Of course we have genuine perception…sensory perception. If not, we’d be unable to cross the street without getting hit by a car. Or we wouldn’t know what a rose looks or smells like. K is speaking about a deeper perception, however, when one sees the tree with no division at all…when one sees the tree as it is…or one sees one’s wife or child as they are. That’s total seeing…seeing the whole in the part. Then there’s love…in the seeing with no division. He’s not speaking of superficial perception…superficial sensory perception, that is. We all have that type of perception or we’d be unable to survive a minute on our own. We’d be in a coma or some similar state.
Are you saying there can be conditioning and non-conditioning, side-by-side, in the same space? That there can be conditioning, and then there can be love, and then there can be conditioning again, and then later on love can pop back in?
I cannot look at conditioning in order to love, or in order to anything. I look at conditioning at a depth and that reveals the defensive strategy by the psyche to protect itself, which is real. The whole question of love being for the conditioned mind was gone into over and over by Krishnamurti, and is obviously one of the psyche’s major sticking points, which it has great difficulty dealing with. The fantasy about love being is up there with the fantasy of the other not being myself.
My perception of the other being myself. In a relative sense all selves are selves (which is not the same as I am you). In an absolute sense there may be neither other nor self - but that is theoretical from where we stand.
But is that really so? What does theoretical have to do with psyche? In the physical, material world there is space as distance between one perceived object and another, which psyche has mapped on to itself, but there is no actual space as one aspect of psyche separate from another right now. What is the non-theoretical basis for the space I may think I am from you? And what is the psychological comfort or security, if such there be, in being separate, and what is the threat right now to me in not being separate. This has been the simplest, starting point for Krishnamurti over and over has it not? Why have you not got thoroughly to grips with this in your life to date?
Theoretical is the sole content of Psyche - its the fuel for the fire - its whats getting us all excited. Its the colour, sparks and noise.
The Observer is the observed, the thinker is the thought? Yes, see this and there is silence.
Because there is nothing to hold on to. And no one to do the holding.
No, absolutely not. I’m not saying that conditioning and not-conditioning can exist side by side, in the same space and in the same moment, but that they can happens in different moments and in a different space. I’m talking out of personal experience, and of course I can be wrong, but I wonder whether the insight should be total or if we may have partial insights which for one moment put us out of the conditioning. For example, I’m just looking at the sea or the sky without any particular motive in mind and suddenly I’m looking at it as if for the first time. For some moments there is deep and touchable silence outside and inside the body and there is the sense of the new. I feel (or imagine?) there is only the universe, that vast space and no individual boundaries. Then after a while I’m back in my limited space.
Can you quote some parts where K. refers to that? I’d like to deepen this point.
That’s what I meant. I’ve explained this point in my answer to Dominic:
Of course, I’ve excluded that. Still… I think we all may have moments of real love in spite of all our conditionings.
If ‘Love’ is the ‘light’, there may be flashes into the ‘darkness’ of the conditioned ‘self’. But the ‘Love’ that K is referring to cannot co-exist with the image of a separate ‘individual’ self-image or enclosed ‘center’. It can’t, it seems to me, have any ‘boundary’.
It’s confusing; it is the ‘thinker’ or observer’s actions of resistance to ‘what is’, that it would like to change, enhance, suppress, etc…and this creates the suffering as well as the pleasure…but they don’t actually exist being just a trick or projection of the thinking process…yet the psychological suffering, pain seems ‘real’ enough.
Is this the ‘animal’ brain reacting to the actions of the neocortex?
The difference pointed to with the use of the word Sacred, is to see there is this mundane perception of life, and in reaction to this life, are trying to fix it. We apply materialistic values, traditional ideas, hoping to improve the materialistic. The question is, why subscribe to this mundane petty materialistic selfish life, and then try to apply the reactionary method to make things better? We are looking for something, but just repeat it all. What are we looking for? The reactionary method is what cannot understand the sacredness of life.
One must understand the implication of the word “sacred”. First of all it creates a dualism: on one side we have the “mundane perception of life” and so the so called materialistic values, and on the other side we have the sacred, a different dimension we don’t have access to but which we hope to reach someday. And of course it’s just this dualism which prompts what you call the reactionary method to make things better. This is just what all religions have done and in introducing this word in our enquiry we are again creating a new religion, a new belief.
You say:
“The reactionary method is what cannot understand the sacredness of life.”
But it’s just the introduction of the “goal” of the sacredness of life that creates the reactionary method. You ask: “what we are looking for?” This is trying to reach something, something which – as you say – cannot be grasped. So it’s better to put it aside, it’s better not to make a division between sacred and profane (or mundane) and consider every aspect of life as important and valuable. We don’t know what “sacred” love is, we only know our common love, and that is what we have to focus on, to understand. I may be wrong but I never heard K. speaking of “sacred” love. He only spoke of love. Either it’s love or it’s not, so there is no division, no dualism. If all life is “sacred” than also our ego and its “mundane” love is sacred. Have you ever reflected what is the meaning of this word? Not the etymological meaning but actually the meaning it has for us. It means simply something greatly important, desirable, something humans set in the highest place and so torture themselves or even kill other for the sake of this “sacred”. The only way to avoid this damned search for the sacred is to consider everything as equally important (or equally unimportant – which is the same).
