Jesus and Krishnamurti

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Superfund
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Jesus and Krishnamurti

Post by Superfund » Wed Jul 15, 2015 11:46 pm

I have found insightful parallels in the sayings of Jesus and in the speaking of J Krishnamurti. Being the 'adventure of faith board,' I intend to post some for reflection; thank you.

Krishnamurti deliberately avoided reading certain texts so as not to condition himself in any way, although when he was older he did in reference to Christianity use the phrase "the son of man." So he had some input of the gospel from somewhere or someone along the way but otherwise was not influenced by it. This is one reason why I find parallels between him and Jesus fascinating as he seems to explain certain saying of Christ so perfectly(imho). Krishnamurti also speaks of 'being' and 'human being' in a way which makes me think of ground of being.

J Krishnamurti- That Thing Which You Fight You become

"Surely that thing which you fight you become.... If I am angry and you meet me with anger what is the result? More anger. You have become that which I am. If I am evil and you fight me with evil means then you also become evil, however righteous you may feel. If I am brutal and you use brutal methods to overcome me, then you become brutal like me. And this we have done for thousands of years. Surely there is a different approach than to meet hate by hate? if I use violent methods to quell anger in myself then I am using wrong means for a right end, and thereby the right end ceases to be. In this there is no understanding; there is no transcending anger. Anger is to be studied tolerantly and understood; it is not to be overcome through violent means. Anger may be the result of many causes, and without comprehending them there is no escape from anger.
We have created the enemy, the bandit, and becoming ourselves the enemy in no way brings about an end to enmity. We have to understand the cause of enmity and cease to feed it by our thoughts, feeling, and action. This is an arduous task demanding constant self-awareness and intelligent pliability, for what we are the society, the state, is. The enemy and the friend are the outcome of our thought and action. we are responsible for creating enmity and so it is more important to be aware of our own thought and action than to be concerned with the foe and the friend, for right thinking puts an end to division. Love transcends the friend and the enemy."

Matthew 5:43-48New International Version (NIV)
Jesus - Love for Enemies

“You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbour and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect."

Matthew 12:25
"Jesus knew their thoughts and said to them, “Every kingdom divided against itself will be ruined, and every city or household divided against itself will not stand."

Edited for spelling.

Superfund
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Re: Jesus and Krishnamurti

Post by Superfund » Thu Jul 16, 2015 7:52 am

Krishnamurti;
Man has throughout the ages been seeking
something beyond himself, beyond ... That is the first thing to learn - not to seek.

Jesus;

Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.
Last edited by Superfund on Fri Sep 11, 2015 12:36 am, edited 2 times in total.

Superfund
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Re: Jesus and Krishnamurti

Post by Superfund » Thu Jul 23, 2015 7:18 pm

From David Bentley Harts's "The doors of the sea." A definition of evil (Edit; This post was originaly just of DBH's quote about evil but I added something Krishnamurti says here because its interesting.)

"Evil is born in the will: it consists not in some other seperate thing standing alongside the things of creation, but is only a shadow, a turning of the hearts and minds of rational creatures away from the light of God back toward the nothingness from which all things are called. This is not to say that evil is somehow illusory; it is only to say that evil, rather than being a discrete substance, is instead a kind of ontological wasting disease.
Born of nothingness, seated in the rational will that unites material and spiritual creation, it breeds a contagion of nothingness throughout the created order. Death works its ruin in all things, all minds are darkened, all desires are invaded by selfishness, weakness, rapacity, and the libido dominandi-the lust to dominate-and thus tend away from the beauty of God indwelling his creatures and towards the deformity of nonbeing."

Note; " a turning of the hearts and minds of rational creatures away from the light of God back toward the nothingness from which all things are called."

