Well said.
Maybe I can bring an example of this. To me it had a fine meaning but I don’t know whether it can strike a chord with another.
Many years ago I asked a friend to help me to transfer my sailing boat from a marina where I had spent a holiday to my home port. The journey lasted a whole day and I could not tackle it alone.
It was a beautiful sunny day, the wind was just the ideal, not too strong or too weak, all the conditions for a smooth and relaxing sailing. I was really happy and enjoying everything. When I say “happy” I don’t mean that kind of hysteria you can often see in advertisements, but just a quiet feeling of being at peace with oneself and with the world. Once the sails were set and trimmed, the autopilot steered the boat and there wasn’t much to do on our part except for looking at the sea, the sky and the passing coast far away. As usual I was enjoying everything and everything seemed a blessing to me, especially the quality of the light. So few hours passed in silence… after a while I realized my friend was bored. I asked a direct question to him and he confirmed he was bored to death. He said: “Nothing happens here and the sea is empty, there is nothing to see.”
To me that was a blasphemy, how could one be bored in such a wonderful situation? And how could one state there was nothing to see? There was only one answer: my friend was blind, insensitive and therefore unaware of the abundance of life.
I could not find any word to explain to him my point of view, and I still now I could not find them if he was here. There is no way to make another more aware even if you love him, unless the other feels a kind of urge to be so. Not even K could do the miracle. This is our situation here, in this forum, isn’t it?
This is a lovely example Voyager, thank you for sharing it.
There is a phrase that is sometimes used in Chan Buddhism (I am not promoting Chan ideas - just as, in using the phrase “beginner’s mind”, I have no interest in promoting Zen Buddhism) which is pregnant with meaning for me: Ordinary mind. To spice it up a little they sometimes say “Ordinary mind is the Buddha” (where the word ‘Buddha’ - from the Sanskrit “bodha” or “bodhi”, meaning “awake” - simply means someone, anyone, who is very, very, very awake).
What I take from this phrase is that our ordinary, humble, everyday awareness contains potential riches that far exceed what we usually feel or experience. This is because we do not value ordinary awareness. So to perceive these riches, in this view, is simply a matter of being interested in what is already available to our everyday experience, our ordinary awareness.
For instance, most of the time we are so preoccupied with our mental interests that we forget we even have mental interests! - That is, we are so focussed on our mental situation, that we neglect 9 tenths of what is available to be experienced, including the simple fact that we are preoccupied with mental interests, and that we can become curiously aware of this fact.
Ordinary mind then is the simple validation of everyday, ordinary experience, experience of the mundane, such as the temperature in the room, the wind in the chimney, the light streaming in through the window, or the thoughts or feelings that occupy one’s psychological space this very second. This same ordinary mind can then be sensitive to even more extraordinary things, if such things are there to be witnessed.
But if we are waiting for the spectacular to appear, or for something to shock us out of our complacency, we can wait until doomsday if we have no sensitivity to ordinary things. Either we will be dulled to it when the spectacular occurs, or we will be so un-attuned for it that we simply regress to an even more insensible state than before. So waiting for an extraordinary mind is folly.
I feel that if - for only one day - we could value our ordinary sensory perceptions of the world around us, and have some simple curiosity about our psychological states, then we would already be doing more than we will accomplish in a year - or several years - of mental exploration and effort.
Why do we not then, in general, value ordinary awareness? Partly it is because of a fear that what we will discover will be depressing or invalidate our attachments and perceived securities. Fear. This is doubtless a part of it. But isn’t it mostly habit? Custom? Inertia?
Probably this is why K often said one needs to be free of fear to look at anything, and also that we need freedom at the beginning, not at the end. We need to have a sense of being free just to observe anything, be interested in anything. And there needs to be enough freedom from fear just to look. And then, if we have this sense of freedom to look, to be curious, we can then look at our pressing fears and anxieties (if this is what is there to be looked at), or at our feeling of boredom (if this is there to be experienced, felt).
