“Pursue a thought completely, go through with it to the end, think it out fully …”
Any thoughts on what Krishnamurti means by the above?
Haven’t you ever done that? Something comes up, and you think about what it means, maybe look up words in a dictionary, and you find various angles to it, and then maybe have a new or different perception about what you thought you were thinking. This may take a turn in another direction, or open up something you had not thought about before.
If you don’t complete your thoughts, they remain suspended until you do. Not thinking things through is unintentionally accumulating unfinished content.
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Today’s quote sheds a bit more light on Krishnamurti’s line of reasoning on this:
K: Pursue a thought completely, go through with it to the end, think it out fully, and you will see what happens. You will find that there is no thinker at all, because it is the thought which creates the thinker.
He appears to be suggesting that if we follow a thought through to its end, we will see that it does have an end, that it is transient as he puts it and more importantly that there is no thinker who is ‘having’ thoughts.
So again I can’t help but wonder what the activity of following a thought through is all about? It seems to be tied to the realization that the observer is an illusion.
"If you have no thoughts, there is no thinker; "
If thoughts are transient and the thinker only exists so long as there is thinking, it follows that the thinker must be transient as well. That is, there is no permanent thinker.
Our very existence is predicated on the feeling of a contiguous thinker.
When this is tried and attention is brought to ‘my’ thought, what happens is the thoughts become about thought itself. The thinking process thinking about how it operates. How it is continuous. How there is no ‘thinker’ just the thoughts themselves wondering about the process , how it works. By association. How the thinker, ‘me’ seems so real and how significant an illusion that is, the belief usually unquestioned that there is an entity that is ‘doing’ all this thinking. Thinking creating illusions of individual 'I’s in charge. But it’s all a “trick” of thought to give itself a sense of permanence, security…which it then has to defend against threats by other false 'I’s. Isn’t this why JK has said that “thought must have a stop”. What will that take? It probably can only be a constant “pursuit” of each thought. An awareness of the thoughts as they arise.
I recall him saying, I think, about all this: “You drop it, and pick it up again”.
The thinker / thought duality is our conditioned ‘default’ mode, isn’t it?
The thinker is thought performing its ability to describe, explain, understand, and its ability to induce feelings that are too good to be true and too painful to bear.
There are thoughts to be denied and thoughts to be allowed.
Thought is better at using pain to restrain than at using pleasure to let loose. If we were better at seeing what’s funny about humans than we are at seeing how horrible we can be, we wouldn’t be so horrible.
Why must thought stop? For how long? If thought stopped for sixty seconds, no words arose, no imagery, no you, what would that do for you? Would thought be relieved to know that it could stop at will? Or would thought realize that it can’t trust itself?
Psychological thought must stop because it’s destroying not only humanity but many species around it.
Most people would agree, but only a few people know what “psychological thought” is. How do you define “psychological thought”?
Of course ‘I’ know that I am just thought. The ‘I’ ‘me’ is a creation of thought. You can see it if you followed those thoughts that you just wrote down. It’s just thought. But the staying with thoughts as they arise takes energy and the default mode is the duality of a thinker apart from the thoughts. Thought can’t or wont think itself into silence. So finding the energy to be present as they arise seems the only possibility for it to cease where it is not needed and where it is extremely destructive.
The only way to answer that question is to give it a try and see what happens.
I don’t see the relationship between those two statements…
Isn’t psychological thought where thought creates a thinker, a ‘me’ apart from itself? Where it sees itself as an individual, a more or less permanent psychological entity that has a past a present and a future?
Does thought stop at will, or is it stopped by silence? If the former, thought’s in control. If the latter, there is no thought.
The term, “psychological thought” seems to have been coined by K. I’ve never seen it used outside of the K world.
Is it stopped by awareness?
I don’t know. I’m wondering, If thought can stop at will, it’s omnipresent. But if it can’t stop, it’s on a loop
To be present to thoughts as they arise is not ‘normal’. I have been conditioned to believe that I exist as the thinker apart from ‘my’ thoughts. This is false. It is an illusion created by thought. This can be seen by as JK suggested following one’s thoughts as they arise. That breaks through the thinker / thought illusion. But that seeing takes energy and when it ends the default of the thinker / thought illusion takes over. That duality is inherently in conflict and draws off the energy that is needed for the pursuit of one’s thoughts. So it comes and goes. But the more the pursuit occurs, the more energy it seems there is for it to be picked up again and again…
Good recitation…