Krishnamurti ~ You and Nothingness Are One

"You are nothing. You may have your name and title, your property and bank account, you may have power and be famous; but in spite of all these safegaurds, you are as nothing, You may be totally unaware of this emptiness, this nothingness, or you may simply not want to be aware of it; but it is there, do what you will to avoid it. You may try to escape from it in devious ways, through personal or collective violence, through individual or collective worship, through knowledge or amusement; but whether you are asleep or awake, it is always there. You can come upon your relationship to this nothingness and its fear only by being choiclessly aware of the escapes. You are not related to it as a seperate, individual entity; you are not the observer watching it; without you the thinker, the observer, it is not. You and nothingness are one; you and nothingness are a joint phenomenon, not two seperate processes. If you, the thinker. are afraid of it and approach it as something contrary and opposed to you, then any action you may take towards it must inevitably lead to illusion and so further conflict and misery. When there is the discovery, the experiencing of that nothingness as you, then fear-which exists only when the thinker is seperate from his thoughts and so tries to establish a relationship with them-completely drops away.

I considered from these that instead of being within full communion with God, we are more often than not, at the periphery of the nothingness from which we have been called. To generalise what krishnamurti is saying here, aswell as the important insights about 'the thinker',is that you may aswell make peace with it (nothingness) and there is a far superior state of being to be experienced by doing so.
Last edited by Superfund on Fri Sep 11, 2015 12:29 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Jesus and Krishnamurti

Post by Superfund » Mon Jul 27, 2015 1:47 am

Jesus;
Parable of the wineskins, "And no one pours new wine into old wineskins. Otherwise, the wine will burst the skins, and both the wine and the wineskins will be ruined. No, they pour new wine into new wineskins."

(Wiki.)"The two (The other parable is very similar) parables relate to the relationship between Jesus' teaching and traditional Judaism. According to some interpreters, Jesus here "pits his own, new way against the old way of the Pharisees and their scribes."In the early second century, Marcion, founder of Marcionism, used the passage to justify a "total separation between the religion that Jesus and Paul espoused and that of the Hebrew Scriptures."

Other interpreters see Luke as giving Christianity roots in Jewish antiquity, although "Jesus has brought something new, and the rituals and traditions of official Judaism cannot contain it."

Can this Wisdom of Jesus be 'unpacked' a bit more?

Krishnamurti;

"What is actually taking place in our lives? There is constant challenge and response. That is existence, that is life, is it not? - a constant challenge and response. The challenge is always new, and the response is always old. I met you yesterday, and you come to me today. You are transformed, you are modified, you have changed, you are new; but I have the picture of you as you were yesterday. Therefore, I absorb the new into the old. I don't meet you anew, but I have yesterday's picture of you; so, my response to challenge is always conditioned. Here, for the moment, you cease to be a Brahmin, you cease to be high-caste, or whatever it is - you forget everything. You are just listening, absorbed, trying to find out. But, when you go out of this place, you become yourself - you are back in your caste, your system, your job, your family. That is, the new is always being absorbed into the old, into the old habits, customs, ideas, traditions, memories. There is never the new, for you are always meeting the new with the old - the challenge is new, but you meet it with the old. So, the problem in this question is, how to free thought from the old, so as to be new all the time? When you see a flower, when you see a face, when you see the sky, when you see a tree, when you see a car, when you see a smile, how are you to meet it anew? Why is it that we do not meet it anew? Why is it that the old absorbs the new, and modifies it; why does the new cease when you go home?

Now, the old response arises from the thinker. Is not the thinker always the old? Because your thought is founded on the past, when you meet the new it is the thinker who is meeting it; the experience of yesterday is meeting it. The thinker is always the old. So, we come back to the same problem in a different way: How to free the mind from itself as the thinker? How to eradicate memory, not factual memory, but psychological memory, which is the accumulation of experience? Because, without freedom from the residue of experience, there can be no reception of the new. Now, to free thought, to be free of the thought process and so to meet the new, is arduous, is it not? Because, all our beliefs, all our traditions, all our methods in education, are a process of imitation, copying, memorizing, building up the reservoir of memory. That memory is constantly responding to the new; the response of that memory we call thinking, and that thinking meets the new. So, how can there be the new? Only when there is no residue of memory can there be newness, and there is residue when experience is not finished, concluded, ended, that is, when the understanding of experience is incomplete. When experience is complete, there is no residue - that is the beauty of life. Love is not residue, love is not experience, it is a state of being. Love is eternally new.

