The Talks on Freedom - Reflections on the Human Condition

Where are all the Alumni?
Whatever has happened to all the alumni?
There are eight K-oriented schools in the world. Some of them have existed for decades; there must be thousands of former students of these schools dispersed throughout society, in jobs and professions, and in retirement. These former students have had a tremendous opportunity in being brought up in a non-competitive scholastic environment, along with years of familiarity with all the depth of the talks and the books.
So why are they all so silent?

~~~~~&~~~~~

Who actually Listens to the Talks?
Has anyone in an unbiased and open manner actually read the talks in their entirety? Or have
they only selectively read parts of them to affirm or bolster their own particular ideas, prejudices, opinions and conditioning?
Is it in fact the case they have they cleverly selected certain phrases and themes to endlessly discuss, debate and ponder over, or settled with a particular conclusion and stopped there, without reading on and seeing the totality of what is being pointed out? And has not this precise situation happened with regard to all the 'teachers' of the past?

~~~~~&~~~~~

The enduring Myth of 'Leadership'
There are no leaders who can help us. If you look closely at all the leaders and putative leaders, from Barack Obama to Hillary Clinton to Richard Nixon and Winston Churchill, they are all just like us - deeply flawed and seeking power. They only exist because of followers. Take the follower away and no leader is required. It is extraordinary how people see the foibles and corruption of their past and present leaders but are eternally hopeful that the next batch will somehow be different; that they will solve the problems in society. Nothing is learned from the past. This sheer blindness to the past is projected into hope for the future. It is the future hope that produces political leaders and all of them mirror the state of mind of the followers.
This searching for leaders to lead has produced this corrupt society.

~~~~~&~~~~~

Importance of the Individual
We have this absurd notion in society that the majority of the people are always right. Everything in society is ultimately judged by how many people adhere to, support, or belong to it. Democracy has simply replaced the tyranny of dictatorship with the tyranny of the majority. Hence the talks overall are adjudged a 'failure' because of the small number of people who have taken them up.

        The reverse is actually true. It is the minority that has always been shown to be right - history has demonstrated it, time
           and time again. All change has always started with one person. The majority, in respect to true morality and ethics,
is in fact always wrong.

~~~~~&~~~~~

The Eternal Division of Man
One of the most enduring principles in the history of diplomacy and politics goes thus: "The enemy of my enemy is my friend."
The entire history of Man is the history of enemies, of division and conflict. This is why, when Communism fell, the statement was made that this epochal event represented: "The end of history."
Alas, it proved not to be, now that we have the never ending war on terrorism.
Humanity needs wars; democracy needs wars. Wars are the great energizers;
enemies give a direction and purpose to daily life.
Wars are also the greatest stimulus to invention and economic progress.
Man talks endlessly about peace but the last thing he really wants is peace itself.

~~~~~&~~~~~

What do we actually want?
Are not desires always in conflict? Have you ever been ambivalent about a particular desire?
Do you always want to keep your options open and not commit to one particular thing?

There are always hidden desires and motivations, removed from the obvious ones that we admit to in our lives. The self is endlessly restless, never settling on one desire; hence it is never satisfied with what it has. The self is craving. Even the very rich are in this situation - there is always the more they are after. At the very center of self is craving, from which arises the fear of loss. This whole process of the self and its continual desires needs to be fully understood.
The self will never be happy with itself.

~~~~~&~~~~~

The Approach
Your approach to the talks is vital. If the motive is to achieve something - peace of mind, happiness, enlightenment - then your attitude to what you are reading will be distorted, will not be open to everything to which you are listening. Hence you will in the end be unable to see the holistic picture, but will carefully select only those things
which conform to your attitudes and motives.

The Ending of Comparison & Relativism
It is a great trick of the mind to resort to the age-old rationalization for one's behaviour - " but everyone else does it." On a larger scale, nations justify their collective actions by the justification that - "if we don't take a particular action, our enemies will." Everything in life is judged by reference to what others will say and do. Nothing is done because it is simply the right thing to do, without bringing in all the complications of comparison and relativism. Yet the point about the talks is that this comparitive approach is clearly a wrong one, without any hedging and qualifications that normally go with it.
Is this so-called 'absolutism' in the talks something we find so difficult to deal with?

The Effort to be Free
It is clear that if you are struggling with understandng, or self-knowledge, then you are taking the wrong approach. Struggle implies a contradiction: I am this but I am struggling to be that. All effort is from the will, the self, wanting to change itself. All desires are contradictory: one desire conceals another desire in another direction. Understanding lies outside of all struggle.
It is simply seeing the fact as it is, without any movement whatsoever away from it.

The Word is not the Thing
Certainly, the word is not the thing. The symbol is not the actuality.
Yet we need words to communicate, and words have certain common connotations. So it is the essential feeling,
the spirit, the intent behind the contextual use of the word that is all important.

~~~~~&~~~~~

The Health of the Mind
There is a vast global health industry dealing with all the myriad lifestyle issues of
humanity; enormous time, effort and money is spent on cures and remedies to enable
all of us to live a healthy life. Yet no-one ever talks about the health of the human mind.

~~~~~&~~~~~

The Global Failure of Education
The global education system has completely failed. What it has produced is
massive inequality and the tremendous superficiality of modern culture, as well
as endless crime and corruption, and all the national, religious and ethnic divisions and wars.
Yet no-one addresses this mass failure of schools as a holistic issue.