So ordinary mind (ordinary awareness), with its simple freedom from fear (at least enough to look at anything) seems to be the only way to genuine, authentic abundance. Wouldn’t you say?
Fear may be lurking under the surface, a constant low-level background that it is close to invisible for us, unless it surges, an unconscious constant fear. Similar in this sense to suffering, almost always present to some degree, relatively rarely seen for what it is.
And I totally get the ‘pointless exercise’ feeling. Meditation or even ordinary unimpeded awareness doesn’t yield shiny exciting gifts. If it does, that’s probably thought at work.
That is a question I tried to answer many times and I cannot say I found a real complete answer.
Surely fear is one of the worst factors for preventing awareness (but we are meaning awareness of ourselves, of our thoughts and feelings, of our values, of our motives and drives and not awareness of clouds, aren’t we?), but also desire has the same effect, we all know how strong desires made us commit the most ridiculous mistakes in our life. And habits of course keep us in a rut from where we are not able to see anything farer than our nose. Inertia could be another word for lack of interest and when there is lack of interest nothing new can be discovered. But I think there is more to be discovered which prevents awareness… the unshakable value we give to thought, using it to face and solve all our problems in spite of its limits (I remember once when talking with Inquiry I told him that we should “devalue thought” and that all K’s teachings concerned this devaluation of thought. But he didn’t agree (:-)). As long as we worship thought we will never be fully aware. Of course, we may be convinced to be aware, that is the trick thought plays all the time.
I particularly like this sentence of yours, yes, when we are capable of seeing there is a “genuine, authentic abundance.” And I’d add: in simplicity!
Another aspect which is related with all that is “leisure”. K said there must be leisure to discover things. I think you talked about that in your reply to Inquiry without naming it. I guess you are better than me to expand this topic.
I think this is actually quite a deep topic, as Voyager points out. There is no particular fear involved in just looking at a cloud or a tree or a face in the crowd. But if my mind has found security and continuity in being preoccupied with various ideas or thoughts, then even as simple an action as looking at a cloud endangers this preoccupation. Looking at a cloud has no meaning for our mental preoccupation, and so it may feel worthless, purposeless, boring. But this feeling of boredom or pointlessness may be the surface expression of a deeper fear: i.e. the fear that our mental preoccupations may themselves be the actually meaningless activity. As Rick says,
Another block is simply habit. If we are used to taking the car we will resist taking the bus or train. If we are used to working in an office on a computer all day, we may resist going for a walk in nature when we have free time. Habit can feel like fate - but if we experiment with making small changes to our daily routine, habit turns out to be as malleable as our bodies are when we exercise them.
Other blocks, as Voyager says, include desire and pleasure. Ordinary awareness may not appear pleasurable to our thought-created sense of things. If there is an opportunity to look at a cloud our thoughts crowd in and offer us a shiny alternative to pursue, something with greater pleasure for the mind. So when we feel the insistent pull of desire we don’t want to be aware (except of the thing which attracts us). Probably we are afraid that if we pay too much attention to the tug of desire itself, we will be forced to abandon the pleasure that the desire is promising. And so we ignore the cloud for our mental pursuit of pleasure.
But deeper than these blocks, or underlying them all, is our deep-rooted identification with thought, with mental existence (as opposed to the existence of outward sensory and inward or psychological awareness). As Voyager says, the real problem is
When in actual fact
The problem is that we then make moving away from thought, or dealing with thought, into a new mental preoccupation, which merely continues this mental investment but on a higher level, with greater sophistication; and it then becomes even more difficult to put aside. This is perhaps one of the dangers of the way Krishnamurti’s teachings can be understood.
But if thought is limited, thought will never fully understand itself, there will always be some aspect of the problem which is left out - and in the meantime life goes by, the clouds pass overhead without being seen, and our lives become ever more meaningless (if our preoccupation with thought is mostly meaningless).
