Wry wrote (on November 16th):
Niko wrote: “In an earlier post on this blog, I talked about David Bohm’s doubts concerning the ultimate usefulness of Krishnamurti’s teachings.” This may be kind of dark, though it could be said that in order to see the light there must be contrast. Anyway, just musing, it occurs to me that, as far as I know, no one, including myself, has ever talked about the ultimate (?) harmfulness of K’s teaching. Again, just musing, as this is not the topic of this response now right now, even though, at least according to K, the future is now.
….. “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.” Yes, and it all comes down to the topic of framing and, I suppose, whether it is subjective or objective, but in order to understand this better it may be necessary to delve into the (objective?) meaning of “subjective” and “objective.”which brings us full circle back to the topic of the two aspects of truth, so is it (even) possible to square that circle? Something to ponder.
(To those who are following the dialogue that is from many different angles beginning to unfold , you can go back and find and read or reread Niko”s original messages, as I am and probably mainly will be responding to selective comments.) So, as you said, Niko, it is a matter of discernment re what is the meaning of enlightenment or most anything except certain definitive topics, such as the sun comes up every day and/or this is the specific literal path I take, ie, have chosen to take, in order to get home, and we know this does not jell with the statement K made, “Truth is a pathless land.” He sure did (try to) take a great big short-cut in order to get so called home, whatever that meant to him, and that is sad in that according to himself he felt he had wasted his life as he did not actualize his aim to help people.
Am getting tired as it is 4 am, so will continue later re the–subject of framing and so called enlightenment. In the meantime (interesting word:-), here is some food for thought: Search: “the doorway effect.”
(Niko)
So much to ponder about this post, and I have to confess that I’m trying to ease my way back into these kinds of enquiries again after having spent a lot of time participating in everyday life and some of my more conventional and mundane interests. So please excuse me, Wry, and other possible readers if my response seems somewhat out of touch or “rusty.”
The notion of the “ultimate harmfulness of K’s teaching (mentioned above) did instantly grab my attention, though. I guess that in a way this is a question that has been functioning as a kind of backdrop for all these years of enquiry. It’s been many years now since You and I (Wry) began interacting and enquiring online. Probably more than twenty years which is almost hard to believe. And in that time, I found that delving into K’s signature phrases and aphorisms critically to be very useful. I also first encountered K in my twenties, but as I recall the first book I read was one of the Lutyens biographies. The specific content of what K was saying didn’t interest me at first. I felt a vague interest in how a purportedly “enlightened” person was living his life. I wondered how that life was different from the comparatively mundane lives that most people, like me, were living. There was a mystery in all that. I think at that time in my life K had already died, and that disappointed me; that I would never get to see him in person. I read about K on and off for quite a few years, and I did read some of the “content” books like The Awakening of Intelligence, and others. Certain things he said intrigued me and sometimes created the mental states that Wry talks about, but I didn’t get too deeply into any of this material until somewhat later, when I had the time to actually do it, and then I discovered the online groups.
When taken seriously, the online groups had a lot to offer, and I participated in three or four of them. To me, taking K’s ideas apart and really examining them critically and putting them up against other frameworks is what lead to any progress in understanding “The Teachings” that I ever might have made. This, combined with various examinations of K’s biographical details, which I have always thought to be part and parcel of any serious look into his body of work, in spite of all the objections to this which I continuously encountered. So the different online groups were useful in this way, but they could also be disturbing, because it seems that there were a lot of repetitive conflicts and some individuals who were trying to manipulate others in a way that was deceptive and even malevolent. This soured my interest in participating, and I am no longer a member of any K groups. I think that the K Foundation has come to a similar conclusion about online discussions, being that they have abandoned their Ning group and allowed it to be erased after several years of deterioration in quality. To my mind this is at least partly due to their employment of ineffective moderators who in a predictable way exemplified the “pathless land” aesthetic.
So something about the “harms” that K did (whether intentional or not), can maybe be deduced from experiencing what goes on/went on in these groups, not to imply that there was not ever anything genuine happening there. But to me the genuine things were the products of insights into where and why the teachings are incomplete, ineffectual, and vague; in other words in pinpointing the short-cuts that you refer to above.
But coming back to the gist of the original post, and your post – Was David Bohm right about there being some kind of deficiency in the teachings? In David Moody’s book, he wrote that Bohm had once told him that Krishnamurti’s work lacked a “fine focus” that would “depict the dynamics of consciousness with a greater degree of detail and nuance.” I guess detail and nuance could also be expressed as “framing,” or maybe even framing the nature of the observer in such a way that the meaning of consciousness and thus of truth and actuality is as clear as it is in the Prasangika Madhyamaka teachings. I’m not sure if David Bohm ever looked at these, but I feel he would have been intrigued.
I was just rereading the chapter about David Bohm in David Moody’s book. In it, Moody relates that David Bohm was very fond of the quote by Hegel, “The owl of Minerva flies at Dusk.” Bohm liked to joke about this phrase to David Moody, because they would often take walks around Arya Vihara in the evenings, but the aphorism from Hegel is often taken to mean that wisdom takes flight only at the end of the day, when it’s too late. Maybe Bohm came to some sort of realization of this kind regarding the teachings after Krishnamurti was gone. In his own humble way, perhaps he was trying to impart this insight to David Moody.
Deconstructing Krishnamurti 