In this excerpt, is Krishnamurti saying that awareness dispels inattention or that awareness and inattention can be happening simultaneously? And is awareness the same thing as attention? Or does awareness bring about attention?
That is, can there be complete attention to the fact of thought or is there no (conditioned) thought persisting when there is attention? It isn’t clear.
K is pointing at the mechanism of discrimination - and its relation to silence/emptiness
What do you mean by fact?
Huh? Don’t see what this has to do with the original question regarding simultaneity.
Factual. Actually occurring.
Thought exists, no? Thought itself- when it is happening - surely is real, even if its content is interpretive, ergo the fact of thought. Thought is no different that anything else that is actually occurring at any given moment.
In the passage referred to, K appears to be emphasizing that awareness is the ability to remain with the real, whether it be thought, inattention or whatever, rather than the non-real, the ideal of attention.
K: And in the state of inattention action has to go on, I have to meet a friend, I am bored with that, there action has to happen.
And then he proposes that that awareness would do away with inattention. By inattention I assume he means being identified with the movement of thought, of conditioning.
At the moment of action, if I am aware, inattention is not.
What can be confusing perhaps is that on the one hand he seems to be saying we should forget about attention, stay with the fact of inattention, and in so doing awareness will naturally kick in and consciousness will be affected (inattention will be no longer ).
I guess in the end he is saying the usual “try, try but don’t try” (active inaction); that the groundwork has to be laid in the mind to allow awareness to seamlessly kick in - and we are all on our own figuring out what that means in actuality. My take is that that groundwork has something to do with being totally discontented, with total being the operative word here in order to distinguish discontent in meaning from misery, despair, self-pity etc. On the contrary, total discontent is freedom cause it means you have realized the folly of demanding things be contrary to their nature, like conditioned thought for example.
The simultaneity of 2 distinct processes is only meaningful if I hold those distinctions as fundamental. Choiceless awareness cannot allow for discrimination. In this case between attention and inattention. For there to be attention, there cannot be distinction - and definitely not intention. Discrimination, comparison, and intention being the movement of thought.
Clarity arises when we are free of presuppositions.
Once we name what is happening, we have called upon our conditioning and moved away from what is - which is the opposite of what is.
We don’t know what is factual.
We are in a relation with what is that provokes certain patterns - these patterns are difficult to distinguish because we are enmeshed in them.
Thought is a word that points to something known. The known is what upholds me and my relation to my world.