Yet there is nothing to stop us, at any moment, from looking outside at the cloud or the tree (or looking within ourselves at our boredom and fear). So, it seems to me, ordinary awareness is always on hand, is always available, to save us from ourselves, if we are willing to momentarily put aside our immediate fears, our immediate desires, our immediate resistance due to habit, and just look.
This is the first and last freedom isn’t it?
For this, as Voyager points out, we have to have a little leisure, a little mental or physical space; and we must be willing to be very simple, both mentally and emotionally as well as physically. Because ordinary awareness may not, as Rick says, immediately
However, one has to reflect on the fact that if the final judge of what is shiny and exciting is merely our own thinking, this thinking may itself be very biased and unaware! So one can experiment with giving awareness the benefit of the doubt (which is its choiceless aspect); so if one feels bored or afraid or low level background suffering, then that is the thing to be aware of - as well as the cloud, the tree, the face in the crowd going by.
You are expressing something I wanted to express but could not… and you are pointing out the most dangerous tricks thought plays, the ones that keep us going in circles. Who has not fallen into this trap? I feel there is a great need to put those discoveries into paper and the only remedy we have is to re-gain simplicity…
stop here, I don’t want to be involved in the network of thought.
Right and right. Thought is instrumental for any kind of judgement: shabby-shiny, boring-interesting, yawn-thrilling, ugly-beautiful, good-bad. The fruits of choiceless awareness, whatever they may be, reveal themselves with being choicelessly aware, not analysis or guessing. And yet interestingly, even knowing this, there is strong resistance to being aware. Being choicelessly aware must be somehow deeply threatening to our sense of stability.
I don’t remember. Can you find when this exchange took place?
As long as we worship thought we will never be fully aware. Of course, we may be convinced to be aware, that is the trick thought plays all the time.
Do we “worship thought”, or are we conditioned to give more importance to thought than to sensitivity? I ask because worship is chosen, and sensitivity is choiceless.
Of course, we may be convinced to be aware, that is the trick thought plays all the time.
I don’t know if conviction and awareness are compatible. When I’m convinced of something, I resist or deny awareness of what doesn’t support my conviction. Awareness is choiceless, but our conditioned response to it may distort or deny it.
Yes, I think this is so. As I was trying to say in my post - and which Voyager also mentioned - we have (most of us at least) fallen into the trap of mental habit, and have found a sense of security there. So anytime we are required to step away from our usual mental habituation, our usual mental preoccupations (whatever they may be), we feel lost, like a fish out of water. We feel destabilised.
Speaking realistically, I think it is entirely natural to spend at least some of our time in the world of our thinking. After all, we have been educated this way, it is part of culture, maybe even part of our human biological necessity, to think and find pleasure in the imagination or intellect. Within sane limits there is probably no harm in this. Even K read novels and watched movies as part of his daily life, he listened to classical music in his bedroom (where this was available), he attended musical concerts, he watched documentaries or the news on TV, and he of course participated in many stimulating discussions throughout his life. So the life of thought - not merely for riding a bike, driving a car, writing a letter, etc - has its own place.
But the place we have given it is the primary place. We are identified with our mental world, and find any threat to it a threat to our own psychological well being. And although we have normalised this as a culture, it may be - or in fact is - a basic mistake that we ought to be aware of and, if possible, change. Because if this stability, this security, is based on an essentially self-created mental reality, which has no independent actuality apart from what we give it through our preoccupation with thinking, then of course we are in danger of losing this stability as soon as we stop thinking or move away from thinking. Our whole identity is threatened by such a thing. We feel the threat of annihilation.
This is probably the main reason why we inwardly resist giving ourselves up whole-heartedly to being aware.
I think that goes to the heart of the fear/revulsion/discomfort of choiceless awareness. It’s an existential fear, the fear of death. The self seems to think-feel that when it goes, everything goes. I’m fond of my sense of self, as you know, but not of that aspect of it. It’s like living with and being ruled by a safety freak who sees the unknown as high-risk, better to be avoided. I give choiceless awareness short shrift, dabble with it, declare the ‘result’ meh, and hold onto that image.
