There are at said to be around 180 cognitive biases in our brain, many of which are self serving, the least of which is the Fundamental attribution error (simply we attribute others behaviour to personality/disposition, and our own behaviour to situtations/environment), so I would say yes to this Inquiry.
Acquisitiveness, addiction, and distraction are what we live with constantly, so if Iâm not aware of thinking about what I feel I must acquire, how dependent I am on certain things, and when and why Iâm distracted, how serious can I be about self-knowledge for its own sake?
By âconstantlyâ, does he mean the now moment, starting afresh at any moment, so that it isnât a matter of continuity, of accumulating successes, of benefit or reward?
âConstantlyâ means always, so I would think he meant vigilance, âwatchfulness in discovering or guarding against dangerâ.
K is talking about âtranscendence through understandingâ self.
This seems to me to be a whole different order of self knowledge than noticing this or that about myself, or even unearthing oneâs inner hurts, etc,. I donât think he is talking about that kind of learning about oneself. That is self-improvement. There is therapy for that. That is, in K parlance, modified continuity, evolutionary rather than revolutionary, progressive rather than radical. Self-gratification. Not that therapy is without practical merit. But therapyâs goal is to strengthen the sense of self, not weaken it.
âTranscendent understandingâ must involve something else. Understanding some movement/process that is common to all of us. Understanding the mechanism of self, perhaps. Beyond the personal, going through the personal, perhaps but to get the general, namely, that we âdepend on circumstances to make [us] satisfied with lifeâ. Getting to what lies underneath the acquisitive thought, for example, rather than just acknowledging my acquisitiveness and reacting to that in whatever way I see fit. To âjust watch itâ or do something about it, as my conditioning dictates. The underlying firmament remains no matter how we swop out or deal with the surface expressions.
I am afraid we remain on the surface with our observations of self and K is talking about a more penetrating type of observation. I can only guess, but I think what would be revealed by that latter kind of observation alone can bring about the depth of seriousness required for âconstantâ vigilance, effortlessly so. That degree of seriousness cannot be adopted or acquired through will or determination, as far as I can surmise. Which brings us back to the limits of thought.
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I donât know what you think I said with that statement.
Yes we remain until we donâtâŚand it is insight that is that âpenetrationâ through the âsurfaceâ; the brain being aware of the âhellâ it has inadvertently trapped itself inâŚ.And the âperception that freedom is essentialâ.
He did not introduce awareness or anything else as a concept. He was sharing his experience. Of course we invariably make them concepts since his teachings have become our knowledge.
True. Watching âwhat isâ without any effort to change it is central to the teaching. Thinking in all its forms (pleasure, fear etc) is our âwhat isâ. Awareness, attention and so on are perhaps âwhat isâ for K. We can begin by seeing how we (thought) have made a pleasure pursuit of Kâs âwhat isâ.
True. Logically any practice is continuity and so it is still bound by memory and thought.
Effortlessness means the ending of thought which is at the root of all effort. Effort in the form of escape, suppression, pursuing systems and techniques come to an end. This happens only when the total futility of all these is seen. It is not easy so long as there is even a ray of hope through the future created by thought. There is complete and unconditional surrender to âwhat isâ. K was a master in using inquiry until the very end when it results in surrender.
â I assure you, when there is complete nakedness, utter hopelessness, then in that moment of vital insecurity, there is born the flame of supreme intelligence, the bliss of truth.â (New York, March 11, 1935).
â Can thought be aware of its own movement? Not YOU are aware of thought and its movement? You have separated yourself from thought. Thought has created the âyouâ. The âyouâ which thought has created thinks it is permanent. So the instant reaction is, âI am going to be aware of thought movingâ, which is entirely different from thought itself watching its movement, thought itself becoming conscious of itself.â (Man is not the Measure, page 307).
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What is the basic assumption of thought that needs to be questioned?
Basic assumption is the sense of division being real.
Here it is like a chicken and egg. What came first? Thought or sense of division? Both are same. Sense of division is an indication of a psychologically unbalanced mind. A mind living in disorder.