Is this partly because education per se is based on competition
and competition itself is regarded as sacrosanct, beyond any challenge or questioning?

      ~~~~~~!~~~~~~~

* The "Wrong Turning of Mankind"

In the David Bohm dialogues, The Ending of Time, the turn of mankind is equated with inward becoming, which lies at the root of all conflict (contradiction). I am this but I am working towards becoming that, which is duality, which is our daily life. This is all centered on the self, as the past, and arises through the seeking of security, through not being able to face the fact in the present, but always seeking to change it, to become something different over psychological time. This whole process is based on desire, on illusion, in which man is essentially imprisoned.

This creation of illusion within the mind is the wrong turning of man and it has existed from the very beginning, as it is inherent in the thinking process itself. Thought is in fact time. So it was not that mankind started out with a silent mind and only later took a wrong turn. (Yet the conditioning at this early stage of thought's development would have been less restricting, which may account for the so-called 'wisdom of the ancients'. And it has undeniably become more entrenched as time has passed.)
So this implies that thought created the self for its security at the very outset of civilization.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

   * “The Otherness” ; “The Immensity” ; "The Immeasurable"
        "The Timeless" ; "The Benediction" ; "The Limitless"

Very little, of course, can be stated about the otherness. We are not experiencing it in our lives and therefore have no words to understand and to communicate it, if it can indeed be understood and expressed in words in the conventional sense (which it cannot, as it is beyond thought). Any words or communication about it are mere speculation on our part, and all theorizing has no intrinsic meaning. Notwithstanding this, what can be said definitively about it from the talks is this: it is a new dimension from that of our present consciousness;
it is a state beyond time, which means beyond thought.
His books address this immensity, especially the Notebook, but is this not simply in order to show us that there is something beyond the mind as we know it? Something that can only contact the new mind:

“All comparison, measurement belong to thought and so to time.
        The otherness was the mind without time…”
     {The Notebook, page 164}

         “It [the otherness] was something, each time [each time it came], totally new
              and that which is new has no relation whatsoever with the known, with the past.”
      {The Notebook, page 165}
     ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

* The Deathbed Statement (1986)

On February 17, 1986, Krishnamurti died of inoperable cancer of the pancreas, which had spread to the liver; in the last weeks of life he was occasionally given morphine for the pain. Nine days before his death he made the following final statement at Ojai, in response to an earlier question put to him in writing from Mary Cadogan. This last statement was tape-recorded by Scott Forbes (the only other person present) at Krishnamurti's request
(with pauses as indicated):

"I was telling them this morning -- for seventy years that super energy -- no -- that immense energy, immense intelligence has been using this body. I don't think people realize what tremendous energy and intelligence went through this body -- there's twelve-cylinder engine [sic]. And for seventy years -- was a pretty long time -- and now the body can't stand any more.

Nobody, unless the body has been prepared, very carefully, protected and so on - nobody can understand what went through this body. Nobody. Don't anybody pretend. Nobody. I repeat this: nobody amongst us or the public know what went on. I know they don't. And now after seventy years it has come to an end. Not that that intelligence and energy -- it's somewhat here, every day, and especially at night. And after seventy years the body can't stand it -- can't stand any more. It can't. The Indians have a lot of damned superstitions about this -- that you will and the body goes [sic] -- and all that kind of nonsense.

You won't find another body like this or that supreme intelligence operating in a body for many hundred years. You won't see it again. When he goes, it goes. There is no consciousness left behind of that consciousness, of that state. They'll all pretend or try to imagine they can get in touch with that. Perhaps they will somewhat if they live the teachings. But nobody has done it. Nobody. And so that's that."
{The Open Door, by Mary Lutyens, 1988, pp. 148-49; emphasis in the original}
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Comment: This deathbed statement has been the subject of ongoing controversy, due principally to the phrase "many hundred years". Many people have seen this as an acknowledgment that this "supreme intelligence" (ie, the otherness) is only for a select few and thus is essentially pre-ordained in human history. It will only operate in a carefully prepared and protected body which is selected out from humanity by this intelligence. This dovetails neatly with the unique awakening of 1922 and the resultant "process" that he underwent for decades after.

It leaves an opening, of course - "perhaps they will somewhat", implying that there is a partial awakening that we can attain. But this is distinct from an immense intelligence that "uses" the body, as an apparent direct human "manifestation".

There is another way of looking at this statement however, one which has not hitherto been canvassed. It could be incorrect.

The man at the time was for the most part in the grip of strong pain, to the point where morphine was used, even though it is a known fact he had experienced adverse reactions to even such things as mild drugs in the past. Late-stage metastatic terminal cancer is not conducive to clear thinking. The biographer states that there were times in the final weeks when he refused to talk as his mind was not clear. Was this statement uttered at a time when his normal judgment was clouded?

The fact is that no-one, not even this man, could and can accurately predict the future. In fact the talks themselves imply this. Life is action, life is constantly changing, every moment is a unique event. The "end of time" means the end of predicting the future for the future is not what is, and cannot be known.

So this statement predicting the future starkly clashes with the essence of the talks. Hence, it may well be wrong.

    (See: The Core Quotes)

~~~~~~~!~~~~~~~