“Darwin famously spent little of his time at Cambridge studying or in lectures, preferring to shoot, ride and collect beetles”

And “…a friend made a “joke coat of arms” for Darwin making “drinking and smoking” the naturalists trademark.”

So there!

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/5032354/Charles-Darwins-personal-finances-revealed-in-new-find.html

In answer to your question above, no, I don’t think he ever entertained an opinion or put forward a hypothesis, at leat, not in his adult life. He was brought to Europe by Theosophists who saw him as the new world teacher. He was educated by them, but in his 20’s, he understood that he could not be a world leader and dissolved the organization that had been created for him. He then set out on his own course.

I have read all the books about him from that point on. The reason I am so adamant about him not forming opinions or hypotheses is their connection to thought. He was a guy who worked at quietening his mind to the point where he could sit in a doctor’s reception area and realize he had not thought one thought in half an hour. To many of us, that might seem outrageous or undesirable, because we rely on thought to entertain us.

I am not saying he did not offer an opinion on life events, such as what colour a room should be painted, or what kind of ice cream he prefered, I am claiming opinion and hypotheses were not part of what he urged people to discover, or what interested him. In fact, they were the antithesis of the awareness he urged.

” “Why is creationism always associated with a biblical source? Intelligent creation could be simply an intelligence that lends to the formation of DNA, the building blocks of cells. ” A beautifully put question, but is that one of your “garbage” thoughts, or the other kind?”

In the first place, I am still learning about awareness and have a long way to go. K. talked about three types of people: those who simply did not want to know, those who were interested in awareness conceptually but who had no interest in putting in the energy to get there, and those who were interested and worked at it. I would place myself somewhere between the last two. I realize much of it is still conceptual to me and I am not putting in the required energy to move things along. Therefore, I don’t have a lot to offer.

Since it was a question I offered about creative intelligence, it means I don’t know. That’s not superficial thought because as K. said, the first step on the way to truth is admitting you don’t know. If you have read some of my other posts, you will see bombast, ego, power trips and other such nonsense. That is superficiality, something from which I find it difficult to divorce myself. Besides, I did not say there was anything wrong with superficial thought, I merely pointed out that it is garbage. Many intellectuals thrive on garbage.

Intelligent thought, to me, is looking without the conditioning. For example, when you look at an oak tree, you are not seeing what is there. You were told it is an oak tree and you were taught how to recognize it. That is conditioned thought. When you look without the conditioning, you begin to see other aspects about the structure. You can do the same thing with humans, being sure you know a person, but you have been conditioned to know that person. Many of us don’t know the first thign about people we are supposed to know.

A lot of what I’m saying is trivial, but conditioned thought can be a heavy burden. It can lead to violence or neurotic action.

What it does show, however, is that one’s views on AGW are generally soundly based in individual politics rather than science. Such is Post-Modern Life.

I dont see much point in getting into a argument about what J.S.K (no not the other one!) said or not. I have read perhaps five or six books of Krishnamurti’s talks , mostly thirty years ago, and I didn’t keep them. I feel as certain as i can be of any memory that I read something in which her refrred to Sheldrake’s theories, though not by name. It may have been in an interview of some sort. As for what he said about the brain, I suggest you have a look at the dialogues with Bohm, because he clearly differentiates between mind and brain. No doubt about it! And he is very speciific about the differences. I’ll have another listen myself when I have a mo. Do you think Krishnamurti never entertained an opinion or put forward a hypthesis? I suggest you read “Lives In The Shadow” if you haven’t already.

Point two: what else would I call it? Well you found a perfect term: “mental exercise”. There are two meanings of philosophy. “philosophy” ( not “a philosophy”) is “the pursuit of wisdom or of the knowledge of things and their causes.” (Oxford). A philosophy is “a system of theories on the nature of things or of rules for the conduct of life”. A “search for meaning” doesn’t qualify on either account, but i’d be happy if you showed me your dictionary meaning.

Point three: You seem to be assuming that I am somehow advocating that the search for meaning is some sort of “good thing”. I didn’t say any such thing. Whether I think that or not is entirely irrelevant to the point that I was making, and, it seems to me, to the point that you are making.

Point three: “Why is creationism always associated with a biblical source? Intelligent creation could be simply an intelligence that lends to the formation of DNA, the building blocks of cells. ” A beautifully put question, but is that one of your “garbage” thoughts, or the other kind? On what basis should your entire last entry be considered “intelligent thought keeping us alive and helping us do our jobs” and not part of the superficial rest?

