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Two men are talking, lying on their backs, looking up
“listen to that bird-song” says one, “and oh, the perfume of those flowers!
Just look at the beauty, the magnificence of that sky!
can you feel the abundant, gorgeous, pulsing life surrounding us?
aaaah” he sighs, happily, his only wish to share this, which was given to him freely
“listen to that peacefulness” says the other, “and oh the scent of this rich earth beneath!
“look at that light above, its radiance, just the sheer, phenomenal, physical wah of it all!
can you feel the deep, expansive, pulsing life everywhere and within?”
“ooooh”, he sighs, happily, his only wish to share this, which was given to him freely
some static, some white noise…
“what? what?”
…then
“you do not see me” says one
“no” says the other
“you do not see what I see!” says one
“no, it is you who do not see what I see!” says the other
‘click’, the line from one end of this spinning globe to the other
is disconnected…
… “hmmmmmmmm”...
one man rolls over, that sun is now much too hot, it burns, harsh
as he turns he deeply sighs again, this time with sadness, exasperation, resignation
the other man makes the exact same sound, the same sigh,
as he pulls his thick blanket up to his chin
he looks up still, only now that moon looking back feels cold, indifferent, remote
as he begins to process his regret
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how bout you and I have a talk right here where we are RJ? See, if I am taking your story the way you intended it, it sounds an awful lot like lament...that if only we could stop bickering about our picture of the sky we may just be able to see the others picture more clearly. It is tricky though, RJ, as often this revelling in the beauty around us is only the flip side of the coin, and the other side holds prejudice and disgust on it. What was K speaking to, was he admonishing us to just take in the beauty? I do not see that he was. Taking in the beauty is a by product of being present, but if there is no understanding of where you are then the beauty taken is is but a reflection.
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sure Joe, we can talk:)
you said "What was K speaking to, was he admonishing us to just take in the beauty?"
I don't think so, no.
I think he was speaking as clearly and fluently as he could about things that transcend langauge. I don't know if I want to summarise, well maybe I do
the problem: pain and suffering (the born of being human stuff, not so much the stubbed toe)
the solution: peace and love
the way: choiceless awareness
it sounds so bare bones, so dessicated bird dropping on your windscreen when I put it like that doesn't it? So boring! He was a talker, you have to give him that.
what else?
I can have trouble holding on to these kinds of conversations for long unless we start disagreeing with each other Joe. Maybe you want to pick a fight about something to keep it going? Or I could help there.
how about this for example?
I've been thinking about you a little bit lately. How you have (or had) some mysterious illness that, if it were me, would have been just eating me up with anxiety and making me behave even worse than usually to anyone who rubbed me up the wrong way. Are you keeping cool because you really are that cool, or my worry, if you want to call it that, is have you learned to keep your emotions in check by staying detached, staying in control, keeping in your head so to speak?
is that all a bit personal? sorry, I think I have consistently failed to follow the rules above by addressing the topic rather than the poster since I ever spoke to anyone here. I hope so anyway.
ok what else, I need to learn how to show quote marks
you said
See, if I am taking your story the way you intended it, it sounds an awful lot like lament...that if only we could stop bickering about our picture of the sky we may just be able to see the others picture more clearly.
I say yes, I like the odd lament, don't you?
you said
It is tricky though, RJ, as often this revelling in the beauty around us is only the flip side of the coin, and the other side holds prejudice and disgust on it.
I understand. The allegory I wrote could just have well been the two men describing how filthy and polluted their surroundings were with the ending being one is sitting in a boat in the deep ocean watching plastic trash and the other is in a factory making it.
but I think you are speaking to the appreciation of beauty itself being somehow the object. I don't think so, no. I agree that it has a flip side every bit as real as itself.
you finished by saying
Taking in the beauty is a by product of being present, but if there is no understanding of where you are then the beauty taken is is but a reflection.
this is where I get back to the question about detachment. That kind of statement can be read as someone who has determined to stay stoic and thus succesfully wards off excess of all kinds. Strong emotions of the self or another can be read as misguided in such a path. Taking in the beauty is taken in with the same dilution that the ugliness was thankfullly watered down by a moment ago.
