World Teacher Alerts Humanity to Danger of Psychological Knowledge Virus

**What about finding out what isn’t first-hand knowledge? Isn’t that where the confusion may be? Isn’t it a form of self-deception to exclude the second-hand knowledge?

**Seems pretty simple actually, like observing each response as it comes up. This question that you provided seemed to ask: is it possible to simply observe the responses, or whatever actually happens, so, in simply looking at that, it seemed quite easy to observe what you wrote, and observe what the words point to, and that seemed to happen rather easily. Did this response here reflect an inability to observe and see what you were asking? Does observation seem difficult to your direct looking?

**Well, I can’t seem to find this thing called ‘psychological time’. It seems to only exist in the imagination. What do you mean that thought “creates a reality?” What’s the nature of this reality?
Can you describe where you see “Thought/self imagining a reality?”

Nothing is being excluded. Second-hand knowledge is all self-deception, so one starts by finding out what first-hand knowledge actually is.

Are you aware of the way you distort what-is according to what-should-be?

It’s not a useful term, but K-used it, so his followers do, too.

What he’s saying is that because we can project a future and reflect on a past, we can “know” things we really don’t know, i.e., second-hand knowledge.

**That sounds like the ‘time’ Dan mentioned. Is there a ‘you’ spending time doing this?

What we go through, the travails and tribulations…the sturm und drang, the gains and losses, the successes and failures…the mourning and the exaltations… all in a blip, a bubble, a meaningless nothing. A reality created by thought, that is called ‘living’.

**In terms of observing directly for oneself, I was wondering what is actually ‘observed’ that looks like “Thought/self imagining a reality.” What’s the connection between travails and tribulations and Thought/self imagining a reality?

This made me think of a cassette I bought many years ago of Krishnamurti talking at Saanen. At several points during the talk K pointed to the mountains, encouraging the listeners to look, and commented on the great beauty. K obviously thought it was worth the listeners looking at the mountains. He didn’t say, “Don’t bother looking at those beautiful mountains - you’ll never see the beauty because of your conditioning.” So in all the pointing out he did, Krishnamurti must have thought that there was a possibility of his listeners observing “what is”. Is this not so?

Yes indeed, it does sound simple Howard. I’m certainly happy to try this out.

Yes, we’re all capable of some degree of “observation”, but it varies from one mind to the next. Some minds can handle more of what-is than others. But, nobody can handle the whole truth without losing everything one stands for. Or to put it another way: only Nobody can handle the whole truth.

Because Nobody has nothing to lose and nothing to gain?

Looking at ‘time’ as a tapestry unfolding itself but complete. The warp and woof being the possibilities available in each moment. My past already laid out but not so with the future. What I do in each moment either continues the patterns of the past or can change what is possible in the ‘future’, can dictate the future. I can continue in the ‘reality’ already established and continue that way until death which already lies in the last fold…or the whole ‘picture ‘ can change somehow. But it is always only what I ‘do’ now that determines what that picture can and will be.

**Yes, that does look like “Thought/self imagining a reality.”

Yes and the imagined reality or model determines to an extent how one behaves, doesn’t it? The Native Americans have a ‘reality’ that sees spirits residing in all living things. When an animal was killed for food or their skin, thanks were given to the spirit of that animal for its ‘sacrifice’. What a strangeness it must have been for them to see the ‘whites’ massacring the sacred bisons from the railroad cars for sport and leaving the bodies to rot.

And the whites living in their reality that it is the Native Americans that are the ‘savages’.

And with that reality, they set about annihilating them.

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Can you elaborate on this?

**I would suggest that the “mind handling what is,” to any degree, is not observation, it’s analysis. It’s a failure to choicelessly observe.

Handle: “feel or manipulate with the hands.”
“manage (a situation or problem).”

**Managing what is, a.k.a., “trying to make it fit into pre-existing knowledge” is the obstruction to observation.

Can you succeed at choicelessness? Who/what fails?

I don’t know. I’m somebody.