Just curious.

What else would you call it, if not a philosophy?

“Krishnamurti himself was fascinated in and made frequent references to scientific discoveries and speculations alike, including Rupert Sheldrake’s fringey theories of morphogentic resonance, and used them to support what most people would consider a set of beliefs .. such as the idea that the brain and the mind were two different things, the former a biologocal entity stuck in its own repetitive ways, the other a universal consiousness”.

Books by K. were actually transcriptions of talks and dialogs he engaged in. I have read every one of those books, making over 300 pages of notes along the way. Not once did I hear him go on about theories put out by others. In his talks with David Bohm, the latter often introduced scientific concepts, some of which interested K., but he was interested mainly in the relationship of intelligence to thought, and how thought could become intelligent, hence unbiased.

Neither did I read anything in his work or in his dialogs or talks about the brain being a biological entity stuck in repetative ways, about the separation of mind and brain, or anything about universal consciousness. There is another Krishnamurti out there who fancies himself a philospher but I am talking about Jiddu Krishnamurti. What you say above about K. is foreign to me.

He did talk loosely about the function of the brain but nothing more than a normal person could ’see’ for himself, but not through a guru or a belief system. That was the thrust of K.’s work, that you had to be able to see it for yourself. Seeing, to him, was the ability of the human mind to watch itself operate and to distinguish from that observation, the difference between thought that is conditioned and thought that is intelligent, or unbiased. However, in that process, the thrust was not analysis, but awareness. He felt that awareness alone could reveal truth whereas analysis was simply the reorganization of stored memories.

The concept of universal consciousness did not come up in any works of/about K. that I read. Instead, he talked about the immensity available to the unconditioned mind. Anyone can experience that immensity with basic awareness. In our natural state, we humans are focused on thought patterns, which are processes that close in, or limit the mind. The habit of focusing on perpetual thought is confining, and when that thought stops, even for a brief moment, the resultant awareness tends to enlarge the mental space.

Furthermore, we humans have adapted our thought processes to time. Anyone can observe his mind to see the linear model in our minds that represents time. I’m sure each person has his own peculiar arrangement of time, but there is always yeaterday, today and tomorrow in some spacial arrangement. It’s an illusion, but the geometrical arrangement in the mind gives us the illusion that time is a physical entity, which we can possibly travel through. In essence, we are stuck in that illusion unless we become aware of it and act.

When one sets out to find meaning, one has to be sure that he is not involved in such an illusion. A question one might ask himself is where did I get the concept of meaning. Did I observe it with my senses, or was it passed on to me in my education and learning experiences from someone else? For example, one can observe the effect of gravitational force, even though the phenomena at work is not the force we visualize. We named it a force and we have modeled gravity as such mathematically as a vector quantity. Gravity is not what we ’see’ in our minds, it is a phenomena entirely separate from us. Time on the other hand is not. It was conceived by us and exists entirely as an illusion in our minds.

I’d call the search for meaning a philosophy because it is a mental exercise, not an actuality. If you took every human off the Earth, would there be any meaning, or a search for it? Meaning has no other meaning to any other species or matter on Earth. It is only useful to us as a device for explaining how we see the world. Even at that, it’s only use is intellectual, hence superficial. We have no need for meaning other than intellectually.

You might argue there is meaning in avoiding a bus traveling down the road. K. talks about that and compares it to sticking a needle in one’s finger while sewing. When one feels the pain, one does not look for meaning in the pain. A deeper process takes control and pulls the needle out. One’s entire focus at the moment is stopping the pain. Afterwards, one might reflect on the meaning of the event, that it drew blood, or scared us, or that an infection could set in if we don’t cleanse the wound.

K. claimed that when the mind sees the truth it will act. That’s pure awareness as opposed to the confusion that is often present in conditioned thought. We are essentially in love with our thought processes, admiring them and valuing them, yet most of our thoughts are little more than garbage. I am not claiming there is anything good or bad about that condition, it’s just the way it is. The only thought that serves us well is that intelligent thought keeping us alive and helping us do our jobs. The rest is superficial. The exercise is not to dwell on that superficiality, giving up and claiming ‘what’s the use’, it is simply to recognize the relative unimportance of our conditioned thought and the neurotic behavior it encourages.

To me, a search for meaning is entirely superficial.

David, weren’t Darwin’s religious views also shatterd by the death of one of his daughters?

Feel better for getting that off your chest? Now, how about debating Ian on what he actually said?