The upside of feeling less is that you feel less bad. The downside of feeling less bad is that you feel less everything else too...
I've read a few of your thoughtful thoughts now, but it was when you spoke about your chldren, or your work, that I felt I actually heard you...
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so then what does that tell us? That I was more real when I talked about the personal or that you were more real when you heard it? Hell, we can give it any meaning we want but you know where that leads...ok, ten paces it is then.
just kidding, and I am mostly over what was plaguing me last summer and fall, thanks for your concern. I can't tell you for sure if I feel less or more, RJ. I can tell you that I think I feel much more than I used to years ago but not at all in the same way--but again that is just what I think, like a passing cloud it drifts above to be viewed or unseen. I try not to think in this way as it always paints fuzzy pictures, which are not my taste. Does that mean I TRY not to think or feel? Nope, I don't think so...I think it means I recognize my own bullshit and life is much more interesting in the every day than the bullshit I can make up and follow. It really is.
When my wife was sick and dying I probably did learn to control emotion to some degree, often for her sake. I of course wanted to be strong when she was feeling weak. But even before that, I never felt too emotionally caught up except for the time I was breaking away from my family, getting disowned, all of that stuff from late childhood. Lots of emotion there, but eventually my father and I were able to see each other and in the midst of a huge verbal battle we both stopped and realized we were just bullheaded, stubborn, and could not hear the other. In that moment we exchanged our mutual respect and that was that, for almost twenty years now we have gotten along swimmingly and simply do not talk about religion or politics.
I guess I am not much for lament, no...part of that fuzzy picture realm I have a hard time feeling a root in. Life is what happens.
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my family had a rule
'no religion or politics'
I thought it was what civilized people knew not to do. That if anyone bought up either subject they were demonstrating their lack of culture...
ah, what a revelation it was to meet Europeans!!
my father has just retired at near 70, he was the head of music at the huge boy's school here and still is the musical director of the catholic cathedral that has been destyoyed by the quakes.
he popped in for a chat and stayed for tea the other day. for the first time, ever.
hang on, this is going nowhere,
argue with me damn you
I have nothing more to say.
oh, here's something
'life is what happens?'
that's a really crap nutshell man
a) you don't know a fraction of what happens at any given moment
b) once you do know it is already over
c) anyone who hears that will probably be tuning into the subtext (i.e. shit happens)
and you don't like laments!!
Joe, your platform is built on the wailing moans of a million lost opportunities
feel the cut and thrust man!
the urgency of the orgasm of this impossible star-burst where we live out our miniscule moments on one of its flailing tails.
speaking of which
think of a sperm and an egg, how little they know what lies in store from their meeting
how the baby fresh hatched is still, utterly, oblivious to what made them so purposefully form and then push their way out of all that was safe and warm into all that was unknown.
how do you think we are any different?
no, do not stop that blind and groping search, never settle for any limp wristed stoical 'it is what it is what it is'
Life is ____
let he who inserts the missing word bow their head, for it clearly must be chopped off.
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RJ whets that vorpal blade: "Life is ____
let he who inserts the missing word bow their head, for it clearly must be chopped off."
In a word, life is something one finds oneself in, and depending upon how that finding is understood, life is either a struggle or a trip.
I know both sides of that coin only because I turned that coin over by accident, saw that heads was the seeker, and finally understood that tails was merely the understanding of that other side of the coin.
What better absolute either/or could one find? If it comes up heads, the understanding flips it over. If it comes up tails, nothing changes.
"There, now you have chosen—not indeed the better part, that you will agree; but really you have made no choice at all, or you have chosen only figuratively. Your choice is an aesthetic choice, but an aesthetic choice is no choice. In general, the act of choosing is a literal and strict expression of the ethical. Wherever it is a matter of an either/or in a stricter sense, one can always be sure that the ethical is involved. The only absolute either/or there is the choice between good and evil, but it is also absolutely ethical. The aesthetic choice is either wholly immediate thus no choice, or it loses itself in multiplicity." (Kierkegaard; Either/Or, tr. Hannay, p. 485)
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Wilbro, monsieur, today someone told me about a child who was getting so worked up about going to bed they were regularly bringing back their dinner pre-nap, they said that the baby was born in November 2009 so I naturally deduced that he must have therefore been about 4 months old...
