I don’t understand why you are being so dismissive here? Some familiarity with Krishnamurti’s language obviously helps to make sense of what he is saying. The way he uses certain words are relatively unique to him, and can change in different circumstances. You must be aware of this.
For instance, sometimes he uses the word “individual” to mean “undivided”, and sometimes he uses it to mean what we ordinarily mean by that word (a separate person, as distinct from the “collective”). He sometimes uses the word “alone” to mean “all one”, and sometimes he means just being alone on a walk. The meaning he gives to the word “meditation” is not the conventional meaning. He uses the word “consciousness” to mean something completely different from the words “awareness” or “attention”, even though most people use these words more or less interchangeably. The word “love” is not used in a way that most people use that word. The word “intelligence” means something different to what most people mean by intelligence. Sometimes he uses the word “compassion” to mean what most of us would call compassion - care, sympathy, affection, pity - and other times he completely rejects these associations (for Krishnamurti true compassion can only be when there is the total end of suffering). I could go on and on. If you don’t mind my being personal for a second, you yourself picked me up for using the word “sincere” on one of the threads, because during a certain period of time Krishnamurti used that word in a very particular way unique to him (and perhaps others like yourself). All I meant by that word was the conventional meaning (of being frank, genuine, open, direct, vulnerable - earnest).
This is not to deny your main point: namely, that understanding Krishnamurti’s teachings depends fundamentally on
I completely accept this. I am just pointing out that even those close to Krishnamurti (those who travelled with him or spoke with him often) would sometimes completely misunderstand what he meant when using certain words (there was a period during his conversations with Bohm, for instance, when he began using the word “reality” in a way that completely baffled people - but there’s no point in going into that here).
Well, that’s simply a judgement of my friend without knowing the full context. They were simply saying that they had never thought about the world in this way, that they had never considered the issue of “thought” and whether it was problematic, etc. They were not saying that Krishnamurti himself was complicated, but that they didn’t understand what he meant by certain phrases (such as the analyser is the analysed); that’s all. And on a forum like this, one ought to accept that others (like my friend) may feel similarly (perhaps not about the analyser and the analysed, but about something else).
You yourself have said elsewhere that Krishnamurti’s expression “You are the world” didn’t automatically make sense to you. You feel that you now have had an insight into that, and so it is very simple to you. But for another (like my friend) it may not. It would be unfair to just dismiss someone because they have not yet had an insight into something. We are surely here to learn.
Our dialogues and conversations on this forum are about sharing all this. Not for intellectual games, or pyrrhic victories over each other (although we can obviously slip into this unhelpful vein) - but an opportunity to share our understanding (or the little of it that we think we have) so as to learn, if possible, from each other, to clarify our own thinking on the matter, and to learn from our reactions to what each of us has to say.
Do you strongly disagree with this? If you do, what do you think the forum should be concerned with?
