Doubting with some humility creates an healthy discussion, what do you say James? 
Sir,
I think, questioning should be there in our discussions, when someone is asserting something on a particular topic, such that we could connect in more unified way. Maybe questioning will unfold the opinions and make the concept more transparent to everyone.
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Is the absolute present honestly one’s daily experience (something that can be called “conventional” or “relative”)?
From logic alone one can say that the absolute present is a total mystery - because the ‘now’ is where the future which is not yet, and the past which no longer is, meets. But how can the meeting place of two things that don’t exist (i.e. the past and the future), exist?
The nature of physical time is a mystery.
But the time of our experience is something a little different. We experience time as a psychological continuum: the past experience meeting the present experience and carrying on to the future. And this whole movement of psychological time has to come to an end for the ‘now’ to have any meaning.
K:
Unless you are free from that movement [of psychological time, the past], there is no observation of the new. That movement must stop, but you can’t stop it by will… You can’t stop it by desire… The past is a movement, always going forward, meeting the present and moving. The now is non-movement, because you don’t know what the now is, you only know movement. You see, the immovable is the now. So the movement of the past meets the now, which is immovable, and stops (Saanen, 27th July, 1976)
I would call such a perception (of the ‘now’) very unusual, and requiring of great insight. So when we talk about facts, we are not talking about a timeless perception of which we may have no direct experience. Ok?
Timelessness and non-causality are not facts for the ordinary person - they are speculations. As we said before, a fact is simply what has evidently happened and what is evidently happening. Like inflation, like covid, like Elon Musk’s attempt to purchase Twitter and evade responsibility for right-wing hate speech. Like the violence taking place in the world, like suffering.
No?
An appearance of what? Is the chair I am sitting on while I write this an appearance of universal energy? At some level, of course it is.
Is actual violence - in Ukraine, for example - a “shared appearance”? Or is it just a fact, an actuality that we (as human beings, or others like us) have to meet and deal with?
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Doubt is essential to any worthwhile discussion. One must feel free to doubt whatever is said. But - as K sometimes said - doubt must also be kept on a leash! 
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Well, maybe you could offer a counter-example?
A dream or a hallucination can only take place because of a real brain in which it takes place.
An optical illusion can only take place because of the way that our vision has physically evolved in response to material conditions.
Is there such a thing as a pure illusion not grounded in anything real at all? An appearance of absolutely nothing (in the absolute sense)?
As Tsung-mi pointed out,
If the mind and its objects are both non-existent, then who is it that knows they do not exist?
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I generally doubt or start questioning, if I read the words framed in a twisted way or if there is some sort of complicated terminology (Alaya vignana, brahaman, Yogic perception, Dignana, Dharmakriti at least for me as I am not educated on those things) or if I see some sort of assumptions in our discussion. If I see the simple words, I feel very comfortable to understand the intent of opposite person.
Yes, apologies for this. I studied some of this stuff recently at university, and have been discussing it with a few people here who share an interest. The technical terms are just a short-hand for highlighting a particular perspective that would otherwise take a lot longer to explain. They are also just the terms that some non-European cultures use to talk about the same questions we are talking about here. And Dignana and Dharmakirti are just names belonging to historical persons!
But I will try to resist any future use of such technical language (unless it feels absolutely necessary).
No need for such things( no one is perfect), just bare my ridiculous questioning sometimes that is enough.
Okay, it is good then.
Friends I got a doubt,
What happens if we ask ourselves, “who am I ?” while doing conclusions from things which we have observed around us? I do not know whether it is practical thinking or not, just asking. 
I suddenly realised that we discussed this issue of facts over a year ago, in April 2021!! (on a thread which began with the question What did Krishnamurti mean by fact?).
Is this still not clear to us after all this back and forth? 
I think one of the replies I made in that year-old thread is still valid here:
A fact has no opposite - it is not a matter of argument (at least, not once it has been seen).
If you and I were crazy enough to want to find out what is actually on top of Mount Everest (and we distrusted satellite technology, drone images, or the testimony of others), then we would have to climb Everest.
If - by some miracle! - we survived to the top in good health, and were not suffering altitude sickness, then we would see the same scene, and be able to say to each other: so this is what is on top of Everest! - There would be no argument.