I am afraid that had I been one of your erstwhile maths pupils you would not be the affably warm-witted wag you find yourself being today. Nay, if you had hair it would be pulled out by yourself, if you had a stomach lining it would have melted by itself. Such a brain as mine caused the school's word-work teacher to have a small nervous breakdown after trying for what must have seemed to him to be an endless term to show me how to make a simple box (that mishappen monstrosity was nevertheless the treasure chest of my remaining teenage years)
some people can think logically and some, such as yours truly, notice a sense of burning rubber if they even begin to try.
I am sure Kierkegaard was very important and, like K, did not lack for things to say if the quote from page 485 is any indication.
I am glad he found his audience but, dear fellow, putting aside the mental arithmatics, to say that life is something one finds oneself in is, I am sorry to say, simply a tautology*.
It neither moves us along or finds us any the worse for wear.
*Tautology (rhetoric), using different words to say the same thing even if the repetition does not provide clarity. Tautology also means a series of self-reinforcing statements that cannot be disproved because the statements depend on the assumption that they are already correct.
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RJ, you set that bar so high that it was either something such as I produced or losing my head. That is why the word I added was added in a word. My only other choice was to describe my day as an example of what life is, which would have been yet another tautology.
Ok, let me lose my head. Life is presence. Presence cannot be found in words, nor in any description of presence, nor in any imagined world (notwithstanding my peddling of UF). The absence of presence is life struggling with itself.
My shtick? There is only one creature that can know that absence of presence, and that by losing that absence, and then coming to understand that loss. In this, the finding is the losing.
Now, pretend you are Koko, and I, a wand'ring minstrel, a thing of shreds and patches…
:kool: :kool: :kool:
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I'll think about that one Wil,
I'll think about it slowly
like a career vegetarian sharpening a meat cleaver
that kind of slowly, if you catch my meaning...
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RJ wrote:
my family had a rule
'no religion or politics'
I thought it was what civilized people knew not to do. That if anyone bought up either subject they were demonstrating their lack of culture...
ah, what a revelation it was to meet Europeans!!
my father has just retired at near 70, he was the head of music at the huge boy's school here and still is the musical director of the catholic cathedral that has been destyoyed by the quakes.
he popped in for a chat and stayed for tea the other day. for the first time, ever.
hang on, this is going nowhere,
argue with me damn you
I have nothing more to say.
oh, here's something
'life is what happens?'
that's a really crap nutshell man
a) you don't know a fraction of what happens at any given moment
b) once you do know it is already over
c) anyone who hears that will probably be tuning into the subtext (i.e. shit happens)
and you don't like laments!!
Joe, your platform is built on the wailing moans of a million lost opportunities
feel the cut and thrust man!
the urgency of the orgasm of this impossible star-burst where we live out our miniscule moments on one of its flailing tails.
speaking of which
think of a sperm and an egg, how little they know what lies in store from their meeting
how the baby fresh hatched is still, utterly, oblivious to what made them so purposefully form and then push their way out of all that was safe and warm into all that was unknown.
how do you think we are any different?
no, do not stop that blind and groping search, never settle for any limp wristed stoical 'it is what it is what it is'
Life is ____
let he who inserts the missing word bow their head, for it clearly must be chopped off.
I do not think we are any different, that is why I accept life as it happens. A baby does not lament its leaving of the primordial ooze, it grasps for breath instead. I have no idea what life will bring but I know that if I am present to it then what is needed to be understood will be understood. It has never been any different than this, I just did not know it until I knew it.
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RJ wrote:
Two men are talking, lying on their backs, looking up
“listen to that bird-song” says one, “and oh, the perfume of those flowers!