Sorry I can’t help with this verbal interpretation. I am using words as pointers, and the pointing is not a duality. Pointing to something it is not an issue whether it is called intelligence, love, sacred, or whatever because it is the looking, not the description. I tried to clarify this, but the verbal gets in the way. Like it says, “thought is the very denial of love.” Not the love of some affection, or love of something, or the love to be expressed, but a space where there is no conflict. This is not a search.
When there is a moment in which it is felt thought is in suspension, or there is a different quality such as love, what is the fact of that? Do I then see what illusion is, because I have non-illusion as an experience, or has thought or conditioning simply shifted gear? Am I aware now that thought has its very own non-thought, or that at the heart of self lies the self’s very own non-self, or selflessness? Have I left myself, or just been in it the whole time?
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Sorry, but pointing is a duality when it’s done in the context of a personal enquiry as this forum I suppose is meant for. Of course one can talk about the sacred in doing a general discourse about this matter, but if we are enquiring into the problem of thought and love, introducing the distinction (and so division) between mundane and sacred love is starting from the other side of the road instead than from where we are. Again I must repeat the statement that there is no sacred love but only love. When one sees that what one thinks is love is actually not love but pleasure, the whole matter is finished. There is no need to talk about sacred love, and it can be misleading.
All this verbal interpretation is not love, and this is obvious. All this controversy is the conflict of thought. I think we are finished talking.
You are right Peter, there is no point in talking with someone who claims to know what love is.
I don’t know.
I don’t know.
I don’t know.
I don’t know.
I don’t know and I don’t want to know. Knowing is just another pretension of the self.
I only know that I don’t know and I stay with this don’t knowing.
Your questions don’t tackle my argument, which was: has thought continuity? Or are there intervals where it is not in operation? This is not something which has to be demonstrated verbally but only discovered practically in the observation of one’s own mind.
I say there are intervals where thought is not operating, and so the self is not in charge, because I have seen it. Every phenomenon of our consciousness is intermittent, there are lots of intervals, usually very short, where the past is not operating, only we are not aware of them. And it’s just because of the existence of those intervals that we have the possibility to get out of the prison of the self. If there is no interval and thought/self is a continuous movement, then we are doomed and can only hope that God from above makes the miracle for us. Love can operate in those moments when thought is temporarily absent.
When I am the fear at the possibility of being doomed, of being locked in thought, which is not a very pleasant notion, I am not free am I to see whether the moments in which I consider myself absent is in fact true? When it has been said along, that there is fear in the space between myself and other, or that there is fear which causes me to avoid looking at things thoroughly, what was understood by fear? Was it just reduced to a word and then glossed over? It is not for nothing that humankind is in the situation it is in.
The first part of your question has nothing to do with the final part. I’m not afraid of being doomed, if that is what you meant, (actually I enjoy being a wonderful self – the best possible self in the world! 
) but being doomed is just, simply, logically, the consequence of the continuity of thought. Don’t you see this point? So if one wants to have a real conversation, one has to deal with this point and not elude it introducing factors which are only your suppositions. If you don’t see my point you can simply say, “no, I don’t think that we are doomed because thought is a continuous movement”, or “No, I don’t see your point, etc…”. This is the correct way to set a conversation, being direct. It’s good to doubt about the assertions of another (as well as one’s own), but you are not only doubting but making conjectures. If you think my experience was only imagination (which can always be) you can say it directly, I’ll not be offended, it’s part of the game in a discussion forum. All this sideway talking is just what ruins communication.
I thought I had explained my point and my approach to this problem but I see that you have completely missed it. My approach to illusion, conditioning, thought, etc, it’s very pragmatical, while yours is very intellectual. When K. asked questions, he didn’t mean to have an academic debate about it but just to invite the people to discover the truth of what he said in daily life. It seems to me that you are trying to understand, of inviting me to try to understand through thought something which does not belong to the field of thought. You cannot understand awareness and so reality, what is actual, through thought, through reasoning. Awareness is or should be self-evident or self-proved. If it’s not – which can always be – no reasoning will make you see the truth. You don’t use thought or reasoning to see the truth of a flower, of its perfume (will that perfume be an illusion? A product of the self?), all you need is just smell it. (And by the way, if you doubt about your smelling then you are surely doomed.)
I repeated four times: “I don’t know” just to be sure that you could get the message.
“I don’t know” is one of the basics of the teachings of K., and his questions were meant to arrive just at that state where one realizes that the answer is not in thought, and so one has no alternative but to keep silent. While in this forum every question prompts another question and so on and there is no pause, no silence. This is not enquiring, this is giving continuity to thought. And by the way: there is no way to discover now if my experience was true, because I’d be using memory and memory is not an instrument for discovering things. Probably it was not, and you could see from what I wrote that I was the first to doubt it. But this is not important, I wrote that just like an example of something that can happen (and I know that it happened to a lot of serious people). The main point of discussion was the possibility of thought not to be in operation temporarily. This is a very simple fact, which is implied in the whole teaching of K. You never tackled this point, probably it does not interest you.
I’m not responding to the other questions of yours because the one above is the only answer I have to give.
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