How can one be “fully aware” and “completely blind” to any part of awareness? Wouldn’t that be partially aware, selectively aware?
this is not an intellectual speculation on my part but something I have experimented so far.
You’re very sure of yourself.
This formulation of the problem is what makes sense to me: no causation, just a possibility.
Finish. 
When Your Lover Has Gone
When you’re alone, who cares for starlit skies
When you’re alone, the magic moonlight dies
At break of dawn, there is no sunrise
When your lover has gone
What lonely hours, the evening shadows bring
What lonely hours, with memories lingering
Like faded flowers, life can’t mean anything
When your lover has gone.
I don’t think Voyager was attempting to be scientifically or psychologically 100% exact in what he was saying. He was rhetorically posing a problem that exists for human beings.
He was - as I understand it - pointing out that one can be very sensitive outwardly, when it comes to one’s extrovert perceptions of the world, and yet, at the same time, be dulled, wholly ignorant, of large aspects of one’s inner being.
Anyone who has known artists can tell you that it is quite possible to have highly attuned sense-perceptions of a certain kind, and yet be very ignorant of many psychological facets of experience that another might be able to point out very easily.
The issue is that for almost all of us our awareness is partial. We are very sensitive in one or two areas of life, but neglectful and insensitive in others.
Our challenge is to have an integral awareness, integral perception of the inner and outer worlds, starting from wherever we actually perceive something true.
For person A this starting point may be the perception of a flower 
.
For person B this might be the perception of suffering.
But the flower also exists for person B, and the suffering also exists for person A. An integral or holistic perception can perceive both.
Do you see what I mean?
Frank Sinatra… lovely song.
Hi Voyager. Your visit to the seaside sounds great! As you say, James has answered in some depth and he’s also posted some very interesting K quotes on this subject. I’ll read everything and reply tomorrow.
Yes. We choose to be specialists. We push choiceless awareness aside for the sake of our special interest: cultivating self, one’s signature identity.
What could be more significant, more pressing, than proving myself constantly? If I can’t prove who I am, I can’t be sure of anything because everything hinges on the question, “Who am I”?
When I don’t have a fresh, new answer to “who am I”, I don’t have a satisfactory sense of my self and I’m disappointed, depressed, anxious, and it’s because I don’t care to be aware of what-is from moment to moment. I care for what I-should/should-not-be every moment because if I can’t say with complete confidence just who/what I am, I am lost.
Until I am aware of the beauty of being lost, I am (like everyone else) chasing my tale of myself.
Do we need to prove what we are, I wonder? Do we need to know with certainty - before we do know (i.e. through insight) - what we are? What is wrong with not knowing the answer to such a question?
Maybe we are nothing. Maybe we are everything. K says we are a bunch of memories. K also says that when we are not, love is, beauty is. But does having this knowledge - i.e. at an intellectual level - liberate us from our confusion?
For myself there is value in not having a complete answer to these questions. Because the part of me that has an answer is just a very small part of what the mind is.
So rather than having an explanation for who I am, isn’t it simpler, more direct, to give attention to whatever is most salient in our present experience?
What is salient is whatever it is that we are currently concerned about, moved by, aware of. Maybe it’s simply the fact that one feels confused. Maybe it is, as you say, that one feels disappointed, depressed, anxious. This then - whatever it is that is salient in the present - is who one (currently) is. This is the thing that requires one’s sensitive awareness, one’s care and consideration, one’s energy and intelligence.
Does this make sense to you?
Yes, this is what I was trying to say.
Resonance
Yesterday at the beach I had the feeling that I could not avoid the impact of reality, of actuality. It was always there regardless my willingness to resonate with it or not. It’s quite obvious, isn’t it? But feeling it is different than understanding it intellectually.
Then after lunch I had a nap lying on the sand. There were almost no people in the beach and they were far from me, so apart from the soothing sound of the sea the silence was perfect.
After a while I heard the voice of a lady saying something to her husband at some distance from me, a dim voice yet, due to the silence, it resonated in the air. It awaked me and again I felt the impact of actuality, again the sea, the sky and the breeze were there and I was resonating with them.
