Thinking Together

Well, Alba, maybe I’m interfering. What I meant, was that in listening you let intelligence operate whether you understand or not what you’re listening to. It’s Krishnamurti that brings in the matter of understanding, and understanding - which is in the field of intelligence - can happen when you use your particular knowledge or not. If I don’t use my particular knowledge,I would say I’m not interfering, so I’m allowing intelligence to do its work.

Is there at any point some attention given to the divisive mind? To one’s own bloody-mindedness as we might say colloquially.
If so what does that look like?

I mean we might get the impression reading the kinfonet forum, that a lot of effort is spent posting divisive stuff like : you are wrong, I am right, I am clever etc.
Is this unavoidable? Is what I know so overwhelmingly important, that we cannot help posting the stuff we post?

Would you mind explaining what is the quality of a ‘listening’ where there is a “you” that ‘lets’ intelligence operate?

Yes, Fraggle, I said it before. In this listening there must be attention in the sense of caring. This ‘you’ if you want, must be mindful, be very sensitive, I think.

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this sounds clever and controlled

Careful folks! Lets take care not to let the initial images we have of people take control in discussion.

And even if I’m correct in thinking that the person I’m talking to is a fool, what is there to be gained in acting violently towards them? What does that make me?

That’s what it is like, Alba. One is listening, that is all.

Thank you @Jess . Now, can we see that those “there must be”, “must be”, “be” imply a self trying to control a priori the act of listening through the creation of an image of what “listening” would be, while “listening” has its own action, which does not depend on a self doing something to “listen/think-together”?

Oxymoron according to K :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

Now Fraggle, I wonder what is it you were asking for when you asked about a description of the quality implied in listening! Weren’t you asking for a description and isn’t a description an image? I wanted to do what you asked, that is all. ‘Must be’ as used here means that if there is no caring listening won’t be there according to what I understand in Krishnamurti’s sense. If there is a self… that is another matter which I don’t think should be discussed here. The topic is listening and I’ve approached it in the way I see it.

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I may care very much to listen to what a quantum scientist is describing but I won’t understand it because I have to know the ‘language’ of physics. I have to have that information already in my brain. Words are representations, they are not the thing that they are describing. Someone ‘speaks’ here and they want to communicate to others, their understanding of the subject. But with abstractions like ‘self’, ‘awareness’, ‘thinking’ etc, we all have different takes on those words, our own understandings, knowledges, experiences…and those understandings are all in memory, all from the past. We judge what’s being said in relation to our own subjective beliefs, understandings, knowledge etc. We choose our friends on the basis of those. So the ‘self’ does have a place in all this, it’s what divides us. Thought as self divides us. That’s why K made such a big thing out of it. The Jew from the Arab, the white from the colored, the rich from the poor…Can I listen to you without any of my past coming into it? Without the ‘self’, the ‘me’, coming between us? Can I listen to ‘your’ thought without bringing in ‘my own’?

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No if it is ‘me’ who listens to you, but there is something in us that can. Unfortunately that ‘something’ is impeded by our constant speculation (entertainment?) about what that ‘something’ might be, whether it exists or not, etc. So that ‘something’ never finds the space and the necessary energy to spontaneously manifest itself. Nevertheless, we all ‘experience’ that ‘something’ at times in our lives… before pushing it back, once again, into the dark corner of our minds that the ‘me’ has reserved for it.

p.s. brilliant exposition by the way, Dan.

We are inquiring into the divisive mind.
The divisive mind is a description of the conflict and confusion that arises from the self and its identification with what it knows.

There can only be an awareness of the movement of self when the self is moving.

nb. if I think : “wonderful! I’m thinking together with the other people” - this is just a thought. We can recognise that thought, because of our “meta-consciousness” or capacity for self-referentiality, aka thoughts as objects in consciousness.

one is not listening
there is no-one here to listen

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K: 19:33 Is there a communication between two people, or with a group of people, in which memory doesn’t operate?


do we really want to communicate
this is the first thing to find out
or does memory take over
and it is just
memory talking to itself

When they built the Webb telescope, thought communicated its knowledge, its speculation, its theories on how to get this huge instrument into space and function perfectly. Though ‘Selfs’ were present through all the years of that, there was no need for them to be a part of the process ie. vanity, greed, competition, ambition etc, when they arose they were an interference, a distraction from the work of the whole team. So thought can operate without a ‘thinker’ when it’s necessary?

‘Listening’ is not the topic of the thread, but an offshoot of our investigation on the main topic proposed by @Alba, which is ‘thinking together’. So let’s get into it if you don’t mind…

Is this what we mean when we talk about “thinking-together” – two people talking together, asking each other for descriptions, or is it something different?

No

Yes

No, the ‘I’ simply wanted to do what it thought I was asking

Go on, please!
[fill in to get the 20 chars needed to post]

If no- one is listening it’s because no-one is caring. It is so

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Indeed, it was me, no doubt about it. As to the topic, that was it. I posted not about the general theme of the thread but only about ‘listening’, I have nothing to say for the time being about ‘thinking together’.