If there is no division, what does thought have to achieve?
Mind without division is silent, aware.
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It is difficult to watch oneself.
For instance, it feels weird to see myself in a video recording especially while I am recorded speaking/interacting. I am so critical of my self. I am unable to watch my self without thoughts. I can look at a tree without a thought but it is so difficult to have such attention on a person.
Watching humans seem to over activate my thinking (my ego).
Awareness and attention to âwhat isâ:
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âWhat isâ being our conditioning, thought, thinking, our reactions in relationship, the various contents of consciousness that have been put there by our thinking and reacting, the experiences or points of view (conclusions) with which we feel identified.
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Awareness and attention being choiceless, without a goal, without an effort, but simply being aware, attending, to the present facts of âwhat isâ.
I have shared a (16 minute) video and transcript of a Question & Answer looking into this issue of awareness and attention on the âAttentionâ thread, which may be relevant.
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Krishnamurti seems to have taken a both/and approach. That is he seems to have approached the human situation both from the point of view of awareness and attention, as well as from the point of view of thought, understanding the limits of thought.
So understanding awareness and understanding thought may not be mutually exclusive.
Obviously, the danger of this is that people will attach themselves to one side and ignore the other - people may begin to feel that they are aware and know what awareness is, and distort investigation in this way. But I feel, nevertheless, that understanding awareness is crucial to understanding thought (and the opposite).
Does not the understanding of thought give rise to awareness? In that sense I would say they are same, same but different. Krishnamurti put in more poetically in this line that has left a strong impression on my mind:
âThought shattering itself against its own nothingness is the explosion of meditation.â
But by not being mutually exclusive, though, I take it you mean that a true and comprehensive, explorative study necessitates a consideration of both . Quite right. But as you point out, and as we have seen, there is a danger in leaning too much into one at the exclusion of the other. In the one case, one can get entrapped by thought chasing its own tail and in the other, one can get enamored by fanciful thinking. A delicate balance is called for.
With the understanding of thought the question of âwhy awareness?â is answered. With the understanding of (total, non-selective) awareness, the possibility of âfreedom from the knownâ is sensed. At some point I guess both these understandings blend into one and the boundaries between them become blurred.
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Understanding implies awareness, so yes. To actually see (not just intellectually) the nature and limits of thought implies being aware, attentive, having insight.
The issue though, as you mention, is that
As I see it the problem of focussing only on conditioning and thought is that one can get into a kind of intellectual bind from which there is no escape. Thought cannot have an insight into thought.
There is ambiguity here of course, because - as you say elsewhere - Krishnamurti also says that thought must become aware of its own limits. This seems to imply that thought can be aware, be attentive, and have insight. But Iâm not sure that this is what Krishnamurti is saying. My understanding of âthought being aware of its own limitsâ, is that it is a way of speaking about an awareness of thought in which there is no separate âawarerâ, no separate observer of thought - in the same way that Krishnamurti talks about observing anger or envy without a separate observer, which can be expressed as: there is only anger, only envy. The state of âonly angerâ and âonly envyâ is obviously a state of complete attention, in which the envy or anger flowers and dissipates (according to Krishnamurti).
Krishnamurti also sometimes asks - and for similar reasons - can consciousness be aware of itself? Consciousness - in Krishnamurtiâs language - is put together by thought, made up of contents that have been created by our thinking and reacting. So again he is asking whether there can be an awareness or attention of the whole of consciousness without any separate âawarerâ or âattenderâ or observer.
So my understanding of these expressions - of thought being aware of itself, of consciousness being aware of itself, etc - is that the state of thought-free awareness or consciousness-free attention is implicit without being stated, because the state of awareness/attention/observation being pointed to do not belong to a separate âmeâ, a separate âwitnessâ.
The problem with only focussing on awareness - and neglecting to explore the nature of thought and its limitations, or the contents of consciousness, etc - is that one may begin to believe oneself to be a master of awareness. This happens only too frequently in spiritual circles. People can become convinced of their own understanding of awareness, or their own insights, and dialogue ends. They know and you can only receive the blessing of their clarity.