Back at home someone sent me a link to a record of Billie Holiday in you tube music, knowing she was one of my favourite singers, and among the many songs there was “When your lover has gone”. It’s a song which many jazz singers have sung, Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Ray Charles, etc. but I prefer Billie’s version. Billie was an ill-fated woman, she spent a miserable life, all her lovers cheated, robbed and abandoned her. So when she sings “when your lover has gone” you can feel she‘s talking about herself. She ended her life as an alcoholic. And you can feel all her sadness in her voice… a very peculiar voice. I was resonating with her sadness.
While I was listening to it, I had a sudden feeling: I had to send the words of this song to @Inquiry. Will he resonate with them? Will he be moved by the simple feeling this song expresses? If he is human, he will resonate with the humanity contained in this song. This, I thought, is the best answer I can give to his questions. This song is not only telling of its author or singer, it tells of us and of course it tells of Inquiry too. I, you, us all are the main characters of the story it tells. The story of humanity.
Yesterday I didn’t think of all those implications consciously. I didn’t stop and think whether what I was going to do was appropriate, or inappropriate, good or bad. Take it or leave it.
But today I thought that perhaps I had found the clue to understand something K had said and which may be relevant with the topic of this thread: resonance.
Perhaps what I’m going to say will appear granted for many of the people here… or maybe not.
I remembered that K had said that we are (or should be) like a drum, being empty it will resonate with every sound that happens to be there. Resonance is something which concern waves, vibrations… and after all the universe, matter, according to science is made of waves. Light is a wave, sound is a wave, and even subatomic particles are waves (I’m forced to enter into the intellectual realm here). So could not perception, both sensory and non-sensory, be just a matter of resonance?
Let’s go back to the voice I heard at the beach, the sound is a vibration and that vibration arrives at the brain and something in it resonate with that sound. So, we can say that we perceive something the moment we are resonating with the waves always there in the outside world. When I was asleep the waves (the sea, the breeze) were still there around me but I was not resonating with them. At the moment of awakening the resonance was re-established.
Now when we are dealing with people our resistance, our mental barriers prevent us from resonating with the other person. And another thought came to my mind, something I have read long ago somewhere, we can resonate with something or with someone because we are made of the same stuff. And love perhaps is just resonance. The Greek word “sympathy” means “together in sorrow”. I can resonate with Billie’s sorrow; I am together with her in that. I can resonate with something fine or with something ugly (if I don’t build a wall), staying with “what is” is resonating with what is and that means I am embracing it/her/him, I am allowing it to enter into myself. The word “comprehend” comes from Latin comprehendere which means contain in oneself or embrace. Understanding happens when we are resonating with someone or are embracing him/her, so perhaps even intelligence is resonance.
What if everything – perception, awareness, love, intelligence, compassion, can be simplified, summarized in this phenomenon of resonance? Surely life is resonance, and resonance is a way to embrace and so understand life. My hope is that if Inquiry can resonate with that song maybe that will lead him to get out of the isolation he has put himself in. There is no need to “look for one’s tail”, reality is always there around and inside us and what we only need to do is resonate with it. And as I have said, if we are made of the same stuff then we can resonate with another.
So my initial feeling at the beach of “we cannot avoid the impact with reality” can be translated “we cannot avoid resonating with life”, otherwise we are not actually living, there is no life in isolation.
Great post Voyager. And very eloquent, considering that English is not even your first language.
There is more to respond to here, but I just want to briefly pick up one aspect of what you write about.
This ‘resonance’ you talk about - how everything, not only physical sounds or physical waves, but also psychological movements, can create a resonance which can be perceived (if one is sensitive enough to perceive it) - reminded me of some of the things K used to say about sound which have always puzzled me.
K used to say that one can hear not only the sound of obvious things like the sea, or the sound of thunder or rain, people’s voices, etc, but also the sound of a tree when the wind has died down, the sound of the tree itself as it were (the sound of its own sap?) - and even the sound of one’s own psychological states, such as the sound of one’s own psychological insecurity!
He talks about it briefly in the following video (length: 4 min, 40 sec)…
An extract from the video:
Have you ever sat under a tree when the air is very still, quiet, not a leaf dancing? When it is absolutely quiet. Have you ever sat under a tree like that and listened to the sound of the tree? If there was no silence there would be no sound. You don’t understand all this.
