[MD] Is it serious?

[Ham Priday]

Hi Andre [Willblake2 quoted] --

My computer suffered a breakdown the last couple of days but seems to have 
recovered, so I'm just catching up with about 50 posts.  Among them was your 
exchange with Willblake,  It caught my attention because it describes two 
aspects of awareness in a way that we rarely see in this forum.  You started 
by quoting Krishnamurti. ...

[Andre]:
> The 'self' is a product of thought, intellectualising being a process
> of dividing.  'The content of our consciousness is the common
> ground of all humanity...A human being living in any part of the
> world suffers, not only physically but also inwardly. He is uncertain,
> fearful, confused, anxious, without any sense of deep security.
> So our consciousness is common to all mankind...and therefore
> we are not individuals. Please do consider this.
> We have been trained, educated, religiously as well as scholastically,
> to think that we are individuals, separate souls, striving for ourselves,
> but this is an illusion....We are not separate entities with separate
> psychological content, struggling for reasults; we are, each one of us,
> actually the rest of humankind".  (from J. Krishnamurti "The Open
> Door", a biography by Mary Lutyens, p 48).

This elicited a question from Willblake which you suspected was facetious:

> But Andre, Why can I only see through my eyes, and not others?

[Willblake2]:
> Perhaps I am displaying the my simplicity, but if individual
> consciousness does not exist, what is the I that is seeing
> through my eyes?

The truth is, neither of you was being facetious.  Instead, you were 
expressing contradictory epistemologies.  You assert that "The 'self' is a 
product of thought", and you define 'intellectualizing' as "a process of 
dividing."  What you don't specify is where the intellect resides.  And this 
is critical, because whoever "owns" the intellect also does the dividing. 
Willblake knows that the intellect is proprietary to the self and a function 
of conscious awareness, which is why he asks "what is the I that sees?"

You also ask us to consider that "our consciousness is common to all 
mankind...and therefore we are not individuals."  That's a non sequitor 
premise.  There are any number of properties common to mankind -- breathing, 
feeding, speaking, walking on two legs, procreating, dying, etc.  Yet none 
of these human behaviors (or all of them together) proves that we are not 
individuals.  In fact, if you want to get logical, only an individual can 
perform any of them.

Krishnamurti is only partly right.   "Consciousness is the common ground of 
all humanity,"  but "the content of consciousness" exists only in the mind 
of the knower.  Conscious awareness is known only to the self and is 
non-transferable.

> One needs only a small amount of experience living with others, and a very
> small amount of empathy to realise the truth of these observations. But as
> Krishnamurti said over and over again; please consider this, find out for
> yourself. Do not accept my word for it.

I have considered it and don't accept your word for it, nor the word of the 
author.  It's the same fallacious reasoning that has led the Pirsigians to 
conclude that intellect and value are universal attributes.  These, also, 
are the realization of cognizant individuals.

But thanks for a fascinating exchange.

Cheers to you both,
Ham