I feel that there is a beauty with absolute truth, as it shows its effect irrespective of the relative facts what is happening in the world surrounding us. What do you say mac?
Right! - which doesn’t mean that what is, is static.
The actual world we live in is alive, constantly changing. Perhaps by remaining with psychological facts - such as suffering - the suffering can change, be transformed.
So we are not putting limits on the world of facts, the limits created by our ideas of absolute or relative.
To use an analogy:
A lotus flower grows in the mud, and if that is all one knows of it, then it is very limited. But if one is patient, and watches it grow out of the water and into full blossom, then one has a completely different understanding of what it is! 
I don’t know what to say - I kinda feel like something strange is going on in the claim “shows its effect irrespective of” - what does this mean? Its a one way street?
Okay let’s go like this
Do you agree that we faced the consequence of COVID-19?
I say that the outburst of virus is an absolute truth, but people tried to hide it initially (Which is a relative fact) but eventually the absolute truth showed its own effect. Hope you understood my intent. 
I could be wrong also, it is just my opinion.
What do you say Mac, James?
If I let the notions of relative and absolute truth fall away, what’s left is a stream of sensory and mental impressions: sights, sounds, thoughts, beliefs, feelings, usw. Being aware of these impressions is as close as anything gets to being ‘factual’ in my view. Everything else is, to some degree, speculative. Any ‘facts’ derived from this speculation are, to some degree, fuzzy.
I think I need to take a break from ‘facts.’ I feel myself digging my heels in, unwilling to budge. The mud needs to settle.
I have to agree with you on this, as we are attached to our conclusions(human beings at the end of the day). What can I say?
I think you have to direct this absolute and relative business to Rick. Is there an absolute and a relative virus? An absolute or relative reaction to the virus?
I think you may be using the word “relative” here to mean “related” - it is a “related” fact that people tried to cover up what was happening with Covid (if that is what actually happened).
Look, Sivaram. The issue here is that some of us are not yet even willing to admit or perceive that there is an objective, actual world beyond our immediate sensations and feelings - let alone talk about the absolute or relative truth of Covid-19!!!
quite right, because these are just abstractions
So, Rick, you will admit no other facts than your immediate sensations, feelings, usw? And your feelings, your intuitive common sense, doesn’t communicate to you the fact, the actuality, of other people attempting to relate to you? of a world outside of your feelings and sensations?
Yup,
It seems that I have done a mistake (maybe confused 
) in using the word relative fact for the act of covering up news by government to hide the truth.
Hey but we have a discussion on the topic of relative fact, that it can point to false ideas also.
I won’t even admit my immediate sensations as 100% facts!
It’s quite similar to an asymptote in math: It approaches 100%, might hit 99.99999%, but never quite gets there. That .00001% might seem trivial, but tiny things can matter a lot!
Yes, like war, like the destruction of the Amazon rainforest, like other people’s suffering.
This is also why I’ve always been suspicious of neo-advaita: “The world can go to hell, only ‘I’ matter.”
Whereas at least Buddhism admits the fact of universal suffering, and the feeling of “What can we do to assuage it?”
There seem to be 2 problems in this statement :
- A problem of definitions/language - Absolute Truth in the case of this discussion means the Ultimate, ultimate, ultimate, ultimate, ulimate truth (sorry I should have used capital U’s) like even more true than God or Brahma (unless there’s nothing more ultimate than God, then we mean God)
- You seem to be comparing 2 apparently true things (covid and government actions) and assigning a hierarchy to them. How is one true thing more true than another true thing? Is 150 apples greater than or less than 150 oranges? (No need to respond to this question)
Can you admit that sensations are being experienced? If not why not?
Things are being sensed (five senses), felt, thought, imagined, and so on. Yes, that sounds reasonable.
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Fair point. But it’s nuanced, right? There are different ways of looking at what’s up with Neo-Advaita. Perhaps we should explore it in a ‘jumping from fact to fact to fact’ thread. That way we can also get some experience working in the realm of ‘facts.’
Interesting. Here is a quote from Tradition and Revolution about this.
Mind remains in “what is”. It remains with pain. There is no thinking of non-pain. There is the sense of suffering. That is “what is”. There is no feeling of wanting to be out of it. Where does duality arise? Duality arises when the mind says, “I must be rid of pain. I have known states of non-pain and I want to be in a state of non-pain” (Pause). You are a man and I am a woman. That is a biological fact. But is there a psychological dualism? Is there a basically dualistic state or only when the mind moves away from “what is”?
There is sorrow. My son is dead. I do not move away. Where is the duality? It is only when I say I have lost my companion, my son, that duality comes into being. I wonder if this is right?
I have pain – physical or psychological grief. They are all included in pain. A movement away from it, is duality. The thinker is the movement away. The thinker then says this should not be; he also says there should not be duality.
First see the fact that the movement away from “what is”, is the movement of the thinker who brings in duality. In observing the fact of pain, why should there be a thinker in that observation? The thinker arises when there is a movement, either backwards or forwards. The thought that I had no pain yesterday – in that duality arises. Can the mind remain with the pain, without any movement away from it, which brings in the thinker?
The mind is asking itself how this dualistic attitude towards life arises? It is not asking for an explanation of how to go beyond it. I have had pleasure yesterday. It is finished. (Pause). Is it not as simple as that?
P: Not really.
