Is there a “proper understanding” of Krishnamurti’s talks, dialogues, and writings, or is there only one’s impression of them? If it’s possible to be aware of how I am interpreting K’s words, it’s possible to put aside my interpretation and attend to what K intended by what he said and wrote.
The only “danger” I see here is being unaware of how I interpret K’s teaching instead of letting it speak for itself.
And since it’s no less perilous to start believing there is no division, there is nothing but the question of whether there is or isn’t division.
So a decision has to be made: did he actually see that or did he believe it? How could I know?
Why do we feel “a decision has to be made” when we know we don’t know something? Why is it our bias, our tendency, our ethos, to believe, i.e., pretend to know rather than be honestly unknowing?
For what it’s worth I believe that he DID see it and that that was the message he was giving to whoever could, would listen: There is no division.
So I succumb to the conditioned pressure to pretend to know what I really don’t know, and that’s the end of the matter. Inquiry is trumped by decision. I don’t need to find out what is true when I can always just presume to know.
It turns everything on its head!
It shuts down inquiry by affirming the authority of dishonesty.
Just the opposite of your conclusion, in my case anyway, it opened everything up!
What I got from this was the following :
If there is no division, as in the observer is the observed, then awareness of what I experience is always awareness of my projections.
It turns the question of whether “I can listen when I have the truth” on its head : listening always includes listening to/being aware of, me.
That’s one way of putting it. I can’t listen. I can’t perceive directly. I can’t love, be free, be silent etc. The ‘I’ lives in the darkness of its belief that it is ‘divided’…it IS division itself and its attempts to be ‘free’ from an illusion only perpetuate the darkness.
K’s “there is no division” is a voice crying in the darkness….a call to inquire, to question, to be as nothing, to be aware. To wake up.
Because “The house is burning” 
I think the issue is that most people participating on any forum often feel as though they have truth on their side, and find it difficult to accommodate contrary views.
So the challenge of a forum like Kinfonet - as was mentioned in the original post - is for those of us participating here to take into account the subtly different approaches each of us have.
On the one hand there are those who completely dismiss any views that they feel undercut or contravene what Krishnamurti has said, and who may even feel that the attempt to discuss or comprehend what he has said - through written or verbal statements - implicitly contravenes what he has said. This is one extreme.
And on the other extreme there are those who completely reject what Krishnamurti has said - about the nature of the self, the ego, for instance; or about the possibility of perceiving without mental images - and who may feel that what the psychologists and scientists are saying about the ego or about perception has totally invalidated Krishnamurti’s teachings on these matters.
And there are a spectrum of approaches that fit somewhere between these extremes.
For myself I feel it is important to give space to as wide a spectrum of participation as possible, but I nevertheless feel that those who are on the extremes have a responsibility to at least listen to and take seriously other approaches.
For instance, if one feels that there are important views to consider which challenge aspects of Krishnamurti’s teachings, I would suggest that rather than creating a zero-sum situation in which only one ‘side’ can be considered true, one ought at least to consider whether both views can be given equal respect, and find out if they even compliment each other, before deciding precipitously that only one of the views can be entertained as valid at the expense of the other.
This is especially the case with scientific views that are constantly changing, constantly being updated and refined in the light of new data, and so cannot be taken as absolute truths in the forms they currently appear.
If one simply assumes from the beginning that what the scientists are saying about issue X is an absolute fact, which invalidates what Krishnamurti has said about issue Y, then isn’t it this is a form of dogmatism at least as rigid as those who do not countenance discussing any of Krishnamurti’s statements?
There is a way of dialoguing that does justice to both the scientists and to Krishnamurti - giving respect to each - without expecting a full scientific enquiry on a Krishnamurti forum, which is clearly not going to happen.
It opens up false hope, false confidence, false sense of security.
Not “always”, but only when awareness doesn’t support the brain’s content.
It turns the question of whether “I can listen when I have the truth” on its head : listening always includes listening to/being aware of, me.
If the brain believes it can “have the truth”, when it hears what does not conform to or support its belief, the head turns away (it is not upended) by reacting, denying, dismissing, or distorting what it can’t dare listen to.
An example of this for me is something K says in a talk he gave in Hamburg in 1956:
We are trying to experience directly for ourselves if there is such a thing as reality, something more than the mere projections of the mind… Can you and I… discover or experience something which is immeasurable?
Even though it is impossible to know whether Krishnamurti was merely hallucinating or seeing the truth of something when he asked this question, it allows us to ask ourselves whether our own minds can participate in an immeasurable state, or not. And what may be making this state an impossibility.
It is also a very general question for ourselves: are we able to experience something more than the “mere projections of the mind”?
Some scientists use the language of hallucination to suggest that everything we experience is a projection of our mind/brain (as @macdougdoug has been saying). But we have to remember that just because scientists use such language does not make it a fundamental truth. It may simply be a very useful metaphor for capturing important aspects of what goes on in neurological activity. But an aspect doesn’t make up the whole.