So, the sound of insecurity, the sound, makes us seek security because we have never listened to the sound of insecurity. You understand? If you listened to the implications of insecurity, which makes us invent gods, rituals and all that stupid nonsense, if you listen to the whole movement of insecurity then out of that insecurity there comes naturally security.
So I wonder if what you say about sympathy applies here?
That is, this resonance - at some level at least - really seems to imply the non-distinction between the observer and the observed. One feels that the other - whether the ‘other’ is a sound, a piece of music, another person, or one’s own psychological state - is not separate from ourselves. As T.S. Eliot - the American poet - said: “you are the music while the music lasts”.
So, similarly, if we are able to listen to our own confusion, insecurity, lostness or suffering, then this would seem to imply that we are part of that insecurity, we are ‘one’ with it; just as we are part of the music when we listen to it “so deeply that it is not heard at all, but you are the music while the music lasts.”
Every being vibrates with its own unique set of frequencies. Its own chord: chord of me, chord of you. Our individual chords reflect the wholes of our body-minds. When you emit energy at freqs that amplify my chord, I ‘resonate’ with it. As a musician, I find it a beautiful way to look at our interdependence: chords exciting sympathetic vibrations in other chords like a sonic Indra’s Net.
Very interesting video. Thank you for posting it.
In it K reveals some peculiar aspects of what he called “the art of listening” and links it to our search for security, something we might find odd. But as he used to say every problem is related to all the others and here he’s pointing out some “hidden” link between listening to the sound of silence and the possibility to find peace of mind. Again this is an invitaton to sensory perception of something very simple and yet subtle like listening to a tree.
Hearing K here I remebered something which may be connected with what K said about listening the sound of silence in a calm night with all the stars above.
In ancient times, don’t remember when exactley but surely during middle age, teologians and pholosophers talked about the “sound of the stars” (or the sound of the spheres), coincidence?
To me sympathy - being together in sorrow (or with sorrow) seems to be the equivalent of listening to (or resonating with) something which we fear or dislike. When we stop running away from our sense (sound) of insecurity and listen to it there is a kind of reunification (no more conflict) and as K said then there is no more insecurity or security but something greater or (more?) whole which makes the two opposites futile and superfluous. Separation or division is the cause of all the suffering so “being together in sorrow” (sympathy) re-estabilishes the lost wholeness. Does it makes sense to you?
Yes. If sorrow is the result of a disconnection, then remaining with sorrow - in the sense of listening to its sound, reunifying with it, “embracing” it (a word you used in your previous post when talking about “comprehension”) - has the potential to transform this particular resonance of the mind, bringing it into a state of wholeness. Then it may have a completely different kind of significance.
That is to say, sorrow is a kind of resonance which exists because it has not been listened to completely. It is like the beginning of a melody 
which is only complete when it has been listened to by the whole mind, which has the potential to transform it. This completeness - the state of wholeness - would then be the feeling or quality of compassion.
I think we get glimpses of this when we feel sympathy for others, or when we allow a piece of music to creep behind the mental walls of our ego and touch us deeply - when the mind is in the heart, as it were.
But it seems more difficult for us to just remain with the sound of our own sorrow so that we hear its whole melody right to the end (to the end of sorrow).
Our unique body-mind chord is, it should be borne in mind, largely a product of our conditioning. What resonates for us may simply be what we know, what excites our subjective memories. In other words, the fact that X resonates doesn’t necessarily mean X is good, true, exalted.
Is there within us a chord that is made of non-subjective frequencies, a Universe Chord? Assuming that kind of UC exists, everyone would have it, be made of it, certain energies would resonate with all of us!
Forgive me for asking, but is this what you’ve found out through exploring, experimenting, or is it speculation? Do you know this because you are living it, or because what we do here is talk about what we think we’ve discovered, found out?
I ask this because you say, “This completeness - the state of wholeness - would then be the feeling or quality of compassion.” Is it compassion or something that approximates what one imagines compassion might be?
