Trust

I hear you. But the K world (I’m not criticising K here) attracts a lot of prickly pears who often don’t feel any sense of shared being! - in fact, they are proud of it! - and this shows itself on the forum. It would take a lot of time and personal correspondence with some of these types to get to a point where they would just stop judging and being hostile, etc.

I also don’t understand why some participants get so outraged when they are asked direct questions (e.g. are you saying that you have wiped out the ‘I’? - or, are you sure about that? - or, don’t you see that this thing you have just said contradicts this other thing that you just said? etc), seeing as this is a discussion forum and not Speaker’s Corner. Some people - it seems - take engagement for aggression, and direct questioning for personal attack.

Love is such a needed thing in this world, and on this forum - but ideology kills everything, and sentimentally is a trap. We need to find a middle way… maybe starting with not being a judgemental so and so oneself!

What he said. :slight_smile:


So then we work with this, life is messy?

You asked me some direct-ish questions that I did not answer directly (if at all). Some time we should go into why that happened.

Another one of my favorite pointers to love: radical openness.

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Ok. ‘You’ tell me that you have had a perfect insight and that you have no self, and that I should just listen to what you have to say without judgement or question. You are backed up in this by a coterie of faithful followers who apparently buy what you believe, and who then attack or ignore anyone for having the impertinence to be skeptical.

What is radical openness then?

You see, to me, to claim to have had a total insight (of the kind K talked about) when I have not had such an insight, is a sin, something harmful and damaging. It is morally, ethically, as well as intellectually wrong.

But to you (the hypothetical ‘you’ and your hypothetical followers) it is a right, a conviction, something sacred that must be defended against. Either this is because the insight truly is a total insight (and so one is quite correct to stand one’s ground); or, because one has so identified with what one takes to be a total insight, it is impossible for you to drop your stance and meet me as you are.

No doubt we all play this game from time to time - but when it becomes habitual and sustained, how can there be trust? Because then you (and your hypothetical followers) don’t trust me, and I don’t trust you.

So what does radical openness mean in this regard? Do I just let you make your claims and walk by as though I hadn’t noticed? And when I do notice and call you out about it, you call me names and raise hell. What is radical openness between people who are at such extremes of polarisation on these matters?

Radical acceptance of being on the losing team

If you start with trust and certainty soon you will end up with doubt and uncertainty.

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Yes, good question. Does radically open mean unconditionally open? Say there’s a person whose singular passion is to bring you down. Your very own Professor Moriarty! What would it mean to be open to the Professor, to love him? It seems impossible, but ya know: The Impossible Question.

It’s not a matter of winning and losing, it’s a matter of sharing a common ground. I’m not interested in finding a new guru on Kinfonet - and part of what attracts me to K is his explicit rejection and non-acceptance of gurus. But there are some people in the K-world (as here) who seem not to have heard this aspect of the teachings (or at least to have compartmentalised it), and are quite happy to take the part of a guru. And that, to me, is a betrayal of our common ground.

In Buddhism there are all kinds of claims that different Buddhists have made down through the ages - many of them outrageously superstitious and suspect! - but everyone accepts that actual Buddhas are rare. Yet here on Kinfonet, there are several people claiming to be near-Buddhas, and there is next to no pushback. Indeed, some people seem to welcome the phenomenon.

But I don’t accept that - because they are people like you and me, who could be sharing themselves more honestly, who could be helping to rid the world of this concept of spiritual authority, of being a guru… all of which interferes with actual human relationship (aka trust).

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Yes, an impossible question…

To continue with the hypothetical relationship - it’s like a mirror image: they see me as evil, corrupt, vile, bullying, odious, arrogant etc etc. And I know I am none of those things (or at least not in the way that they claim - I am just selfish, reactive, boisterous etc in the ordinary, human way). I am sometimes arrogant - that’s fair. I try to hear the truth in the false, and see where they are holding up a true, undistorted mirror to my eyes, and where they are not.

And yet I see them as deluded, blind, indifferent to reason, sanctimonious and rigid. They are just as arrogant as they accuse me of being. Are they willing to look into this mirror too, and try to see the true in the false? Or must I break this mirror of my distorted relationship to them, so that they can just be what they are without my reflecting back to them any images at all?

All I can do is to own up to my own selfishness, my own arrogance, my own reactivity, etc, and try to take the criticisms from other participants on board. Because we have to get on - we share the same space, the same forum, the same world. And if we cannot get on here, why should we expect the world to be any different?

But trust means the feeling that we are all doing this. Not just one or two. And I guess until more of us do this - including, or especially, oneself - trust will remain highly tentative and fragile.

There it is! :slight_smile: The forum is the world, right? A microcosm.

Makes sense. But to wade into the impossible: Is trust dependent on trustworthiness? (Think: Is love dependent on whether someone is love-able?) Can I trust a person if (I think) they are delusional, ignorant, sadistic, arrogant, deceptive? It wouldn’t be conventional trusting, rather a trusting that they will think and act according to their current programming. It might be stretching the definition of trust beyond its breaking point. What do you think?

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Gurus can’t exist without followers .
Who are the followers in here?
I don’t see any.

Look again at the definitions. Trust is a strong belief. In its roots the idea of unchanging absolutes.
The first step on the journey towards acceptance of what is, is acceptance of the everchanging what is

I will have to think about this. Can one trust someone who one has an image of as being untrustworthy? I’m not sure that one can do that.

But maybe one can drop one’s image of them (as being untrustworthy) and meet them in the next moment and see what happens? That would be a kind of unconditional trust, wouldn’t it? So yes, maybe that would lead to a different kind of trust (so long as it was genuine, and one wasn’t secretly carrying on with the image).

(I don’t mean this of course with respect to actually criminally dangerous people - there one needs to maintain the image that one has of them as a practical measure to stop them from doing more harm).

But does it have to be about belief? (if this is what you mean). I think this is what nobody is getting at (if this is what he means).

Trust may just be about being oneself trustworthy (or true, truthful - which has the same root as trust). It may mean not holding onto images of other people in relationship, so that we can meet them afresh in the next moment. If we can be trustworthy - in that sense - maybe this can then foster a sense of trust in other people (on this forum and elsewhere)? No?

It makes sense doesn’t it that psychological problems have to be dissolved immediately? But that can’t happen if one isn’t aware that there is a psychological problem? Is ‘dissolving’ overcoming, analyzing it (which involve time) or is it something else?

How is a psychological problem dissolved immediately?

If Trust is a contract based on our need for security, this must be seen.
What need is there for trust if there is no fear of what is to come?

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Part of the puzzle, definitely.

Trust might be described as an expectation that a certain set of behavioral guidelines will be followed.

I trust you to not use what I share with you to hurt me.
You betrayed my trust by revealing to others something I said to you in confidence.

There are different types of trust, this is the type I miss most in the forum. You?

This is an understandable fear, our self image has been an essential commodity, for survival and security, in the interactions of humans for most of our history.

Pro tip: make sure that you are privy to some embarrasing secret about your interlocuter first, that way we are bound by a mutual contract of pride and secrecy.

Tricky stuff - how does this work without it being some kind of role playing game?

Trust, if I look again at the definitions and etymology, can only be in relation to the silence underlying the noise, the emptiness before the conflict - this too is not quite correct - trust is only possible if we accept the whole process - the flow and the arising patterns.