We can measure aspects of experience. But it may not be possible to measure the whole of any given experience. And to be in a state of experiencing whereby something immeasurable becomes even notionally feasible, the mind/brain must be whole, complete, not fragmented. Even the best metaphor cannot capture such a state.
Yes of course. To me this ‘no division’ business is crucial. Belief has nothing to do with it. I will find out if it’s true or not….if I can.
Btw, this was not a ‘question’ (no division) but a statement he made as fact.
Yes, knowledge is dangerous but also one aspect of the whole.
David Bohm in ‘touch the future’ writes the following about it:
Knowledge Is Full Of Barriers
The point is that knowledge is full of barriers which are very active. In the case of special relativity, one of the main barriers was Newton’s belief that any velocity could be reached and overtaken. Einstein did not mean to disparage Newton with his questioning. Rather, he said that if he saw further than Newton, it was because he stood on Newton’s shoulders. Newton himself showed a similar humility when he said he felt like a person walking on the shores of a vast ocean of truth and picking up a few interesting pebbles.
As I recall it, Bohm’s view of scientific 
knowledge is that it is a constantly moving exploration that attempts to keep up with what has been discovered, but which remains forever limited. There can be no final knowledge, no theory of everything. Knowledge is always an approximation, a current ‘best guess’ at what reality or nature is doing, forever one step behind nature, a fragmentary abstraction of certain features of nature. So knowledge is always fragmented and never whole.
Krishnamurti’s concern was the perception of the whole, holistic perception, which he called insight. And such insight, he said, is not the product of knowledge, has nothing to do with knowledge.
So there is a tension between scientists who say, from their ground in knowledge, that such holistic insight is impossible, and Krishnamurti’s statement that holistic insight can happen and does happen (so long as the brain is quiet).
So for these scientists Krishnamurti’s statement is the product of illusion, hallucination.
I would look at the false… without comparison, without judgment, without condemnation.
But isn’t it the truth for the psychologically conditioned brain? As long as the brain is holding and identifying with its content, scientists can see the brain doing this very thing.
I feel these are two quite different things Inquiry.
The metaphor of hallucination is applied by Anil Seth to the brain’s perceptual cognitions. In his book he tends to mix up psychological processes with perceptual cognitions sometimes - as this isn’t an issue to which he has given much attention - but he is essentially exploring ordinary perceptual cognition, not the process of psychological thought.
What Krishnamurti is concerned with, and what you are alluding to, is the way that psychological thought, psychological memory, distorts our experience of the world, by creating enemies (for example), or by constructing internal (psychological) fears, or by diminishing the acuteness of our sense perceptions.
These are two quite different ways of talking about distortion.
The challenge of exploring into what Krishnamurti (K) talked about is that it implies a creative tension between accepting what he said at face value, and rejecting what he said as having no validity.
The tension between being a follower, a believer of K, and a cynic, a perpetual rejector of K.
For me, to enquire into K’s teachings implies two things:
Being serious enough about them to be open to exploring what they are pointing to afresh.
And establishing the same use of words together so that there isn’t a constant and unnecessary breakdown in communication.
So, for instance, Krishnamurti talked a lot about thought, the nature of thought, and how it is limited. If a person proposes to use the word ‘thought’ in a totally different way than this, then dialogue/conversation will break down.
The way K used words could often be ambiguous, and one has to allow for context-dependent differences to emerge when using the same word. But these ambiguities in language can be explored on their own terms without occluding their generally accepted meaning.
So, for instance, the way that K generally talked about consciousness is not the common way this word is used in the wider culture (where it usually means awareness). But occasionally K used the word consciousness as a synonym for awareness. So one has to go by context.
Similarly K used the words intelligence, love, insight, meditation, attention, perception, mind, truth, reality, actuality, time, knowledge, the observer, experience, aloneness, etc, in very specific ways that are often unique to him. But K also used these very same words in their ordinary accepted sense. So one has to be alert both to their specific K-related meaning, as well as their general significance, because - depending on context - either meaning may be intended.
And finally, one is interested understand what K talked about because one is interested in understanding oneself. The understanding of K’s teachings and the understanding of oneself do not exist in separate psychological universes. So this ought to be borne in mind when examining K’s words.
One thing seems clear:
Between on the one hand those who are adamant that they have had insight, and those, on the other, who have a cynical or nonchalant disregard for K’s teachings, it is actually quite difficult to find people who are willing to explore what K taught.
In dealing with the saints and the cynics there seem only to be endless disagreements (on the one hand) and dialogic dead-ends (on the other). The cynic will never be convinced except of his cynicism, while the self-appointed mystic is forever entranced by their delusive fantasies.
are very, very, very few.
For me, exploring what K taught is an ongoing attempt to understand what K meant by what he said; how he used language to awaken the listener/reader to what language can’t adequately convey.