Just look at the beauty, the magnificence of that sky!
can you feel the abundant, gorgeous, pulsing life surrounding us?
aaaah” he sighs, happily, his only wish to share this, which was given to him freely
“listen to that peacefulness” says the other, “and oh the scent of this rich earth beneath!
“look at that light above, its radiance, just the sheer, phenomenal, physical wah of it all!
can you feel the deep, expansive, pulsing life everywhere and within?”
“ooooh”, he sighs, happily, his only wish to share this, which was given to him freely
some static, some white noise…
“what? what?”
…then
“you do not see me” says one
“no” says the other
“you do not see what I see!” says one
“no, it is you who do not see what I see!” says the other
‘click’, the line from one end of this spinning globe to the other
is disconnected…
… “hmmmmmmmm”...
one man rolls over, that sun is now much too hot, it burns, harsh
as he turns he deeply sighs again, this time with sadness, exasperation, resignation
the other man makes the exact same sound, the same sigh,
as he pulls his thick blanket up to his chin
he looks up still, only now that moon looking back feels cold, indifferent, remote
as he begins to process his regret
If I may make an offering for you to do with what you will:
Lend an attentive ear to Snguyen. Question and ask for clarifications, but don't sit too high in your chair; as heat will pass from a warmer thing to one less warm, so is what he has compared to what you hold. The same goes for Babu (Babs) if ever you should get the chance to chat with him.
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Roots wrote:
If I may make an offering for you to do with what you will:
Lend an attentive ear to Snguyen. Question and ask for clarifications, but don't sit too high in your chair; as heat will pass from a warmer thing to one less warm, so is what he has compared to what you hold. The same goes for Babu (Babs) if ever you should get the chance to chat with him.
oh dear,
Roots, come back and bellow like a bull
or just as well, moo
moo loudly, longingly, like a forlorn, heart-shorn, lost lover
or begone
but do do one or the other
anything but this dreadful, sycopanthic, lukewarm, devotional, muleed pap where you dart in and out like some obsequious manservant to some imaginary higher 'truth'.
I know you have more intelligence than that old Don, but do you have more balls?
oye olay!
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joe wrote:
I do not think we are any different, that is why I accept life as it happens. A baby does not lament its leaving of the primordial ooze, it grasps for breath instead. I have no idea what life will bring but I know that if I am present to it then what is needed to be understood will be understood. It has never been any different than this, I just did not know it until I knew it.
gotta love ya honest Joe.
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Old friends,
The other day I saw that becoming was truly impossible and with that seeing I felt like I could lie down and die then, so free of everything. It adds to the weight of silence and now it sees much more clearly than before that thought is impossible. As much as becoming is impossible to reach the other shore, to jump over that great immovable wall which becoming itself creates, thought is impossible to touch the real. Absolutely it is not communicable that sense of the true but only you can directly perceive it yourself. For that something which is true but not communicable though you have tried, is there any regret?
I don’t think there is personally. Regret is the residue of yesterday and upon that “million lost opportunities” you continue to build or search for a better future, you carry the same wound into that which heals. I found that they are two very different things, mutually exclusive. The old duality, the two sides of same coin has been used to measure things till the coin is completely lost without the knowing of how it is lost, then something else catches fire on your attention; you are alone yet you merge into everything.
And joe I understand what you mean in “life is what happens”. But beneath it I find that psychologically what happens as we see it normally is causation upon causation. It is that I am responsible for the wars in the world, not to exaggerate it any bit. But I guess to see that “you must be the world”. Therefore the magnitude of “life is what happens” depends enormously on perception and that perception is only limited by how far you want to see.
Willy, life is presence. It sounds philosophical but if it is so true for you that time ends, and together with it the ending of the power of knowledge upon which one depends, you will be supremely happy yourself and spread it over to me who is bewildering. Life is present, true, but how does that ending of time explode me into another million things because all that is put together by time has ended?
RJ, The upside of feeling less is that you feel less bad. The downside of feeling less bad is that you feel less everything else too...