The contrarian need to find a loophole [an opposite] in this fact would be undercut by the more practical reality that it would have taken us weeks and weeks of preparation, expense, and perspiration to reach the top and see what there was to be seen. Friends don’t argue about trivialities.
So a fact [once seen] creates no controversy, no disagreements, no division.
I also shared the following extract by Krishnamurti to indicate what he meant by the word “fact”, and I still feel it pretty much gets at what most people would consider to be a fact:
When we say ‘fact’ … what do we mean…? … The fact is that there is war. Right? The fact is that human beings are violent. The fact is there are national divisions, political divisions, religious divisions, ideological divisions. Right? You and me - division, the woman and the man - division. And the fact is, where there is division there is conflict - the Jew, the Arab and so on and so on, the Muslim and the Hindu, and so on. … We said facts, or what actually is - short, tall, broad, brown, white hair, pink and so on, so on, black. Those are facts.… I make a gesture… it is a fact. I look at you, friendly, or with antagonism. That’s a fact. (4th Public Discussion, Saanen, 1977)
There may be other orders of fact, other orders of actuality - such as what happens to the universe at distances approaching the Planck length, or what might happen to our sense of time if we could travel at the speed of light, etc - but these all involve a large degree of theoretical background knowledge, inference, scientific expertise, etc, and were not primarily what Krishnamurti (or the Buddha) was interested in.
So rather than getting into a highly abstract conversation about what it means to establish complex scientific facts, let us take for granted that we are primarily discussing psychological facts (or at least widely accepted, well-known scientific facts).
And, similarly, while the universe might ultimately be timeless or have no cause, we are not talking about truth here (in our discussion about facts), because again that would almost certainly be speculative for us. A fact is something that is clear and obvious to our general awareness, our general perception.
There may be deeper orders of fact, but we cannot just skip over our present ignorance and confusion - so we are not discussing what might be the case for someone who has wholly emptied their mind of all thought and time (for that kind of discussion I would point you to the thread on the relationship of mind to the universe!).
So can we agree - for the present - that there is war going on, that there are national divisions, racial divisions, religious divisions, that there is starvation in some parts of the world, environmental destruction, etc, and that we - as human beings - are collectively responsible for all that?
This would then be a starting point for a real dialogue.
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What Krishnamurti and Bohm call facts are not absolute but relative facts, so that’s what I’ll call them. (Conventional facts and consensus facts work too, but they don’t roll quite so nicely off the tongue.)
Relative facts. Bring 'em on!
Starting points for dialogue are good - and dialogues do start on kinfonet.
Often though, even when people do seem to be understanding each other, a sticking point is reached, and we have to back away, into theories, or incomprehension, or conflict.
Other times, conclusions seem to be shared quite quickly, and the dialogue ends.
Sometimes, opinions or facts are just stated, and no dialogue even starts.
If we agree on a fact - what happens next?
Some might argue that a fact is just an image : a seemingly accurate representation - that might be used as part of a model, if that model serves for some goal or prediction.
What is our goal? Seeing the effects of reacting from this center we call me?
Yes, this certainly seems like a fact.
So if we agree these are facts^ where do we go from there?
^ I’m thinking: relative facts, relative facts, but keeping it to myself (kind of). 
Ok. Can we get clear what we mean by absolute and relative orders of fact?
And what we mean by a representation?
First, absolute and relative. What do these terms mean?
Does it mean that when I am hit by some tragedy, some deep suffering, I can skip over the agony of suffering into some absolute dimension where there is no suffering?
Yes, my friend is dead, but that’s ok because nirvana is samsara? Yes, the amazon rainforest is being cut-down and destroyed, but that’s ok because everything is consciousness? Yes, there’s a war happening right now, but that’s ok because fundamentally there is no causality at the level of absolute truth?
Aren’t we deluding ourselves when we think such things? Have we ourselves realised absolute truth that we can so easily refer to it whenever there are problems in the world?
So, is this traditional distinction (in the Hindu and Buddhist worlds) between an absolute and a relative truth the product of our own speculation? The Buddha may have seen absolute truth - bully for him! - but I am not the Buddha. What I have is what I have: the world of my daily experience.
