Bright Light. Big Questions. (split from bobby & irene)

[RitalinKid]

Krishnamurti would tell you there is nothing to seek. His idea is that your goal is to let go of the conditioned responses that you've created and that society has created within you, which is not a search. An example is his idea that happiness is a perversion of joy, where joy only lasts for a single instant, like an infinitely small dot along a time line. In his way of thinking, joy has no time, cannot be measured in time. Your thoughts can use that good feeling to condition a response, so that you to want to do whatever caused you to get that feeling again, whether it's helping someone else or stealing from a department store.

Note that he has to create localized definitions for joy and happiness, which can create confusion and further increases the difficulty of keeping up a discussion.

Here's where my thoughts come in. I can see his idea of joy and happiness, but doesn't it sound as if you have to through life emotionally neutral? That's what it sounds like, but if you become aware, you shouldn't be neutral. Look around you. You see mundane things, a house and things people have in their house. If you realize that your consciousness is not trivial and the fact that you are surronded by pieces of matter that we barely understand is also not trivial matter, how can you not be overwhelmed with joy almost constantly? With that being said, I don't think it's necessarily our goal to remain in a permanent state of joy. For another time.

As with everything in that book, I'm still mulling all this over. K and I have some differences, and I'm interested in seeing how he sees the world rather than making his thoughts my own. I would write more, but I've gotta get to work; I have an 8 o'clock meeting.

 

[bobbyburns]

I'll go ahead and add that none of this leads to apathy, because even after the self has been smashed to pieces and love kicks in, pleasure and pain never go away. the body is still this fragile thing, and, like all things, it will inevitably die. you might get hit by a bus one day, then that's it, you're finished. however, there's a big difference between fearing a painful death and intelligently avoiding it. pain sucks, but it's there, and it's painful for a reason. just because you don't fear it, that doesn't mean you'll go out killing yourself. that would be pretty stupid. in a sense, you don't kick the door down everytime you leave your house. you know how it operates, so you just turn the handle. it's simple intelligence.

on the subject of pain though, if you know anything about krishnamurti's life, you know that basically until he died he suffered from severe pain all along his spinal chord and the crown of his skull. in his notebook, it's interesting how he described it. even as he experienced it, he talked about where it came from and all the different nerve regions it touched. the first thing that popped into my mind was that it sounded similar to the way someone gives you directions. I don't know, I originally quoted it, but I think you're better off just reading the entries in their entirety, because they don't translate very well out of context.