To continue, Niko and I had an interchange following part 1 of this topic, so please read that. Also, up till now, we have not made an effort to publicize this blog, so at present we are getting our readership from web referrals, though this could change; and in the future there might possibly a zoom group. We started this venture together, but she did all of the work and has paid for this over the years Thank you Niko! Interestingly, the readership has been kind of low, but consistent, even during the recent years when we have not been posting.The readers do not know this, but people have been coming here from all over the world —to give an idea– in just the last two weeks we have had readers from The United States, France, Australia, Albania, Turkey, Algeria ,Spain, India, Canada, Greece, Romania, Vietnam, Germany, Argentina, Norway, The United Kingdom and Sweden — and there have been readers from other countries in the past, somewhat recently I recall, from Brazil, South Africa and Jamaica, the point here being that people from all over the world are investigating, presumably to find an approach or to possibly amplify an already existing approach, and this touches my heart, as no matter where we are from, we share this common interest to discover how to function at a more harmonious level, so already there is a connection. I understand that if English is not your first language, some of this beginning orientation may not be easy to read, but I promise to try to simplify and get down to brass tacks the best I can.
Also, a qualifier: I never meant to imply that K and G influenced each other, in that I am 99.99999 percent certain that K in no way influenced G, This said, a connection I forgot to mention is that they both were originally influenced by Madame Blavatsy (who was a Yogacharia Buddhist) and founded Theosophy, a movement which was very popular, and with which movement both later became disenchanted. As I recall, G mentioned his attraction to the Blavatsky writings in his final book – Life is Real Only Then, when “I Am”. Another interesting similarity is that usually (or at least hopefully) people work in a group so there is some kind of check and balance against individual subjective distortions (and possibly grandiosity), but neither of these men did , which, on some level can be seen as problematic.This said, sometimes you do have to go at it on your own.
So …. where this or that teaching came from can be quite tangled, and the person trying to figure all of it out almost surely has a blind spot, as when thinking about this kind of stuff or anything, the very process of thinking generally becomes on some subtle sensory level the ground, so one is standing on ones own limited and subjective thinking processes, and, as we know, K took negating the validity of this kind of subjective thinking as a starting point. He has often been criticized as being too intellectual in his approach, which was basically, by my understanding, that of negating this and that as not being (ultimately) true, and then he would very adeptly and imo disingenuously talk the reader into another subjective state, let’s call it “beauty,” which he did subtly imply was ultimately true. I question whether it makes good sense or any kind of sense to use negation of the thinking process, however faulty that process may be, as the foundation of ones development of being. Actually he was saying there are two kinds of thinking, the second way being the (presumably conscious but I wonder:-) use of thought as a tool; the question that arises for me is if he himself was really even using another kind of thought. Now my analysis may in itself may be too intellectual for those who are reading, and this is where we come to use of language so as to create various psychological/emotional affects. And did Gurdjieff create various effects, or, better put, affects? Oh yes, but primarily not by the use of language. To be continued,,,,
Deconstructing Krishnamurti 