Awareness

Kinfonet Discussion
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I do not know if you have ever tried to be completely aware without any choice, to be wholly perceptive without any borderline to attention. If one is so aware one can see that one is always running away from the things of which one is afraid, always escaping.

Public Talk 7 Paris, France | September 19, 1961

When I try to be completely aware I’m choosing to attempt it, as in practicing meditation. What I find with this attempt is that awareness of all the senses is accompanied by my stream of consciousness, the thoughts that arise constantly whether I’m aware of them or not.

These streaming thoughts are words, images, memories, sounds, whatever the brain draws from its content to keep the stream moving along. I’m aware of physical sensation, sound, sight, smell, temperature, etc., but it’s always accompanied by the content of my stream of consciousness, and these two different movements aren’t always coherent. In fact, the stream of consciousness seems to have less to do with the physical sensations than its compulsion to keep moving. The body’s response to actuality is nothing like thought’s response, the purpose of which seems to be distraction from and resistance to awareness.

The more aware I am of this distraction, resistance, and incoherence, the more I want to bring a stop to the stream of consciousness. It seems to have no other purpose than to continue as if it is as essential as breathing. But because it conveys little or no necessary information, it’s called the “monkey mind”.

As much as I want to lose my stream of consciousness, I have to admit my fear of not knowing who I am, of feeling lost without that knowledge. It doesn’t occur to me that it might be now that I am lost, clinging desperately to my stream of consciousness, my contents, to keep being who I think I am.

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Then whom is it occurring to?

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If you’ve ever been lost in a forest with no sense of which way to go, the “who” is a human being that is too unaccustomed with wilderness to know what to do; someone so unprepared for this sort of thing that they can only panic or pray or do something rather than nothing because its a matter of survival. But with false identity, it’s not a matter of actual survival, but the survival, the continuity, of false identity.

When the mechanical nature of false identity is seen for what it is, true identity is a human being’s relationship with actuality from moment to moment.

Our false identity is based on actuality plus our relentless stream of consciousness. We’re wasting our energy doing what we human beings seem to have been doing ever since we realized we could hypnotize ourselves.

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From the movie The Matrix, Cypher talking about his willingness to choose ignorance:

You know, I know this steak doesn’t exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize? Ignorance is bliss.

It’s quite easy to see the embracing of political and intellectual ignorance running rampant these days. It’s harder to see the sneakier and deeper embracing of the ignorance of self identity.

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Isn’t it just a matter of reciting and repeating the magic words and images constantly?

What if a brain’s streaming contents were switched with another brain’s contents, and both brains were suddenly streaming a foreign language and unfamiliar imagery, music, etc.?

Come to think of it, it might not matter because it’s really about the brain’s submission to the authority of streaming content, how ever familiar or alien it may be. Like listening to music all the time or having the radio or television on constantly, the brain seems to need a background for the foreground of identity.

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Radios and televisions can be turned off. Stream of consciousness background not. But let’s say you were able to turn it off, flip an internal stillness switch. What would you be, where does I go when the stream stops streaming?

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Yes. Unless the brain has any memory of being an infant beginning to learn to speak, it hasn’t a clue as to what awareness is without elements of its personal identity streaming in the background. For the conditioned brain, its identity is more important than anything else it’s aware of.

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This means there are 8+ billion people walking around thinking, believing, ‘knowing’ they are the most important being in the universe. 8+ billion viewpoint characters, heroes, leading men and women and children and even infants. Given this, it’s amazing we manage to do as well as we do as a species. We’re really skilled at designing our prisons and prison cells for optimum coziness.

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By “doing well” you mean our species hasn’t done as much harm and damage as we would have were it not for dumb luck and serendipity…and that assessment applies only to those of us who haven’t been killed, injured, or traumatized by the harm and damage we have done and continue to do. And this only applies to humans. What about the many species of plants, insects, animals, etc., that are rendered extinct or endangered by our way of living on this planet?

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I think we humans do remarkably well given the flawed brain and world we inherited. We’re like people who grew up in hate/fear/violence-driven families and cultures. I admire those who don’t simply keep the violence alive, but dare to question it.

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There’s no way of knowing how well or how poorly we’ve done “given the flawed brain and world we inherited” when so few of us are open to the possibility that there’s something fundamentally wrong with the way the human brain operates.

What’s more, we don’t know if there is any living human brain that has corrected itself. We assume Krishnamurti’s brain brought itself to order and was a light to itself, so we’ve made him our lighthouse…or one of our lighthouses.

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We believe the ‘fix’ is to learn the right way to think. We rarely entertain the notion thinking itself is inherently broken, it’s too unsettling and the fix is too jarring.

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It took me a long time to “get” what Krishnamurti was trying to convey to his audience, and I suspect it was because I was resisting what he was saying. The self-centered brain is not open to the possibility that there’s something profoundly wrong with being self-centered.

If “the fix” is self-knowledge, it seems that would mean the brain is expending less energy doing what it is conditioned to do, and more energy exposing it.

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What interests me is: Can the brain-mind be truly deeply open to the possibility? Or is the brain inherently limited to self-centeredness, is that how we’re built?

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We’re limited to self-centeredness by the way the brain is operating, and a crucial aspect of its operation is concealing the way its abuses thought, lest the center dissolve, relieving awareness of thought when it isn’t needed.

When the brain awakens to its need for self-knowledge, it’s need to now how it maintains its illusions, the way “we’re built” is exposed, and that’s the end of if.

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This is theory for the likes of us unenlighteneds. As long as that is utterly clear, all is good. But when theory is taken for truth, the confusion begins.

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Yes. It should go without saying that I’m assuming that when there’s awareness of the means by which the brain maintains its illusions, the jig is up, it’s game over, etc.

I am also assuming that the brain is not aware of how it maintains its illusions because it is not ready to be done with illusions; not ready to live with actuality because that would be abandonment of everything it knows and presumes to know.

What is a brain that knows nothing more than what it needs to survive in the environment it is familiar with? What does the brain do when its environment is not as familiar as it seemed, and survival isn’t as simple as it seemed to be? What does the brain do when everything it depended on is either imagined, or at best, questionable?

If the brain must be a light to itself, it must be capable of being completely silent and empty, unwilling to do anything, because everything it has done up to now is nothing new.

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I was talking to myself too. I love theory, actuality often spooks or bores me. I know this nurtures delusion, but I tell myself I can have it all: the fantasy and the truth.

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Why can’t a selfless brain enjoy fantasy?

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I doubt the true truth (IT) and the fantastical truth are compatible. But maybe they are!