“Wary”? Children’s brains love believing in fantastic things (the good ones). We go from Santa and his flying reindeer to angels and God and ……
Yes, as I said earlier, we don’t expect of the child’s brain to be wary of belief. For the young brain, belief is a toy, something to be played with until the brain is capable of acknowledging what belief is.
How do we tell the difference between fact and belief?
Thought and emotion, and even more thought and feeling are intimately intertwined, I agree. It would take something like a peak and pure feeling-emotion to be thought-less. And the time when thought is truly ‘banned’ from the proceedings is usually fleeting, some seconds maybe.
Would you be into posting an experiment along these lines to Experiments? Could be illuminating!
The main thread for me in Krishnamurti’s writings and talks is his fervent (burning!) desire to set man wholly and unconditionally free. Though he didn’t propose any paths for ‘attaining’ that freedom, he did speak often of the necessity of self-observation and learning.
I think that he spoke quite forcefully for the need for us to have a brain that was silent, empty still in order for us to “participate in the Immensity” and to not do that was a great loss.
I agree. He also made it perfectly clear that by freedom he meant a state of love and intelligence in which thought has no place, in which self-interest has no place.
So part of exploring what Krishnamurti meant by freedom, as I understand it, is to find out for oneself the limits of thought - where thought has its right place, and where it has no place at all.
And to come upon an understanding of this it seems to me that we have to be negatively aware of the active presence of thought in our life. Of what thought has created in our minds, in the psyche, and which we are affected by every day. Not condemning, not acting upon what we discover - but caring about the watching.
I think this already carries us pretty far. It may not be speculatively exciting, but it is actual.
Many facts are self-evident, and many are demonstrably true. Everything else is conjecture.
It is an eerie thing to realize that the conversation going on in your head is between thought and itself!
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Thought is only as good as it is aware of its limits, and since it is our primary means of communication, it has to be in constant communication with itself.
Thought does what it can to represent what it can name, identify, and describe, and if can’t do that carefully and responsibly, it is not serving the purpose of clarifying, but of confusing.
This has been mentioned on another thread, but what K calls the field of understanding and love in which thought doesn’t exist, is essentially a state of pure attention:
love is a state of pure attention in which thought is absent
freedom is a state of pure attention in which thought is absent
beauty is a state of pure attention in which thought is absent
intelligence is a state of pure attention in which thought is absent
insight is a state of pure attention in which thought is absent
mind is a state of pure attention in which thought is absent
creation is a state of pure attention in which thought is absent