If what we see and understand is not ‘working’ we can 1) do a Sisyphus and repeat the fail over and over hoping that “I’ll get it right this time!” or 2) give up or 3) look deeper. I vote for Door 3.
Our pattern is to minimize disturbances. The good news: We often succeed. Bad: The success is temporary, the disturbances return. So, looking deeper, what’s going on?
The “pattern” is me, the ‘self’ image. Disturbance changes, threatens its ‘shape’ and it struggles to retain it. The pattern of me can change, with time, knowledge, experience, ‘insight’…but the or ‘a’ pattern prevails. So effort to change the pattern comes from the pattern itself, wanting to ‘become’ a more desirable shape.
Can the brain while alive, ‘let go’ of this whole patterning mechanism?
Why would it want to? Why would we want to? What’s the payoff?
To answer my own question, I guess you could say that freedom is found in letting go of the whole patterning mechanism. And freedom is a big payoff.
But total ending of / independence from conditioning might be a fairy tale. It seems like one to me, but I realize I might be wrong. Less dependent on conditioning, sure, that’s definitely possible, we all know this. But the fully unconditioned wo/man … I really doubt it.
Doubt makes sense when we look around and see what is going on, what it seems has always been going on. K and others brought the message that it’s possible. That, Love is possible. We’ll see.
I assume you mean a specific type of love? We’ve all experienced love in one form or another, so we all know it is possible. Right?
I guess that’s the benefit of someone showing up in your village and saying: “There is another land, far better than this one, I have seen it, I know.” To take the person at their word would be an act of faith or trust or gullibility. But to find out for oneself, yeah, that’s the ticket!
What is happening is that we are content with temporary solutions. Any answer from the self must be temporary. It cannot be anything else. That which is formed by time, shaped by time, must continue to sustain its own time-based patterns.
The pattern is broken every time we are angry, afraid or confused. So we are frequently letting go of the pattern. Or, the pattern has a very limited life-span. Then, when it breaks, we quickly resurrect an old pattern, perhaps modified slightly, and we carry on.
What is there to find out? The land in which we are now living is the only land there is. The dialogue we are in, the family, the job, the city, the town, the country. And we have made a mess of it. Unless we fix it immediately, it can never be fixed even though we may commit the rest of our lives to sorting it out. Is love an ideal? Is love something either in the past or in the future, always either a memory or a hope?
So is love an answer at all? When it stops being an answer to all our ills then surely it is no longer caught in the same pattern which creates our misery.
Sounds right, so what does “fix it immediately” entail for you? We’ve been told there’s no ‘method’, no ‘fixer’ , no time, etc. K said his secret was that he ‘“didn’t mind what happens”… is that the ‘fixing’ you’re talking about? The ‘not minding’?
There is no answer. We once again face the prospect of global nuclear war. There is no answer now, just as there was no answer in 1945 when they dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Can the mind remain totally sane in an insane world? There is only the question without a single answer.
You say something has to be “fixed” which implies that something is broken, something is wrong that needs to be made right. The implication again is that something should be other than ‘what is’. I ask what needs to be done to ‘fix’ the situation that you say needs fixing and you say there is no answer…why not consider K’s ‘answer’ : to not mind what happens?
But we do mind what happens. This fact cannot simply be replaced by a slogan which maintains the opposite.
Is there any aspect of the self that persists? If so, it might be able to offer answers that persist.
Solipsism!
So what is the ‘fix’? That you say must be done immediately. Fine if you don’t know but why say something is necessary to do, if you don’t know what it is?
The word “slogan” to describe the secret that K shared with us seems to me to demean it.
No, solipsism means one is concerned only with oneself because of the belief that the self is all there is. That’s just another form of belief no different from the belief in God. We are here now facing together the same question. Belief is futile, idiotic. So what shall we do? The answer doesn’t lie in another land.
But aren’t you saying the same thing: Our only concern is the land in which we are now living, which is the only land there is? Individual-solipsism and group-solipsism are both solipsistic.
Returning to the original posting of this thread:
Morally speaking, are there ‘universal red lines’ no human being should cross? Murder, for example, in any of its forms. Torture? Slavery? If so, who draws these lines, who decides whether an event falls on this or that side? How far does relativism/perspectivism go?
It is necessary, isn’t it? Whether I say it or not is irrelevant. We have to fix it. There may be very few chances left for us to fix anything. So what is the fix? What will put things right? I have no idea. That’s why I put the question. Can the mind remain totally sane in an insane world? There is very little point in posing a question for which one already possesses an answer. And unless we reject every other answer that comes along in the form of ideas and proposals, we shall remain deeply in this mess. Can we bear to live with these kinds of questions and yet have no answer to them? That’s both the quandary and the fix together, but we don’t really want this kind of thing. We are always seeking for and grabbing at the most ridiculous idealistic solutions. Yet there is no sanity in that direction, whether it comes from a past slogan or a forlorn future dream.
But K wouldn’t mind - that was his whole point. How on earth do we miss such obvious things?
Are we really concerned about anything at all? Or are we just treating all of life as a theoretical experiment? If we don’t really care about where we are, about what we do, about those with whom we live and work, there is very little point in any of these discussions.
Primarily we are concerned with ourselves and things that are extensions of ourselves: family, tribe, political party, spiritual teacher. The further we get from a sense of self involvement, the less urgent our concern. 7.5 billion people, each of whom feels they are the center of it all.
Which doesn’t mean we don’t care about others. We do! Just way less than for ourselves.
Greetings.
Yes, it is. Discussions are made all in fear of future, about humanity’s prosper.
Let humanity go extinct like Dinosaurs did, or let humanity prosper for billion years. Why to discuss about anything at all?
From discussions, one can only look at oneself as “What happens, etc.” like you said. But It WON’T change whole humanity, and ‘it WILL one day’ is all a false belief or speculation.
Love and Compassion doesn’t mean Caring. Doesn’t mean to change/protect people. Caring and Protecting and Prosper and placing “Only Beauty and not Destruction”, are all a “security” to “escape fear and sufferings” but not facing it. Poor Krishnamurti & K-ists. It’s okay, one day one will understand. 
Free world is stalling??
I’m sorry. There is NO FREE world. There was not or will not be, any such thing as FREE World and so no view of stalling arises.
World has both Beauty and Destruction. There is not just one thing present as a whole in any time, ever.
World, is full of fragments of Compassion,fear,anger,pleasure,sufferings,security,conflicts, contradictory-opinions,pride,greed,hatred,Love,etc. This is the Beauty of the World, and this is it’s Destruction too.
This is “Thought” - it’s Beauty and Destruction is all over the world. Seeing it and being truly aware of it’s whole nature, is Intelligence.
Hoping “free world” is POSITIVE THINKING. 