Yes - this is a good description of what takes place and why.
Nevertheless I feel, I sense, I intuit, that there is a simpler, more modest, more ordinary way into this business that doesn’t involve so much existential angst.
So rather than think-feeling in terms of impossibilities, why not think-feel in terms of what is ready to hand? And ordinary awareness, humble curiosity, is ready to hand.
That is, to look at something, to pay attention to something, because one feels like looking at it, one feels like giving it attention. And if one doesn’t feel any interest in it, then to drop it and pay attention to something that does capture, in a small way, one’s interest.
There is always some aspect of present moment experiencing which one can be interested in. One might even think of this as a kind of experimental hedonism: to be curious about the taste of the apple juice one is drinking, of the cold feel of the glass in one’s hand, of the refreshment one feels after one’s thirst has been quenched, of the feel of water as one rinses the glass under the hot tap, of the view of the garden as one turns to place the glass on the drying wrack. And so on.
Each moment has an infinite variety of small little sensations and experiences like this - and to notice them is to step away slightly from one’s purely mental fixations, so as to open up a conversation with the world beyond thought.
We can’t simply ditch the thought-made mind in one go through a decision or action. It seems to me that we have to feel our way into the world first, before a transformative insight becomes even a vague possibility.
This feeling into the world does not take time: it is immediate feeling-awareness, here and now, of the taste of apple juice, the coldness of the glass, the view of the garden, etc - as well as of the dull rumble of one’s anxieties (from the monsters in the basement), such as they are.
I feel this is worth giving some space and energy to experiment with.
Perhaps useful is the good old metaphor of snake and rope, where the snake is the annihilation we fear and the rope is the opposite, aliveness? We look and see that utter annihilation awaits us should we dwell in awareness. But spiritual teachers tell us we’ve got it all wrong, that dwelling in awareness is aliveness, not annihilation. Listening passionately, we get it, choiceless awareness is aliveness rather than annihilation. But our understanding is partial, intellectual, the rope still seems snake-ish, we remain confused at the root level.
Pleasure junkies that we are, we want to milk the last drop of pleasure out of life. This is something we know how to do in our default state of consciousness (not choiceless awareness). But there is no such pleasure to milk from choiceless awareness. There may be gifts galore in awareness, tiny everyday joys, simple moments, but these are not intensely and dramatically thrilling like the pleasures (and pains) of our default sleepy-daydreamy consciousness. At least I don’t think they are (from experience), but what do I know of choiceless awareness, maybe it is endlessly amusing?
Yes, I think you’re right James - spending some of our time in the world of our thinking seems very sane and reasonable. As far as I can see, the problem is that we spend almost all of our time in the world of our thinking and that the other world of choiceless awareness is an unexplored planet where we almost never go. Why would we? Do we even know it exists? What could there possibly be there that would make such exploration worthwhile? We understand that one man went there and it seems to be an incredibly interesting planet but the fact that we want to go there stops us travelling and we can’t get our heads round such a strange set-up. Does this make any sense?
“Almost all our time” implies that for a short time at least there is choiceless awareness. And if that happens with something important like the violence in us, it’s enough. I wouldn’t use the expression “the other world”, to me it sounds as if we have created an image of it, of what we should do according to K. and we have associated a sense of impotence with that image. Let’s forget about another world, or an unexplored planet, and just deal with what we are facing from day to day, from moment to moment. And I even think it’s healthier to forget about choiceless awareness, because we have created a myth out of it, and make the best with our ordinary awareness. We have created an image of it and we are trying to achieve it, that is just the wrong way to proceed.
“What could there possibly be there that would make such exploration worthwhile?”
Discontent with our lives, with the way we are using our mental resources. K said we must have the flame of discontent, do we have it? Or are we caught in the old trap of looking for a result?
