I think that if you’re interested, you read them all. Maybe even re-read a few. But then you realize that it’s time to move on and see if what you’ve read and thought about is true. That’s when the journey begins. How long or how far it will take you is the unknown. You have to drop it all like all the others you’ve read and listened to and get to a place where you ‘don’t know’. That’s the place of ‘intelligence’. Intelligence is not-knowing.
Yes Dan, agreed wholeheartedly. The only thing I would add is that some can prematurely stop reading Krishnamurti before it is time to move on. They are just parroting him or repeating him, without actual understanding.
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It doesn’t matter. The ‘message’ is so radical that very few of us will even go near it. You, me, we are “nothing” (not-a-thing). Touch that, he says, and if you don’t take root in it, you will “go to pieces”. Only time will tell if that message filters into humanity before terrible things happen. For each of us interested, we have to go through it to the end. And we don’t ‘know ‘ where that is. That’s why Intelligence is the state of ‘not-knowing’.
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Recently I was talking with some people and I asked why do you watch a K video, but talk about all your mundane lives. One person said we are here questioning what K said. I didn’t respond, but what they meant was, they are questioning, who is it, to say these things, and does it relate to their lives to hear someone to speak like this? They weren’t questioning the actual content, and what it means in their understanding, of what was actually said or written.
Peter, I think any watching of Krishnamurti videos is helpful, even if they talk about their mundane lives. I also feel it is beneficial to question, any form of questioning, even if it is not the actual content. Eventually questioning might blossom, real questioning can come out of it.
Most books about Krishnamurti are more adulatory than informative. I’m interested in what drew Bohm, and perhaps other scientists and artists, to K’s teaching.
I read a biography of Jackson Pollock some time ago, and learned that when he was young he was a K-devotee, even emulating K’s sartorial taste…
I am also interested in things like what drew a great scientist and thinker like Bohm to Krishnamurtis teachings. From what I get out of reading Bohm, he was greatly interested in Krishnamurtis take on “The observer is the observed” and on Krishnamurtis insights into time, thought, and no becoming psychologically. Krishnamurtis teachings were quite original and different than traditional religious teachings. There was something quite captivating, original, refreshing, different, and unique that must have attracted a great mind like Bohm to it.
The continuing thoughts about how to live life is stuck in the conditioning, and we have been thinking about all this for 1000’s of years with no change, and there is more and more violence. It is the wrong questioning. It is questioning because I am reacting to being told something, or it is not what I understand, or it is not fulfilling my expectations, or it is challenging my sense of self. It is not the serious direct questioning of the actual immediate condition, looking at my state of mind, my reactions, my thinking. right now, with openness. To follow the usual mental process is to be working within the conditioned knowledge and can only result in what is known; ideas, belief, culture, tradition etc… It is cultivating routine thinking, with no fresh outlook; there is not a discovery or an insight. Just the same old familiar worries and concerns.
May I suggest you to read ‘An Uncommon Collaboration’ from David Moody?
Yes, I think that if you have seen/understood the truth, and brush it aside, and do not live according to what you have understood (being “anchored” in it), then it will indeed destroy the mind, or even having the possibility of having a mind.
Isn’t the question then, what does it mean to be “anchored” or rooted in the truth that you the thinker are actually only thought? That, what has been believed to be ‘you’ / ‘me’ is not you or me at all but an illusion created by thought and memory. Is the ‘anchorage’ needed then, that which has been called , “choice less awareness”? As the previous anchorage (Identification?) with the conditioned consciousness falls apart?
If it is true that “the seeing is the doing”, there is nothing left to brush anything aside.
That may be an ‘idea’ … from what K spoke about.
There is no light switch … ‘off or on forever’ .
When someone said to K after a talk
“the trouble with you , is that you’re stuck in a rut “ … K told us that he thought to himself “ I’ll have a look at that to see if it’s a fact”
So… does our notion of a transformed human take into account that he/she still may make mistakes etc… need to continually watch etc.
Transformation as once it’s happened we’re some idea of perfection is an idea some have… by misunderstanding ‘time’
Misunderstanding another ‘K ‘ quote…that if one is going North and sees it’s the wrong direction… he changes to east or west or whatever and ‘never’ goes back to north.
This maybe so… but again … is ‘time’ misunderstood … it appears so ‘absolutist’ to the time bound person ( most of us) … but from a timeless freedom where K may have said this from… it may be from moment to moment…no ‘light switch’.
Just things to consider for oneself.
At one time I did think that K may have simply been a freak of nature… and In a state that was totally ‘unique’ … that might only happen to anyone else by a similar accident of nature. I expect many think this.
Now, I think there may have been the ‘chance’ that he simply didn’t take on/ gather as much conditioning as most of us.
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I see another option here, that if the “direction” is seen to be wrong, there can be the realization that every direction is wrong, that there is no map and no knowing where to ‘go’. This to me is the state of ‘not-knowing ‘. The force of the discovery that you as ‘thinker’ are just an illusion of the thinking process, may determine what happens after that truth is seen. He has said that partial insights may not be insight at all. But once touching the ‘total insight’ into our true situation, there could be no going back . It could not be unseen. So it may be our going back and forth does create cracks in the walls we’ve built around ourselves but the walls remain.
I have a recent
example of how ‘insight’ appears in me. I have a song say, that repeats over and over in my brain. It is annoying and I would like it to stop. Then it was ‘seen’ the repeating song and the annoyed reaction to it were the same thing, emanating from the same brain,
both ‘mechanical’…always shocking to discover that one isn’t what one takes oneself to be.
Yes. … explanations may often be that also… … . . … .
But it’s all ‘grist for the mill’, no? BTW Clive, I just realized that the D that you were responding to was not me but David S so forgive me for that misunderstanding.
In this statement, there is the suggestion that one has a attained a permanent state, is that so? Is there anything permanent? So, how can one remain “anchored” “in truth”, so to speak, in a world that is constantly changing, and challenging one? You see, one has known people who have “fallen from grace”, so to speak. Moreover, one is reminded of all those who spent numerous occasions sitting and listening to K speak, and were completely blown away by what K said, and then gone home and gone back to their lives, and then they would end up complaining that they were unable to sustain their understanding. So, I ask, why not?
Maybe because it was just a form of ‘entertainment’…we were just adding him to our ‘Spiritual Quest’. We hadn’t realized any of it in ourselves.
Yes, we go back to our lives. This is where to start. The habit is to think of solutions, and to manage our lives, maintaining the distance we have between life and living. So may I suggest, see this action of thinking, and see it integrated, along with everything, in living. There is no actual separation of our lives, thinking, action, and everything. The energy, the action, of thinking, is as much the action, the energy, of living. Realise action is all integrated, and it is all one energy.
What about the energy of love (not misusing the word “love” here)? I say that the energy of love is in no way connected with thought/thinking. [K never asked if “love” could end, he asked whether “thought” could end.]
Putting the energy of love aside, for the moment, the other “problem” I have is in trying to reconcile the phrase “the action of thinking” with “the energy of living” with “it is all one energy”, in that there may be a suggestion here that there is only that particular kind of energy (thinking) possible in the whole universe, which could lead to a kind of conclusion that there is no other kind of energy in the universe, and inevitably that there is no possibility of any sort of “sacred” energy anywhere else.
The third “problem” I have is that you say that “action is all integrated”. Is it? Personally, I do not see that all, all I see is fragmentation - in the lives of… oh so many people.
Am I misunderstanding you?