Niko wrote:
“In an earlier post on this blog, I talked about David Bohm’s doubts concerning the ultimate usefulness of Krishnamurti’s teachings. In his book about the Oak Grove School, David Moody recounts a conversation with David Bohm in which Bohm states that Krishnamurti’s work lacked a “fine focus” in its depiction of the nuances of consciousness. Apparently their exchange did not go forward into the details of why they perceived this “lack”, leaving the question of where the deficiency lies. Many people who are devotees of Krishnamurti tend to dismiss Bohm’s doubts because Bohm was not (even by his own admission), “enlightened.”
This situation is interesting in and of itself because it comes back to the issue of questioning the teachings. Krishnamurti encouraged this “questioning” as long as it was set up as a sort of Koan in his listeners’ minds. There were boundaries set as to what the questioning could be. For example, questions about K himself were off limits. K seemingly knew where he wanted people to go with their “questions” and David Bohm was unable to get there. He also suffered from depression and had dependency issues which Krishnamurti viewed as a sign failure on Bohm’s part.
It had to be Bohm’s failure and not Krishnamurti’s.
Many people think that someone like K is beyond criticism because they take it as a matter of faith that he was enlightened. Following this manner of thinking, David Bohm cannot be right about a lack of fine focus in the teachings because he himself was not enlightened. A question comes to mind: in what way can one’s discernment about a supposed enlightened person be valid if one is not himself enlightened? How might this idea even be functional? How can David Bohm discern that the teachings lack something?
A tentative answer: everything comes down to discernment.
Also, there are different kinds of “enlightenment”.
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Wry: Yes it is a matter of discernment in that each human being’s experience is contextual and also to some degree on the bias (at least on the bias according to someone else:-) I think a good teaching needs to account for this, which K did not really do; rather then attempting to shape a given situation at the bias (shape being an interesting concept:-), he attempted (or pretended?) to directly do away with the bias, whereas in actuality it is necessary for each person to work out for himself in his daily activity the non-functional flaws in his own discriminatory processing of data. This is not as easy as K made it sound; he many times used the word effortless, yet at at other times, though less frequently, spoke about the process being difficult or hard or work). So… is there a way to address this conundrum that we want our lives to flow, yet sometimes our lives flow in the wrong direction? It is about orientation, isn’t it?
Can someone else help us learn or does each person completely on his own just do it? As we know, any teacher presents information to a student within a certain framework, and also, the bias is to support the way one is processing data so as not to experience suffering, which does make sense on a rudimentary level, and most everyone who has considered this situation, would agree that only self-serving past a certain point is not socially functional.
Re David Bohm, he was not the only one who discerned that K’s teaching lacked fine-tuning. Imo the reason many people do not want to look into this is simply because it does not fit into their own story. So what is the ‘true’ story about David Bohm and how do we fit it into our own story which is interconnecting with this story, or do we omit him? You know, if you know how to really spin a good story you can fit almost anything into it. The question is, what makes a story be good? Again, this would depend upon the perceived function of the story.
Deconstructing Krishnamurti 