I think Voyager is right to seek to demystify “choiceless awareness”. As we know, choiceless awareness is a phrase K used often in his talks and discussions, but for this reason it has taken on a kind of abstract or ideological significance for some people, which has turned it into an impossible dream for spiritual adepts. As Voyager says,
For myself choiceless awareness doesn’t mean something different per se from ordinary awareness - it is simply a refined or more accurate description of what ordinary awareness actually is. So, for instance, the daffodils in the vase are yellow. I am aware that the daffodils are yellow because they are in fact (for a non-colour-blind person) the colour we have agreed to call yellow. There is no choice in this awareness of the fact. Choice may come in immediately afterwards when I say ‘I like’ or ‘I don’t like’ those daffodils, but then one can be aware of this psychological movement as a new fact - and again, the very fact that it is there and one is aware of it means that one has not chosen this fact to be there: one is simply aware of the fact that one ‘likes’ or ‘does not like’ the daffodils, etc.
So ordinary awareness, left to itself, is always choiceless. The issue is that we are psychologically active constantly, giving attention only to our psychological preferences and interests, and this constancy of our psychological life overcomes or overpowers or blocks out simple, ordinary holistic awareness (awareness is also holistic). I think this is what Sean is saying when he writes:
The consequence of this is that we begin to make an abstraction of what this “other world of choiceless awareness” is. Either we say to ourselves (mentally, in thought) that awareness is impossible, or we say, as Rick writes, that
Or we speculate that it means either
or
Remember, this is the view of awareness that we have from the perspective of our thinking minds, the mind that is preoccupied with thought, and so is bound to be one step removed from the thing it is judging (and it will always likely disvalue awareness in one way or another, because awareness is not dependent on our capacity to think).
At the other extreme, there are those people who make large claims about awareness, that awareness is already transformation, that awareness is a state of non-division, that awareness cannot be an awareness of thought, that awareness is synonymous with insight. This helps contribute to the misunderstanding that awareness is only for the privileged few, for the people who are already Buddhas, enlightened masters, etc.
But simple sensory awareness of the fact that one is hungry or tired, excited or bored, that it is daytime as opposed to nighttime, or nighttime as opposed to daytime, is already awareness. There is no need to make a mystery of this fact.
So I think the issue that we are exploring together is whether there can be a cognitive or attentional shift away from our preference for thinking (and being occupied 9-5 with mental interests), towards a more holistic, sensory and psychological awareness (by ‘psychological’ I mean awareness at the level of our heads - not just our bodies, our senses - but a psychological awareness without the preoccupation with thinking we currently have).
Yes, of course. That brings us back to the question of seeing that thought is not capable to make us live a satisfactory life and so we are all the time discontent with what we do, with how we act, with our relationships. Personally I see that 99% of my relationships with the people around me are superficial or conflictual and therefore I cannot help but being discontent. And I can see that the cause is thought. I feel at home only when sensory awareness is in operation and I don’t find it difficult to shift from thought to perception. So that’s why I felt that talking (too much I think in this forum) about choiceless awareness is just a myth we have created hearing K.
A beginner’s mind is a mind who is not trying to mold one’s life according to the “pattern” given by K, or a mind which is trying to figure out what is that weird experience another had and we hadn’t. A beginner mind is simply watching with spontaneous interest what is in front of him/her or inside his/her head, and when that thing he was watching is no more there, forget about it and watch something else which has come about.
Yes. I think this is the clue. We realise at some level - whether dimly or acutely - that we are living at the level of thinking, thought (mental preoccupation), when there is the possibility of living at the level of the senses, at the level of holistic awareness (mind-body awareness or emotional and sensory and cognitive awareness, or however else one describes this).
Feeling this discontent with the way we habitually live our lives, we can then become interested in the
This may or may not have a quality of intense
But we will not find this out unless we explore this for ourselves. N’est pas?
out of water. We feel destabilised.