It is true when feeling and passion are directed by thought, control and choice. When all those factors are understood in life and not just on paper, the non- dissipated energy gathers itself into an intensity that you can call it action and love. We are given desire and not to kill it immaturely but with this desire we also know the depth of sorrow, personal and worldwide, and the unquenchable thirst for the eternity. Great suffering is also the great seed of revolution, and so comes a totally new dimension.
I thought I just want to share it.
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Hey Snu,
I want to hear you and talk with you but I have a problem in that at least one person here thinks you are the reincarnation of K and therefore needs to be approached like some sort of 'dispenser of the light'
I know this may be counter-intuitive to someone grown in Asian culture where the personal, the family, the 'being' is usually kept pretty strictly under wraps (switch on daytime TV in any Western culture any day of the week to see my point by comparison), but I want to suggest that you dispel that myth of being here to show the light to others and come on back to the common ground asap. to qoute LT "stop being holy, forget being prudent, everyone will be a hundred times better off, stop being altruistic, forget being righteous, people will remember what family feeling is"
Mate, I was up on mountain tops in India nearly 30 years ago, meditating day and night and blissing out in the silence, and, to anyone who would listen when I came back to the West, I would talk a lot of the same kind of thing you are wont to say. It's all good man, I'm still into it in a big way, but if you leave the fact that your shit still stinks out of it then you are going to continue to perpetuate the illusion that some of your listeners are going to be suffering from that there is a place to get to and someone to become...
maybe one or two questions will help you get that ball rolling...
What are your greatest challenges in life right now?
What do you do to earn a living and how do you feel this sits within your spiritual life?
What do you think is the point of your sharing with others your experiences and thoughts?
I think you are on the way buddy but like I always said to you, you only just got born again, resist the temptation to go grandiose babe.
lossa love
RJ.
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RJ wrote:
Hey Snu,
I want to hear you and talk with you but I have a problem in that at least one person here thinks you are the reincarnation of K and therefore needs to be approached like some sort of 'dispenser of the light'
I know this may be counter-intuitive to someone grown in Asian culture where the personal, the family, the 'being' is usually kept pretty strictly under wraps (switch on daytime TV in any Western culture any day of the week to see my point by comparison), but I want to suggest that you dispel that myth of being here to show the light to others and come on back to the common ground asap. to qoute LT "stop being holy, forget being prudent, everyone will be a hundred times better off, stop being altruistic, forget being righteous, people will remember what family feeling is"
Mate, I was up on mountain tops in India nearly 30 years ago, meditating day and night and blissing out in the silence, and, to anyone who would listen when I came back to the West, I would talk a lot of the same kind of thing you are wont to say. It's all good man, I'm still into it in a big way, but if you leave the fact that your shit still stinks out of it then you are going to continue to perpetuate the illusion that some of your listeners are going to be suffering from that there is a place to get to and someone to become...
maybe one or two questions will help you get that ball rolling...
What are your greatest challenges in life right now?
What do you do to earn a living and how do you feel this sits within your spiritual life?
What do you think is the point of your sharing with others your experiences and thoughts?
I think you are on the way buddy but like I always said to you, you only just got born again, resist the temptation to go grandiose babe.
lossa love
RJ.
I am just completely a normal guy with a family of two teenaged-boys living here in San Jose, CA. In August 2008 I joined a retreat organized by KFA in North California and I rather was so passionate there that I felt shy to be so out of normal place and being noticed. I am a shy guy, Asian of course.
I work as a chip layout designer in Silicon Valley and therefore have much control of my time and access to computers. Bruce jumped on me once long ago about the world crisis but I worked to make computers. Ha, but he often said he could not care less and so do I.
You know, here in a K forum, I really love to dig out someone who is deep in the understanding of the things K mentioned. And I am surprised really why you don’t see the things I talk of out of myself and not to parrot K at all. Why don’t you talk into it, into the core instead of the peripheral much of time? When I share it, I really expect you challenge me and go into it, but most of time I got put up high as though I try to play the game of pretension. How sad that is.
