I wanna say that Trust is the genetic and cultural conditioning that allows us to believe in the goodwill of others.
Early on in the history of modern Psychology, it was thought that humans had a natural capacity to trust strangers (like scientists and politicians we were not related to nor had ever met in person). It was later discovered that this was not so much a human psychological constant, but rather a weird psychological quirk of university undergraduates.
For most of the world and for most of human history, trust is only given to our parents and close family - truth (and power) is family/clan based.
The only reason I am aware of for why we in Northern Europe - and those that live as we do in āWestern Educated Industrialised Rich Democraticā (WEIRD) societies - evolved this wider level of Trust, is due to the Church, in Medieval times, for some reason deciding that we should no longer marry family members (which had been the usual practise).
The nature and nurture model has been amply demonstrated - if you have acces to some twins and a few years to spare, you can try some experiments yourself.
What we donāt know about Trust has yet to be demonstrated. Our ideas about Trust (actual and potential ideas/models) are of course not (and can never be) a complete reflection of reality, they are concepts.
Dan: When knocked off our āperchā (pedestal) there is a great flapping and flailing as we try to āget backā to where the ācomfortā is, to get back to where āhomeā is.
The word itself derives from PIE root deru - ābe firm, solid, steadfastā - which is also the same root for the words true, truth, and tree. Trees are clearly very trustworthy! - and truth the most trustworthy of all.
A couple of dictionary definitions (as they apply here):
if you trust someone, you believe that they are honest and sincere and will not deliberately do anything to harm you (Collins);
or, more generally:
a firm belief in the character, strength, or truth of someone (Merriam-Webster).
As macdougdoug says above, this kind of trust is most likely to be established between people who already know each other very well, such as close friends, intimate partners, and families. It is difficult to honestly extend this level of trust to complete strangers (as many of us are on this forum).
One straightforward but problematic way of establishing trust on this forum might be to create an in-group of participants who each believe themselves to be the special repository of Kās insight/mutation (donāt throw rocks at me for saying so!), and who encourage each other to indulge in this because it maintains each member in their self-belief.
So trust can be established among an in-group at the expense of the out-group. We see this kind of problematic cultivation of ātrustā occurring in closed Facebook groups, or even cults, which often leads to the uncritical acceptance of non-rational and conspiratorial views.
A reaction to this might be to create an alternative in-group of people who are cynical about Kās insights/mutation, but it is clear that this would be merely a reaction.
A third way of establishing trust might be to admit some kind of common ground that we all share - such as human consciousness (and its contents). K has indeed suggested this as a starting point that we can all stand on together. But this common ground will be rejected by those people who believe themselves to be the special repository of Kās insight/mutation, or who give extra importance to those sayings of Kās which speak of rejecting society, being an outsider to society.
Maybe those of us who feel we share a common human consciousness (with its contents) can make a start - climbing down from our pedestals and treating each other as equals - but if others feel that they stand apart from human consciousness and are only speaking from pure insight/ego-lessness etc, this approach will be unsustainable.
So we are at an impasse - it seems to me - so far as trust goes. What do you think might be the way through?
Straightforward my A**!! The main problem being that we crazy kooks have difficulty recognising other crazy kooks as our equals.
No obvious Special K in group here so far to my knowledge.
I do actually believe that you/we are human, and doing y/our best. And I do accept and understand that our best is often pretty poor.
Please state your case - unless you are just sharing your feelings.
Trust - as with all the other feelings we have, are productions of this body/mind (aka part of our psychology). What else would you like to add to the concept?
But we are not complete strangers. Weāve all engaged with each other, often quite a bit for quite a while, here and in some cases in Zoom dialogues. We tend not to share personal information, but you can learn a lot about a person from what they say and how they say it.
Yes. Krishnamurti said trust comes with love, and nobody says love comes with a felt sense of shared being. Thatās my pedestal and I aināt cominā down!
My feelings are āmy case!ā To me trust is deep, important, and mysterious. Iām guessing that doesnāt resonate so strongly with you. Which provides us both with a delightful opportunity to get to know a smidgen more about each other by reading between the lines.
We canāt transact trade without trust. Even before we became civilized, we traded with other groups of hunter gatherers. Itās that simple. Itās just practical to be trustworthy.