We don’t fear the unknown. We are afraid only of losing the known. It is the loss of the known that we associate with the unknown. We would rather cling to the most absurd opinions and beliefs than have nothing at all to turn to. So we never know what it means to be totally alone, knowing absolutely nothing about what we are. That’s our real knowledge, our true bedrock: the nothing, the not-a-thing, the absence of everything put together by thought. Apart from the technological stuff, everything else is mere pretend knowledge.
Hi Dan.
The egoic I, yes?
Is there a real entity that senses/thinks?
Is anyone or anything home? If not, who or what is calling the shots?
There it is.
We are terrified of nothingness, nowhereness, nobodyness. We fear it like we fear death.
But what is the entity that fears all of this? It is a voice saying to itself, ‘I am something; I am somewhere; I am somebody.’ No wonder it is afraid. It has gathered around itself all of these ideas and images; and not one of them is permanent. Not one of them provides deep everlasting security.
As I expected - you throw in another distracting and unnecessary semantic curve ball 
- You had said previously that
At the moment of anger there is only anger
Now you are saying that to even express what you had previously been happy to say in words implies an observer because there is “someone” talking about anger.
This means that what you had previously said - namely that
At the moment of anger there is only anger
was, in fact, not correct (you are now saying) - Because there is always something other than anger present as soon as it is articulated verbally that
At the moment of anger there is only anger
That is, it was only ever an observer making an observation about a hypothetical state of “only anger” which was not “only anger” at all, but rather “anger plus an observer talking about anger”.
Can you understand why this might confuse people?
So, when I picked up what I took to be an interesting question you had raised - namely that
At the moment of anger there is only anger
I was in fact picking up a sentence that for you had already been invalidated in the very expression of it! - that (according to what you are saying now) you yourself had invalidated by verbally saying that
At the moment of anger there is only anger
Am I understanding you correctly?
So we have to go back to the part of the discussion that existed before you said
At the moment of anger there is only anger
because that for you now is invalidated.
So we are still at the point where there is anger plus the observer who is trying to control that anger. The observer is separate from the observed (as anger). We are still at that point.
So when you now ask
we are still speaking about it in the context of this observer separated from the observed, who is now asking whether he can “let go” of the anger. It is still the observer.
It is still the observer whether he attempts to “control”, to “let go”, to “do nothing about”, or to “remain with” the anger. The observer is both asking the question, and the observer is also attempting to carry this out in action (controlling, letting go, doing nothing, remaining, etc). - Right?
Which basically means that there is no direct observation of anger itself: it is still being filtered through the reactions of the observer. There is not yet the state you spoke about previously - that now mustn’t be named in language - that
At the moment of anger there is only anger
Unless of course you are now claiming to have gone beyond anger, and are teaching us from the “other side”. Are you doing this Paul? - This is what it seems as though you are doing by putting up all these semantic smoke-screens.
If not, can you put your question more simply? What is it about anger that you are trying to say when you invite us to let go? Is it an insight that says: “let go!”, or is it merely the observer attempting a different strategy?
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We can ask that about the animals the birds, etc and there obviously is. They function and get by quite well it seems. But it’s doubtful that there’s a someone or something in charge. They function as an organism, in balance… It’s this ‘me’ entity stuck in our psyche that seems to have thrown everything out of whack. Thought’s creation of the thinker.
I recall a scene where a female tiger is lying on the grass and a male come s on the scene and approaches her. At a moment when he gets close, she explodes in a fearsome roar lashes out with her paw and sends him flying backwards in the air away from her. Then he walks aways and she settles back on the grass. Explosion over. Flowered and done?
Yes, it’s definitely a wrench in the works! Some kind of self seems to exist, but what it is and how it exists is quite mysterious.
How might one find out?
Yes, and the drive to find deep everlasting security is strong in our species. Inborn, learned … yes, yes. Our capacity to fool ourselves in order to stave off terror and despair is enormous. We are brilliant at it. We fear, we find no rational fix, we invent a fix, we institutionalize the fix, and we come to believe it’s real. Sort of. Part of us, the intelligent part, knows at some level that the fix is hokum … but we’re good at suppressing that part.
You are still missing my point. At the moment of anger there is only anger. I stick to that; I am not trying to invalidate it or change it. I think this is fairly obvious to anyone who has ever been angry. At that moment, the observer is incapable of intervening. But a second or two later, the observer comes into play. He either says, ‘I was right to be angry,’ or, ‘I was wrong to be angry; I must never be angry again.’ Why? Why does the observer return?