Perhaps I have had moments when the world seemed to be infused with global awareness, universal mind, beauty - but those may have been partial insights, and partial insights do not cover the whole.
So if I meet a present psychological or human fact with my memory of previous ‘spiritual’ experiences, or my memory of what the Buddha said about the unconditioned, unborn truth, etc, then I am not meeting the fact at all. I am merely interposing - between myself and suffering, or myself and human violence - an idea that there is an absolute and relative truth. And an idea is not the actuality. The word is not the thing. The description is not the described.
So a “relative” fact is not a fact, it is an idea that hides an assumption (about something “absolute”). And when I am earnest about meeting a real fact - such as suffering - I cannot meet it with ideas, with assumptions, with beliefs.
What do you guys make of this?
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What is a representation? The word itself comes from “presentation”, which means to be before something, or for something to be immediately at hand. A representation would mean then “to have something placed before us”. Right?
Our eyes have evolved for millions of years to represent the visual world to us. We do not see all the colours of the spectrum, and other animals can see things that we can’t see. For instance, cats and sharks see much better than us in the dark, birds of prey can see objects at far greater distances than us, while hummingbirds, mantis shrimp and bees can see ultraviolet light.
So while our eyes do not represent all that there is to be seen, they have evolved sufficiently well for our needs, and we can trust our visual representations up to a point. In any case, we have no choice in the matter. We can use telescopes and microscopes, and different kinds of thermal cameras, uv cameras, x-ray cameras etc, to broaden the scope of what we can visually represent, but that is all.
However, when I am looking at a tree (which mean that my eyes are representing to the brain an object ‘out there’ we call a “tree”), and an idea comes in - such as, “I’ve seen that tree before, it’s nothing special”, or “Really that object we call a tree is nothing but a form in emptiness”, or “That’s a seemingly accurate representation of a tree” - is that idea as necessary, as intrinsic to the visual seeing of the tree as the optical representation itself?
Because our ideas are also attempts to represent the world - that is, to represent the world through our thoughts, our thinking.
So: there is the image of the tree in my retina, which is what allows for the visual representation of the tree. And there is the idea which comes between the act of seeing the tree, and the tree.
Which of these seems to you the more fundamental representation?
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Santa Claus may be true - usually reliable people have told me he is a magical being, who though hidden, exists outside of our imagination.
The fact is that for me (and for those of you able to agree), Santa Claus is only something that I have imagined.
It may only be a “relative fact” (that Santa Claus is imaginary for me - because I have only so far imagined him) - but surely its true? What would the absolute fact of my relation to Santa Claus be? Does it even make sense to bring up absolute facts here?
The initial projection from my brain based on however that all works is the more fundamental of the 2. Additional thoughts/judgements about the tree are secondary.
Right. It’s obvious isn’t it? We are talking about human facts, things that we can see, hear, taste, smell or touch; things happening in the world all around us, in society, in nature; and things we can directly feel or perceive inwardly, such as our fears, our pleasures, our affection for another, our joys and sufferings.
These are what I take to be our primary representations of the world. Ideas and thoughts about what we directly see and feel, only come afterwards - and so is secondary.
Is the word “absolute” relevant here?
Many people believe that Jesus Christ lives today, that Jesus is God, that Jesus died for our sins and was raised from the dead, that he is the second person of the Trinity, etc.
So what is my relationship to the fact that other people believe this? Because it is a fact that millions of people apparently believe this.
First of all, do I believe it? If it is a fact that Jesus lives, then where is the evidence for it? Is it in the Bible? Is it in the churches and cathedrals? Does Jesus reveal himself in prayerful contemplation?
Or is the image we have of Jesus a creation of two thousand years of propaganda? - a creation of our thinking?
So I may be surrounded by people who believe that Jesus lives, but this doesn’t make it true. Belief does not equal actuality. Belief is an idea we have attached ourselves to emotionally, but it is still an idea.
And ideas, as we said, are not a primary representation.
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Absolute truth cannot be used as an escape from the relative.
Absolute truth just means “whatever actually is, dude”
If I don’t want 1+1 to equal 2, Absolute Truth cannot be weaponised.
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