To be very practical and effective in our social relationship, in our relationship with everything, one must be happy; and there cannot be happiness if there is no ending, there cannot be happiness if there is a becoming. In ending there is renewal, rebirth, a newness, a freshness, a joy. But the new is absorbed into the old, and the old destroys the new, as long as there is background, as long as the mind, the thinker, is conditioned by his thought. To be free from the background, from the conditioning influences, from memory, there must be freedom from continuity; and, there is continuity as long as thought and feeling are not ended completely.

Sir, you complete a thought when you pursue the thought to its end, and thereby bring an end to every thought, to every feeling. Surely, love is not habit, memory; love is always new. There can be a meeting of the new only when the mind is fresh; and the mind is not fresh as long as there is the residue of memory. Memory is factual, as well as psychological. I am not talking of factual memory, but of psychological memory. As long as experience is not completely understood, there is residue, which is the old, which is of yesterday, the thing that is past; and the past is always absorbing the new and therefore destroying the new. It is only when the mind is free from the old that it meets everything anew, and in that there is joy.

Superfund
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Re: Jesus and Krishnamurti

Post by Superfund » Tue Aug 04, 2015 9:09 pm

Thinking through Jesus's parable and what krishnamurti says regarding 'the new' and 'the old' it is also interesting to consider what krishnamurti calls "the thinker."

Krishnamurti ~ The thinker is thought

Now, if we see the truth of that - that the thinker is thought, that there is no thinker separate from thought, but only the process of thinking - , then what happens? If we see that there is only thinking and not a thinker trying to modify thought, what is the result? I hope I am making myself clear. So far, we know that the thinker is operating upon thought, and this creates conflict between the thinker and the thought; but if we see the truth that there is only thought and not a thinker, that the thinker is arbitrary, artificial and entirely fictitious - then what happens? Is not the process of conflict removed? At present our life is a conflict, a series of battles between the thinker and the thought - what to do and what not to do, what should be and what should not be. The thinker is always separating himself as the `me' remaining outside of action. But when we see that there is only thought, have we not then removed the cause of conflict? Then we are able to be choicelessly aware of thought and not as the thinker observing thought from outside. When we remove the entity that creates conflict, surely then there is a possibility of understanding thought. When there is no thinker observing, judging, moulding thought, but only choiceless awareness of the whole process of thinking, without any resistance, without battle, without conflict, then the thought process comes to an end.

Now consider,

1 Corinthians 2:11 For who knows a person's thoughts except their own spirit within them? In the same way no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God.

Matthew 16:23 But Jesus turned and told Peter, "Get behind me, Satan! You are an offense to me, because you are not thinking God's thoughts but human thoughts!"

Romans 12:2
Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.

James 1:8
He is a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways.

When you strip away all the mythology and ideas about the boogy man etc. what is the ancient understanding that is "Satan," “adversary” or “resistor."?

Is it not Krishnamurti's 'thinker'?

Superfund
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Re: Jesus and Krishnamurti

Post by Superfund » Thu Sep 10, 2015 12:01 am

Krishnamurti ~ humility
Can humility be practiced? Surely, to be conscious that you are humble is not to be humble. You want to know that you have arrived. This indicates, does it not, that you are listening in order to achieve a particular state, a place where you will never be disturbed, where you will find everlasting happiness, permanent bliss? But as I said previously, there is no arriving, there is only the movement of learning-and that is the beauty of life. If you have arrived, there is nothing more. And all of you have arrived or you want to arrive, not only in your business, but in everything you do; so you are dissatisfied, frustrated, miserable.
Sirs, there is no place at which to arrive, there is just this movement of learning, which becomes painful only when there is accumulation. A mind that listens with complete attention will never look for a result because it is constantly unfolding;like a river, it is always in movement. Such a mind is totally unconscious of its own activity, in the sense that there is no perpetuation of a self, of a "me," which is seeking to achieve an end.