There is no observer in play right now because we are just looking together at this picture of ourselves as we behave in daily life. In daily life we get angry; we lose control. And my question is, why does the observer enter so quickly after any episode of anger? Can the same observer or censor keep out of it altogether? Even if it is just as an experiment to see what happens when it stays away.
Let me put it another way. While I am talking to you, discussing, arguing, looking at some issue that is extremely important to both of us, I lose control, I blow my top. What happens when I refuse to call this loss of control ‘anger’ or anything else?
And I am deliberately using the word ‘refuse’ here: I refuse to do anything with this outburst of energy. Why do I refuse? Because the whole issue we were discussing so passionately is now right in my hands; the baby is mine.
Yes - this is my question too. I think we are in agreement on this. The language I was using for this was the word “flowering”. 
You can use another word, that’s fine.
So (we are asking) can the reaction of anger occur without the observer doing anything about it, without seeking to control it or shape it in any way - but just let the thing flower? It’s a question that - as you say - invites experiment, something to “play with” in daily relationship.
And maybe in the flowering (or whatever word you prefer to use) is the letting go?
A dialogue exposes the hokum. That’s all. It never attempts to create a better form of hokum. In just looking at the hokum, we are already awakening intelligence.
We used anger as an example, but it could be any feeling, any outburst of emotion. It could be something less dramatic, like guilt. A feeling arises and there is the refusal to name it. In other words, the observer is deliberately switching itself off.
Yes, I feel a strong urge to expose hokum … then lessen/solve/fix it. Dispel the illusion. What I don’t see so well is that my doing something to the hokum, attempting to de-hokum it, might very well be another, perhaps subtler form of hokum.
Hokum all the way up … and all the way down. (There I go again!)
The perception that I have been giving tremendous important to images which have no substance to them has already done something to the images and to the image-maker.
Things ‘as they are’ often seem flat and boring. It is only when I’ve made something out of them, played with them, put my special little twist on them that they feel interesting. A chipmunk seen ‘as it is’ is just a chipmunk. But when I give it a name and personality and special place in my life, it is so much more.
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Agreed. It could be any feeling.
Maybe it the way you have phrased this, but it doesn’t sound quite right. If it is “deliberate”, a deliberate refusal, then it must be the observer - right? Can the observer “switch itself” off deliberately?
Any act by the observer is still the observer. That’s why I think the language of choiceless awareness is better in this arena. We might then ask:
Can there be a choiceless awareness of the feeling (or emotion) as it arises? In this choiceless awareness can there be only the feeling (emotion) without an observer intervening to evaluate, act upon, or in any other way distort the feeling?
It is a question we put to ourselves as part of our daily life, like a seed planted in the soil, to which there is no conscious, deliberate answer.
If the seed sprouts, then there is a choiceless awareness of the feeling as it arises. If it flowers, then that implies that there is only the feeling and no observer acting upon the feeling deliberately - the observer has naturally, without effort, fallen away.
So we are asking ourselves (non-verbally): what happens in that flowering? Is there a letting go? Is there a flowering and a withering of that feeling? What happens when the observer is absent?
It is a question that has meaning only in a mind that is in what we might call meditation - right? It’s not an argument then, it’s something to be discovered, explored - experienced (if I can use a non-Krishnamurti sounding word).
In doing all this, it is your own life which you are making special, isn’t it?
Yes, it can. That’s what I am saying. That’s the insight, the discovery.
I’m changing both my life and the chipmunk’s life (in that I’ll pay more attention to it, feed it, try to tame it perhaps). But the special-ness I might ascribe to both my life and its life … that’s me doing it, yes. The chipmunk might be happy to get treats, but ‘feeling special’ is I think beyond its affective ability.
So - at least verbally - what you are saying is: “the observer can end the observer by a deliberate choice to end the observer”. Does this sound right to you?
You call this an insight. In which case you are implying (at least verbally) that insight affirms this act of choice, will, desire, control. But is insight a deliberate choice?
You are calling this an insight, but it doesn’t sound correct to me. Maybe it’s a problem in the way you’ve articulated it, but - as far as I understand what we’ve been discussing all this time - the observer can do whatever it likes: control, switch-off, run away, choose. Yet it is still the observer.
Any deliberate act implies choice, will, desire, control. And all this is what we have been calling the observer.
According to Krishnamurti insight is a flash of total perception that arises out of choiceless awareness and attention to what is. It has nothing to do with will, conscious deliberation, choice or control.
So either you are using language in a way that is radically different to Krishnamurti (to express what you are calling “insight”), or it is not an insight at all, and you may be fooling yourself.