Krishnamurti: I think it is. You see, this implies non-comparative observation. Comparison is dualistic. Measurement is dualistic. There is pain today, there is the comparison with the non-pain of tomorrow. But there is only one fact: the pain which the mind is going through now. Nothing else exists. Why have we complicated this?
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Apologies for not replying your posts sooner - it got too late for me (last night) to answer.
I was replying to a post by macdougdoug (during a conversation about the place of the terms “absolute” and “relative”) where he said that truth or fact is anything that truly, actually is - which I agreed with - and he gave 1 + 1 = 2
as an example of something incontrovertible (something we cannot use the concepts “absolute” or “relative” to escape from).
It is a minor point, but the problem with this example is that it presents actuality, the what is, as something static, something that cannot change. I’m sure this was not macdougdoug’s intention, but I thought I would nevertheless clarify that psychological facts (unlike mathematical truths) can actually change - which is relevant to those of us on this forum who are investigating whether transformation is possible.
This is why I shared the analogy of the lotus flower, which is well-known in Buddhist cultures.
Yes. So what I was suggesting is that perhaps, by remaining with a psychological fact - such as sorrow or hate - that it might change spontaneously. Not change because I want it to, or because I desire change - but simply as a consequence of direct observation, where the observer becomes (or is realised to be) the observed.
How is one to get over one’s hate? If the fact alone remains and not its opposite, then one has the energy to look at it. One has the energy not to do anything about it and the very fact is dissolved.
(Ojai, 2nd Question & Answer Meeting, 8th May 1980)
If you watch sorrow with care, hesitancy and affection, you will see there is no escape from it. Therefore that very thing that has been called sorrow turns into a totally different thing, which is passion.
(Madras, Talk 5, 7th January 1978)
Do you see what I mean?
Rick, didn’t we already discuss this issue of certainty several times? I’m sure we discussed it somewhere on this thread, and on some other threads too.
We are not suggesting that there is such a thing as complete certainty with regards to facts. We said that there can only be complete certainty - if such certainty exists at all - in truth, in insight.
So by demanding of facts that they be 100% certain, aren’t you - if I can use this analogy without being taken literally - “putting the cart before the horse”?
By all means, use the word “fact” in whatever idiosyncratic way you deem fit, but it is important to bear in mind the context of Krishnamurti’s usage of the word.
For K, facts matter primarily because they are relevant for self-knowledge. He often said in his talks that one can deceive oneself tremendously by isolating oneself from the world and just meditating. So he proposed that we require a criterion for looking at the “inner” - and that criterion was an awareness of what is going on externally, in the “outer”.
By “outer” he meant the world of society, the rich and the poor, the class divisions, the national divisions, the religious divisions, the racial divisions. Also our awareness of nature, of what human beings are doing to nature, and what our immediate relationship is to trees, to animals, to the beauty “outside”.
Then only, he said, are we capable of turning our gaze inwardly, to the “inner” - an “inner” which he said is also the product of society: the beliefs, the prejudices, the assumptions we have picked up from our parents and teachers; as well as all the psychological contents of fear, anxiety, pleasure, suffering, loneliness, hurt, etc, which have been created through our reactions, through our thinking.
For K, it is only when one has become aware of the totality of this movement of the “inner” and the “outer”, that a genuine insight may arise.
An insight which is not .00001% short of being insight - not a partial insight - but a total insight.
And only a total insight can be certain.
To disregard the reality of war, violence, nationalism, poverty, ecological destruction, suffering, etc, because all that one can be “certain” of are sensations (and even there, as you say, certainty is denied), seems to me to be a form of obstinate denialism or callousness, that I honestly don’t think you feel. What do neo-advaitins make of the whole field of compassion?
In any case, even if all you will admit to are your own sensations, the sensations of sorrow and pain have to be met somehow - one cannot simply wish them away because one has intellectual doubts about their reality.
So that pain, that sorrow (when it is there) is what we are calling a “fact.”
And I’m good with that: As I said, subjective experience is imo as close as we get to facts.
I really need to give this a rest. For the time being, rather than think of the thingies we’re discussing as facts I’ll think of them as ‘facts.’
Yes I do James. I will put this last quote from the same book same chapter to close this aside conversation, if I may. This is something suggest by K. that is very interesting,
Krisnamurti: The complete non-perception of “what is” breeds the thinker, which is dualistic action; and when the mind falls again into the trap of dualistic action, that is “what is; remain with that – for any movement away from that is another dualistic action. The mind is always dealing with “what is” as noise, no noise. And “what is”, the fact, needs no transformation because it is already “the beyond”. Anger is “what is”. The dualistic movement of non-anger is away from “what is”. The non-movement from “what is”, is no longer anger. Therefore, the mind – once it has perceived, once it has had non-dualistic perception – when anger arises again, does not act from memory. The next time anger arises, that is “what is”. Mind is always dealing with “what is”. Therefore, the dualistic concept is totally wrong, fallacious.
P: This is tremendous action. The dualistic action is non-action.
Krishnamurti: You have to be simple. It is the mind that is not clever, that is not cunning, that is not trying to find substitutes for dualistic action, that can understand. Our minds are not simple enough. Though we all talk of simplicity, that simplicity is of the loincloth.
The non-dual means really the art of listening. You hear that dog barking – listen to it, without a movement away from it. Remain with “what is”. (Pause) The man who remains with “what is” and never moves away from it, has no marks.
P: And when marks take place, to see that they take place. One act of perception removes the mark.
Krishnamurti: Quite right. That is the way to live.
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