Matthew 18:1-4
"At that time the disciples came to Jesus, saying, "Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?" And calling to him a child, he put him in the midst of them and said, "Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven." ~~Matthew 18:1-4

Matthew 11:29 New International Version (NIV)
"Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls."

Is it this kind of participation where being has depth?

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Re: Jesus and Krishnamurti

Post by sgttomas » Wed May 18, 2016 12:33 am

*bump*

This is great stuff. I want to reply but I also want to bring it to others attention. I certainly wasnt around much last year when Superfund posted it.

-sgtt
Prophet Muhammad (God send peace and blessings upon him) is reported to have said, "God says 'I am as My servant thinks I am' " ~ Sahih Al-Bukhari, Vol 9 #502 (Chapter 93, "Oneness of God")

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Re: Jesus and Krishnamurti

Post by The Pixie » Wed May 18, 2016 1:57 am

Superfund wrote:J Krishnamurti- That Thing Which You Fight You become

"Surely that thing which you fight you become.... If I am angry and you meet me with anger what is the result? More anger. You have become that which I am. If I am evil and you fight me with evil means then you also become evil, however righteous you may feel. If I am brutal and you use brutal methods to overcome me, then you become brutal like me. And this we have done for thousands of years. Surely there is a different approach than to meet hate by hate? if I use violent methods to quell anger in myself then I am using wrong means for a right end, and thereby the right end ceases to be. In this there is no understanding; there is no transcending anger. Anger is to be studied tolerantly and understood; it is not to be overcome through violent means. Anger may be the result of many causes, and without comprehending them there is no escape from anger.
So would you say the Allies became Nazis over the course of World War 2?

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Re: Jesus and Krishnamurti

Post by met » Wed May 18, 2016 8:32 am

The Pixie wrote:
Superfund wrote:J Krishnamurti- That Thing Which You Fight You become

"Surely that thing which you fight you become.... If I am angry and you meet me with anger what is the result? More anger. You have become that which I am. If I am evil and you fight me with evil means then you also become evil, however righteous you may feel. If I am brutal and you use brutal methods to overcome me, then you become brutal like me. And this we have done for thousands of years. Surely there is a different approach than to meet hate by hate? if I use violent methods to quell anger in myself then I am using wrong means for a right end, and thereby the right end ceases to be. In this there is no understanding; there is no transcending anger. Anger is to be studied tolerantly and understood; it is not to be overcome through violent means. Anger may be the result of many causes, and without comprehending them there is no escape from anger.
So would you say the Allies became Nazis over the course of World War 2?
They didn't need to. They were already far worse. Arundhati Roy reports that when she challenges the Indian middle class on the upcoming genocides of India's 500,000,000 poor, many of them just retort: "That's how the Americans got rich!

You can only be the 'epitome of evil' if you fail at genocide, so there's someone left to blame you....
The “One” is the space of the “world” of the tick, but also the “pinch” of the lobster, or that rendezvous in person to confirm online pictures (with a new lover or an old God). This is the machinery operative...as “onto-theology."
Dr Ward Blanton

Superfund
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Re: Jesus and Krishnamurti

Post by Superfund » Mon May 23, 2016 3:08 am

The Pixie wrote:
Superfund wrote:J Krishnamurti- That Thing Which You Fight You become

"Surely that thing which you fight you become.... If I am angry and you meet me with anger what is the result? More anger. You have become that which I am. If I am evil and you fight me with evil means then you also become evil, however righteous you may feel. If I am brutal and you use brutal methods to overcome me, then you become brutal like me. And this we have done for thousands of years. Surely there is a different approach than to meet hate by hate? if I use violent methods to quell anger in myself then I am using wrong means for a right end, and thereby the right end ceases to be. In this there is no understanding; there is no transcending anger. Anger is to be studied tolerantly and understood; it is not to be overcome through violent means. Anger may be the result of many causes, and without comprehending them there is no escape from anger.
So would you say the Allies became Nazis over the course of World War 2?
The bombing of Hamburg and Dresden.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Roya ... CL3400.jpg

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