So there is the danger of making awareness and attention into a kind of power-trip, a hierarchy of the aware and the unaware, the illumined and the ignorant, the teacher and the student. This becomes stale and intractable, just as the endless enquiry into the nature of thought can become stale and intractable. But just because this is a danger ought not to put us off from finding out experimentally in daily life what awareness and observation are. This would be to throw the baby out with the bath water.
Ultimately, yes it is an entirely, personal experiment. To walk the talk. Our mind is our laboratory. We are alone.
It is invaluable nonetheless to have access to a safe place where we can run the design of our individual experiments by others engaged in the investigation of the same problem. To be alone, together.
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From my experimentation, I see that both pursuing thought or trying to end thought makes the mind dull.
Seeing is action, doing. In that there is energy. Life is action. Seeing is action. It is not awareness OF something. It is just seeing and in it there is energy and action. It is not a practice
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That would seem to be so but is it? Is there such a thing as âaloneâ or is that the sensation of the frightened brain/mind that in its ignorance has created its own false, limited , divided reality.
âYou are the worldâ⌠how could âyouâ ever be alone?
Having confidence in my thinking means Iâm not choicelessly aware of my thinking, but biased, assuming my thinking is adequate or accurate. So I must be as skeptical of my thinking as I am of anyone elseâs thinking.
I, as identified thought, cannot be aware.
Yes, and awareness of thought is proof of this.
Seeing is action, doing. In that there is energy. Life is action. Seeing is action.
Yes, but the problem I have with calling life âactionâ is that it implies an actor, an agent of execution, and the action youâre referring to is the action of the bodyâs intelligence or the intelligence K spoke of, which the psychologically conditioned brain is not in contact with.
K said âthe seeing is the doingâ, for instance, and by that he meant that action that is not reaction is intelligence, and the bodyâs intelligence and psychological reaction are the only kinds of action we are familiar with.
Dan, we donât have access to each otherâs consciousness, do we? It is in that sense, we are alone surely. I can only imagine what is going on in your head, I canât live it. Nor can you in mine. We are indeed islands unto ourselves.
Regarding, Krishnamurtiâs âYou are the worldâ statement. I realize it is commonly interpreted to mean that you and I are one, but I think that interpretation is an oversimplification. I take it to mean that individual human conditioning is created and continually updated by a collective stream of conditioning. It is that sense, yes, we are all the same. The particular way we are conditioned is unique but that conditioning has been sourced from a single collective repository of conditioning. A collective stream of consciousness is what Krishnamurti terms it in his more esoteric conversations.
As long as we have a sense of an observer, though, the reality is that we are alone. We carve out our piece of the collective conditioning and live entirely within that isolated sphere. In fact we are so alone according to K that we are incapable of relationship of any sort. Our view of another person is entirely an image in our minds, composed of our conditioning. We have no real contact with another. We are that isolated. That alone. As long as there is sense of a separate observer, a conditioned interpreter, we are cut off from the rest of the world even though it feels otherwise.
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I donât see skepticism as being any different. Not in a radical sense. Not unless it is turned on oneself. Like a phoenix reborn from ashes. There is still an evaluator present. Skepticism must also be put on the chopping block. In the end, we are all believers, theorists.
I donât know what could trigger the kind of insight K is saying is possible but if we are to take him at his word, he did say the core of his teachings could be summed up in the phrases âthe observer is the observedâ and âtruth is a pathless landâ. Which rules out any positive course of action we can conceivably come up with.
Who/what does the chopping?
In the end, we are all believers.
Belief is all we know, and though we know whatâs wrong with it, how dishonest it is, we canât help but move from one belief to another because we donât know what else to do.
I donât know what could trigger the kind of insight K is saying is possible but if we are to take him at his word, he did say the core of his teachings could be summed up in the phrases âthe observer is the observedâ and âtruth is a pathless landâ. Which rules out any positive course of action we can conceivably come up with.
Yes, but if one doesnât try everything and fail, how would one know?