The greatest challenges: complete understanding. That requires me to work on it so much everyday and my eyes almost lose their sights for staring so much in deep, you know, let’s call it meditation. I used to think it was finance for I should not starve my family by not to work. But the conflict was not really true so. And then it was with my wife with her strong objection to me being without a soul but just a deserted body in the house. But I solved it, by what, more understanding. The greatest challenge is an absolute, complete understanding, all that K mentioned about, not a cent lack.
Si Nguyen.
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thanks Si, that's great to hear you
plus I love it that your name means yes, (well it would if you were Spanish)
is it enough to prick the self-inflated bubble of Mr Root's devotional adulation? Maybe not, but you suddenly appear about 100 times more human as opposed to someone working night and day to get into some kind of 'state'
you have to listen to your wife man, she is the closest thing you have to anyone that can actually help you along the way. If she isn't happy at the same time as you are wallowing in transcendental bliss then you have gone no further than the crack addict on the corner sucking in ecstasy while their children at home wail out their hunger and loneliness. You probably think I am bullshitting you here, I'm not.
and how about those boys? that's tough right, teenagers? None of this, all that Krishnamurti talked about, taught, did, amounts to anything of any value if it is made to be more important than your relationship with those boys. No-one says it has to be happy-happy joy-joy, they're teenagers for crying out loud, they probably think they hate you, I am talking about connection, about if they are hurting, sulking, scowling that you are right there in the stew with them, feeling what every parent feels, the love mixed in with the powerlessness. No-one alive who has gone though it will blame you for wanting to tune out of them and tune into God, that would be nice but for the fact that there is more God in those boys than every page of K's writing stacked together and then repeatedly photocopied until the stack reaches Pluto.
If you haven't worked it out yet I can tell you my own feelings again, I love K, I admire and respect him, but he was just a man who found his particular way and sought to show it to others. He didn't have what you could call normal relationships but he did have the wisdom to say that life is relationship, pure and simple (and someone thought that there was no good answer to that life is _____ question, deary me).
I think where we can make such a fundamental error is when we think that the so called spiritual life is about attaining a certain state. Si my friend, you want a challenge, here it is, I think you are making that mistake, right now, here, today.
This 'understanding' you are talking about is really just a kind of 'altered state'. Some place where you presumably then go on to talk like K about how lovely the flowers are but how miserable the people are, but now you really really mean it.
Peace is not death. Silence is just the space between the heart-beats of All that is.
Stop trying to die to who you are Si, your family prefers you to be home tonight.
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Thanks a lot RJ. What can I say? It is a long way to talk into things right? I just wanted to see you guys maybe in a kfa get-together some day? Oh, it does not matter really. And, oh, I am a really happy guy and no worry that I have bad relationships with people. Absolutely no. However, this K guy got me into such a different perspective, and I will keep it to myself for as long as I don't forget everybody and the energy does not explode into words. I don't want to create enmity, misunderstanding. But, oh you know, it is a very weird thing.![]()
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joe wrote:
snugyen...it does depend on perception but the real issue is not the perception but the mindset that the perception is born from. The ten thousand things rise and fall, rise and fall, said lao tsu...
Yes, but then what can I do about it?
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joe wrote:
just what you are doing is fine, isn't it? You will always be just where you are.
In a sense, yes. I love to live simple and with lots of beauty in life. But you know, I don't and can't have just a normal mindset and it is not my fault. Put it that way. It is the force of life, the waves of it that destroy and create. But of course I can blend in happily for a moment and then disappear into that big aloneness.
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snguyen wrote:
Thanks a lot RJ. What can I say? It is a long way to talk into things right? I just wanted to see you guys maybe in a kfa get-together some day? Oh, it does not matter really. And, oh, I am a really happy guy and no worry that I have bad relationships with people. Absolutely no. However, this K guy got me into such a different perspective, and I will keep it to myself for as long as I don't forget everybody and the energy does not explode into words. I don't want to create enmity, misunderstanding. But, oh you know, it is a very weird thing.
that,
was an artful dodge
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