to look as the other person looks. We’ve reached our wall again, I think.
There can never be two different ways of looking. Never. So let’s be intelligent about all this. It is not about me looking in your way or you looking in mine. Just look at me. What you mean is that you can’t look without an extra movement going on in the background. There is for you something much more important or urgent or distracting than just looking. This other thing is fear. Fear. Thought. Habit. Confusion. Time. Suffering. Spin the story of it as you want, but basically it is fear because in looking there is no element of control - and we are all afraid of not being in control.
You see, this is the same as before. To look we must abandon all sense of control. And having lost control, we can’t go back to it if we have really lost it. But if we pretend to have lost it, if it is merely misplaced, then we’ll go back to it. When a friend dies, I have lost him; he is gone. When my mother dies, I have lost her forever; she is gone forever. It is no different with the loss of a psychological relationship within oneself. One can’t lose fear and then find it again later. It is gone.
So there is absolutely no wall, except as a story, except as an excuse. It is like saying, ‘Sorry, I can’t do what you are asking because the dog ate my homework.’ The homework is to look. It doesn’t matter at what. If you can’t bear looking at me, look at something else. Look at the sunlight on those clouds. They are harmless enough. Yet apparently we still want control of it all.
Now see what it all means: in wanting to control those clouds or control that person, you are allowing them to control you. The controller is actually the controlled, because whatever story is being produced about the clouds or the person, it is the controller who is being controlled and affected by all that extra movement. Total control must therefore mean something entirely different. But we never go that far psychologically and so it remains a problem.
Total fear is total order. To meet the whole of fear is the highest form of order. Once we reject every partial explanation and fragmented aspect of fear, it is a state of total order. Total self-pity is total compassion, which doesn’t mean that any degree of self-pity is a degree of compassion. It means only that there is the possibility of meeting the whole of life. This is because we have looked at something and now we can play with it - and it is showing us all sorts of amazing things. And it was all there at the start, at the moment we sat down together.
No. A narrative about a tree is not the tree. A narrative about you is not you. And we have never looked at anything without narrative. Let’s first of all face the immensity of this fact without putting any extra narrative around it. Don’t say, ‘I may have done it rarely,’ which minimises the fact. The narration is always there. Therefore, awareness itself is narration, which means it makes no sense to say, ‘I just need to be aware.’ On the contrary - that’s now the very last thing I need to do. When I try to be aware of the tree, I am still fighting the tree. Or the dog or the deer or the person sitting next to me.
We said this earlier: that maybe observation is the last thing needed. Now we are finding out exactly what this implies. Is it possible to look, listen, watch the world go by, without a scrap of awareness or observation? Can I meet the world, not all my crazy versions of the world?
I think you are saying that my motivation to try and be “aware” is also due to conditioned conclusions.
And also that any observation that we have is actually just more conditioned projection of our world view. So just a continuation of the the known/fear.
In order to meet the world, rather than relate to our conditioned narrative of it - it would seem that some refusal to continue merely existing as fear is necessary.
Nothing more than what already motivates us, you mean? As in curiosity? As in the question : “what is all this?” is a naturally arising question? And the setting aside of personal opinions a spontaneous methodology?
The world is there; I meet it every day. Human society is in a perpetual state of conflict. Why? Do I really care to find out why? Am I outside of it, looking in? Then changing it becomes all about control, changing the behaviours and ways of thinking of others. Or, I am society; I am this world. Then what is there to do?
The deer and I, we looked at each other and moved on. For two people, looking at each other is never as simple. Why? Is it because we are only comfortable when we are looking at each other with a motive? Or are we just looking, which includes then the looking at our own discomfort? The motive to change or to understand what we see, even though we may call it mere curiosity, is an inseparable movement of fear and thought.
We are the world. In looking at this as we are now, we are meeting the world. But we are not doing anything else apart from looking. Once we go off into clever descriptions and explanations we have moved back into something else, which is the habit of making known the unknown. The known is terribly limited and phony, except in a very small field where we have to know and remember some very key facts.
Artificially, we can put aside opinions. But because of the motive behind this deliberate attempt, our opinions are inevitably going to creep back in some form or another. The belief that we are different or separate from the world around us is our central psychological opinion. Some version of this opinion must always surface in relationship. It can’t ever be set aside until it is no longer an opinion. The fact - whether it is a fact that we are the world or a fact that we are not - abolishes the need for opinions at every level.
The day before I met the deer, we met a lady, whom we had never met before. She is very interested in all this Krishnamurti business, an extremely clever and articulate person. In talking together for a while she told us that she knew what it means to live with fear. So I asked her why she tolerated fear in her life for even one second if she knows what fear means. It turned out that she has opinions about fear. Which means very simply that she has never asked herself why she tolerates such a monstrous thing as fear. She has never put to herself a direct question and followed it through right to the end, never stopping again at stupid or second-hand opinions. So she listened to my question and it had an impact. But what would be the impact of one’s very own question?
So I am not sure what it means to ask naturally arising questions.
It seems that there must be this realisation (which is not the same as saying : “I want this realisation”) that any action from me, as a center acting upon my life, is necessarily a continuation of fear and conflict - that action/conclusions from the base of suffering and delusion, can only lead to more of the same.
And that realisation - and the impossibility of moving away from that realisation - would be a function of sensitivity (and responsibility). A sensitivity such that imperitively denies any further harm.
See what is taking place whenever we say things like, ‘It seems there must be this realisation.’ We are guessing at it - that’s all it means. I am not sure that any realisation whatsoever is necessary. Who is the realiser? Who is the entity that says, ‘I have realised something profound’? This is all just another conclusion in the realm of the centre. For there is no centre outside of thought and fear, and the conclusions which these two have produced. So the centre having its realisations is part of the continuation of the same thing: thought and fear. Everything real is outside of oneself. One can see what is real directly as one looks at the world. One doesn’t need to realise a thing inwardly.
Our aggression is real; our violence is real; our perpetual conflict in relationship is real. So there is absolutely nothing else to realise. Anything else is away from the fact. Can we look only at the fact? There is then supreme intelligence without a shadow of guesswork or confusion surrounding it.
Time and again we prefer a nice theory to an uncomfortable fact. But there are no nice theories - they are all quite foul. Indeed, they are far fouler than what is actually happening in front of us, even that war in Ukraine, because while we remain entertained by our own crackpot theories the fact is never met and the wars continue.
Find out. It is easy enough. We have never before met, I believe; forgive me if I am wrong about this. Are we already judging one another even before we begin to converse? Or, are we willing to look carefully together at this rather bold statement that any theory in relationship to another is an abomination? We can’t do both at the same time: we can’t judge and look at the same moment. The judgement is a theoretical assessment of another human being. The looking together carefully at exactly what it is that we are doing is already an intelligent action.
I appreciate your energy and passion, your zeal, but can find no way in to what you wrote, have nothing to say. You might not feel a wall between us, but I do. So I suggest we wait for the mud to settle, then possibly revisit this. Okay with you?
Then look at the wall. Don’t even bring me into it. Find out who or what is keeping any kind of wall between you and another. Find out exactly what this wall feels like. And if you are totally happy with the wall, keep the wall.