“We” can’t do anything. He has made that very clear, often. As I see it, there is no ‘abandoner’, only abandonment. And it must be total. The abandonment of all psychological attachment in the moment. in the moment because the moment is all there ever is. That means to me not only the attachments but the one who is attached as well. I am what I am attached to. Without identification with what I am attached to, I am “nothing”. Isn’t that the deep basic fear of thought: to be nothing? Yet that (maybe) is the truth.
A hand that isn’t asking for money would drop “a wad of money” that’s pressed into it because it wouldn’t be clear what the terms of acceptance are.
Does thought have fear or does thought cause fear? Can thought be fearful, or is fear just a feeling, an emotion? Thought can incite fear and amplify it, but can thought experience fear?
Thought has no fear of being nothing because thought knows it is nothing but thought.
What content was in the hare’s mind? It has no awareness of itself as a hare.
Howard’s question was about the invention of ‘I am separate’ by thought. He wanted to know if that invention is mine. Cognition is a thought-driven process of perception. Non-human animals have no psychological forms they identify with; and yet, they are capable of self-world differentiation which is a state of separation. There was no Mr. Hare inventing it. I guess I am innocent too.
**Thanks for that Dan, that was hilarious. An old joke, but still good for a laugh!
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I’m not sure about any of it. JK at one point says “Thought IS fear.” Obviously psychological thought, not technical. But isn’t it the ‘thinker’, ‘experiencer’ that becomes ‘fearful’? And those illusory entities are creations of thought aren’t they? So ‘who’ is it then that is feeling frightened. When I say “I am scared” who is that ‘I’, if not thought itself with memory?
Fear is a feeling, an emotion, it’s physical. But it can be incited by thought, as can other emotions. Thought can’t be fearful because it’s a mental, mechanical process, but it can stimulate and incite physical sensations.
The “illusory creations of thought” are just more thoughts, but because these illusions aren’t seen for what they are and are mistaken for actualities, they’re experienced bodily, physically. It’s the power of suggestion.
There is no fear in the total abandonment of psychological thought in the moment - like being with the hare or with the courtship of the flying eagles.
Fear comes in when I think there is nothing interesting happening, when I’m absolutly bored. Or when I think I can’t cope with a situation, when I think people might get a bad image of me as incompetent or slow.
So the deap fear of thought might be not being able to preserve the image one has put together as competent, able, compassionate, having interesting and important things to do - the breakdown of the " me" as I think I should be and thus being as I am - one of many, nothing special.
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If this is so, why this need by thought to create this fictional me? The source of division, conflict, etc. what kind of ‘security ‘ is gained by the creation of an illusory, continuous entity, me?
When psychological thought’s image of itself is exposed to ridicule or contempt, the experience can induce the physical sensations of fear or humiliation, but thought can’t experience “deep fear”. It can only acknowledge its mistakes and consider the possible consequences, and it’s the consideration that induces the sensations of dread and fear.
You might have once? I wonder. One never ever falls out of love. If you see that as a commercial transaction now, you couldn’t have read it right in the first place then.
“Giving up things” is akin to renouncement. To Krishnamurti, it is the giving up of the self and that is essentially what Jesus was talking about. The self is a whole way of life and not just the illusion of the separate actor invented by thought. If it was that simple, then everyone in this forum who can see this is transformed. I can keep my money, you can keep your wife, Paul is free of fear, Dominic is the observed, and all of us should be certified fundamentally changed by the American Psychiatric Association.
By the way, I didn’t get that part about the eagle and the cigarette. The smoking culture was before my time.
Of course, we can. What Krishnamurti meant was that it cannot be done consciously, deliberately with willful intent to achieve a perceivable end.
Let’s not get hung up about being the abandoner. Like it or not, the self is here to stay. Even Krishnamurti cannot do anything about it. Do you think he was really walking around in the selfless state, that state in which there is no center during his waking hours? How do you think he could place his bottom on the center of the chair he had to sit on before giving a talk?
Let’s be clear about this. Fear is one thing and thought is another. Fear is an emotion, a feeling that is real and can be felt. Thought is not real, and as the mind, is an idea, a metaphor. Wow, this is real meditation, Dan. Heavy stuff. I need a drink.
It’s not what I think, it’s what he said: “I have no self image thankfully.”
Neither have I, but only when there is no other. Otherwise, I get into self-image mode to interact with other selves and objects. Having no self-image doesn’t mean living 24/7 without a center. How would you walk down the stairs without watching your step? How could Krishnamurti have walked through a door or shoved his dinner into his mouth?
My consciousness is not mine when the self is not. Any other time, when the movie director in us calls “Action!”, we resurrect the self-image, get into character as Sree or Dan and follow the script of a sane person living in time and space of a real world.
I’d say that is what it means. The human mind free from the particular, the personal, the “me and mine”. Free from its conditioned state. Free of the “prism” through which the world is seen. The limiting quality of that ‘filtered’ view. It, to me, is not at all about renunciation as you said. That is an act of will, aimed at discarding this or that. Is his word “negation” different than that? You asked what is the ‘blossoming’. To me it is this emptying of the mind of the personal, the divisive separateness of the ‘me’. A radical psychological revolution. Will it happen before humanity destroys itself? Looks unlikely at this point.
To me this a kind of aberration in the evolution of man and nothing is gained by it. We aquired it through tradition, education, through transmission of false knowledge, because as children we were told we are seperate and couldn’t help to believe it. We can never be secure because what we think we are is just an idea. That seems to be the reason for fear.
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Yes unless the self-image is ‘dropped’, the false view of what ‘death’ is (as well as other beliefs) haunts us throughout life. It poisons the time here like the Sword of Damocles hanging by a hair.
I think Krishnamurti used the term thought-feeling sometimes. We needn’t make mistakes to feel dread and fear, it is enough to think that one might fail or might not be appriciated, because we remember occasions when that was the case. And one is afraid of experiencing it again.
We don’t die just because we are nothing special, just because our ideas about ourselves are false - let’s be aware of that next time we are afraid 
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Yes. I was just referring to how the mind’s realization that it made a mistake can induce the physical effect of fear.
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