“we”
As you apparently realise it yourself, why use ‘we?’
I find it insidious that posters are writing of others but using the word ‘we’ as if they are including themselves, when it seems to me they are not. To the extent that I try to be accurate, try to critique my own tendencies to generalise, I will be more attentive to my true state. I am supposing that also goes for others.
( insidious: adjective - proceeding in a gradual, subtle way, but with very harmful effects.)
What are the implications? I’m not free, for one. And everything about ‘me’ is programmed and we’re imposing that programming on everyone we interact with, for one.
We are all selves. Even me
If you can acknowledge conflict and judgement and delusion as it occurs, there’s clarity enough to learn about it.
I agree Tom, but it still leaves a mystery. The fact that you say it is a program shows that you realize it is a program, yet you say, “we don’t realize it’s a program.”
How do you explain the contradiction?
If it is a fact that you do realize it is a program you cannot factually say ‘we don’t realize it’s a program.’ To be true to the fact you would have to say something like, ‘most of us don’t realize it’s a program,’ thereby excluding yourself from the collective subject. Forgive me if I deduce that there is a reticence to do so.
So what is the fact? You are a ‘self’ but is that particular self part of the collective subject with regard not realizing that it is a program? And if not, why the apparent reticence?
That is a big ‘if.’ But I think it is correct.
I use the word ‘conscience’ as expressing that twinge you feel when you find yourself in contradiction. It is not the usual way to use the word. Usually conscience and morality get mixed up. Morality has to do with the set of values we have adopted (in my usage). Conscience however is something I regard as a capacity, like an alarm going off or a wee small voice asking us to check again. Like all alarms however, they can be silenced.
The ability to distinguish the difference between judgement, conflict, and delusion as it arises in the mind, is discernment, and a discerning mind is capable of further examination and discovery.
Yes, the prick of conscience may lead to observation and in that observation the power of discernment may be used and from there, understanding may occur.
But as they say, there’s many a slip between cup and lip.
None of us are selves because the self is an illusion, and no one can be an illusion, a self-image. One can only identify with it.
Who is identifying with it?
There is no “who”. There’s only the desire to be someone, and the means to fashion an identity and create the illusion of a “who”.
Desire is the movement of the desirer, no?
This “desirer” is what we name self. Desire is the content of self. Are you trying to say that the content is the container ? (As K does) That there is not the self that is desiring, but rather that self and desire (or fear or whatever) are the same thing?
There is an accumulation of memories, desires, experiences, likes, dislikes, hurts, joys, etc that make up the ‘who’ or ‘me’. K. calls it the “contents of consciousness”. It is the ‘emptying’ of this consciousness that is the ending of the self or ‘freedom from the known’. There is no method or process in time that can bring about this emptying…it can only happen now through the perception that this is our situation.
Yes the ‘self’ or ‘me’ is not an entity that exists apart from the accumulation, it is the accumulation. It (me’) doesn’t exist. An ‘illusion’ created by thought. As in thinker / thought and observer / observed.
Identification is separation, confusion and conflict.
No. As I’ve said repeatedly to you, the self is an image, an illusion created by the mind that desires to be someone. An illusion cannot do anything. It is just an image. A human identifies with it to fit in with all the other humans doing the same thing.
You’re making this impossibly complicated. Put Krishnamurti aside and observe yourself, your thoughts, your feelings, your desires and fears, and find out for yourself what you’re doing.
The mind is what desires. (I am repeating what you just said)
Question: Is this mind what you identify as being you?
I think what you call “mind” is what I call “self” - because desire/aversion is self. (desire/aversion are emotionally charged thoughts)
If the “mind” has desires, fears - it is a self.
Strange that you think I am being complicated - Isn’t this really simple stuff ? (wrong maybe)
Actually - I have been repeating the same simple stuff to you all along and I get the impression we are not really understanding each other. May I just ask : are you trying to share some sort of insight with us here on this forum ? Or are you trying to work stuff out logically, reasonably through debate?
Yes, we are referring to the configuration of the mind, which is steeped in illusion. We are calling that configuration ‘self.’ It is a material process. The configuration is actual. It exists. Yet it does not reflect truth.
The mind is not the self. It is the means by which the illusion of self is created. Krishnamurti called it “thought”, I call it the mind, if that’s what’s confusing you. Desire is thought, fear and aversion are thought, just as the illusion of self is a product of thought. It’s this simple.
If the mind has desires, fears - it is a self.
No, for the last time, the self is an illusion that the mind, thought, identifies with. An illusion can’t do anything. It’s just an image.
Yes this is how I see it really, dialogue is something my life is rather than any one thing in particular. It is ironic perhaps, though only to be expected, that something specifically billed as dialogue should prove as fractious as anything else while serving to highlight that fact.