But it seems more difficult for us to just remain with the sound of our own sorrow so that we hear its whole melody
This may be because it is not melodic but dissonant, and we react to dissonance because it defies and challenges the kind of listening we associate with melody. We don’t even consider it music or something to listen to, but noise, madness, pandemonium…something to turn away from, turn off, escape.
Part of what I wrote is simply sharing what I understand to be K’s teaching about this issue. For example, here (length: under 1 min):
“The ending of sorrow is to hold that sorrow, that pain. Look at it. It’s a marvellous thing to know how to hold the pain and look at it, live with it. Not get bitter, cynical, but to see the nature of sorrow. There’s beauty in that sorrow, depth in that sorrow [if one can stay with it]”.
And of course we know that K repeated over and over that the ending of sorrow is passion, the passion of compassion.
But, as I said above, apart from what K has said about it,
This is what I think Voyager has been attempting to communicate and share with you in what he has been saying. When, for instance, he talked about his feeling-response to the song sung by Billie Holiday:
I think, Inquiry, you are too much in your head, and not sufficiently in your heart 
. You need to get out of your head sometimes to resonate with the kinds of thing being discussed here.
I think it can be fun, in a speculative kind of way, to consider the world in terms of these various frequencies. One can think of each person’s conditioning as creating its own frequency, with more mental or intellectual frequencies being distinct from more emotional frequencies, or more kinetic, athletic frequencies, etc.
Each person on Kinfonet has their own kind of frequency that we can detect - perhaps dimly - through their posts.
There is also the frequency of the great ugly human beings, like Putin and Trump, and the frequency of more gentle human beings, like Jane Goodall and the Dalai Lama. The frequency of great artists and musicians, with all their peculiar eccentricities and sufferings, the different kinds of minds they have.
And beyond all this, there is perhaps the frequency of intelligence, insight, compassion: the kinds of frequencies that one may be able to contact through meditation or moments of catharsis, awakening.
Thanks for you opinion, Doctor, but I resonate quite well. I just don’t respond the way you think I should.
That is a point I wanted to explore having been playing guitar in the past…
I’ll proceed slowly and you tell me if what I say is right or wrong according to your knowledge.
Resonance produce amplification and/or transformation. When one string of the guitar resonates with another string of the same wave length (or key) the resulting sound is amplified. Similarly, two people having the same passion for the same thing, or share the same feeling, that feeling or the passion is amplified. (In other fields that is called “synergy” and when it happens the resulting energy or effect is greater than the sum for the single ones. The whole is always greater than the mathematical sum of the parts – see my comment about K’s speech of security/insecurity).
But we also have resonance (and synergy) when different strings are played together (like in a chord) and in this case the resulting sound is transformed in a key different than the single ones. This is due to some kind of affinity between two or more different keys (or wave length). For instance, when you play together re, fa#, la (or in English D, F#, A) you get the chord Re major which is different than those three). Perhaps there could be the same kind of resonance between different manifestations of our psyche.
But there is also another kind of resonance which is relevant with both what K. said in the video above and with my experience at the beach. This concerns the close relationship we have between silence (or void) and sound. When I was sleeping at the beach I heard the voice of the lady resonating in the air, that means there was an amplification of the sound due to the silence present in the beach. And we should notice that silence improves sound and sound improves silence. (K used to say that we can perceive the silence in the sound). Taking the guitar, the void inside it amplifies the sound of the strings. This makes me think that when we observe silently our reactions, fears or whatever, the peculiar quality of the silence in the mind makes the perception clearer and so the understanding can take place.
Let us be simple. When I listen to Billie Holiday singing “When your lover is gone”, there could be resonance with it or not, according to our openness. Obviously if I’m locked in a small space and I have no interest in breaking out of that space the resonance cannot take place, But when it happens, it happens because both me and Billie are made by the same stuff, we share the same psychological structure, the same consciousness. You may call this common ground “conditioning”, it may be or it may be not, but anyway it’s a “universal chord”. Do you suppose that a person who has eliminated his/her conditioning and sorrow will not resonate with the sorrow of another still conditioned individual? To me it seems just the opposite, all true religious figures, and K is one fine example of this, showed compassion towards the less fortunate persons. And compassion is not resonance?