Why ‘if’?
To be aware of precisely what one is feeling, thinking, sensing, one cannot be aware tomorrow, one cannot be aware yesterday.
There is passive awareness literally only in the present.
And only then can what we are - rather than what we think we are - begin to tell us its story.
Because it’s all metaphors as far as the I can see.
James, I think we’re speaking from very different points of view. From your pov what you say makes good sense and what I say doesn’t.
From my pov, there is no thing (mental, physical, whatever) that is not a metaphor (pointer, concept, symbol, image, whatever). And taking metaphors literally doesn’t make sense, it’s like mistaking the finger for the moon.
The implication is that you know “exactly what you are”. Do you? Or is your story, “I Left the Past to Live in the Present”?
I think what he’s saying is that we’re always telling our story to ourselves, and if we’re not following it, we’re playing it out unconsciously.
Not if ‘it’ happens in the present. Outside of time.
A path is a blueprint for a journey through time to a future ideal. Hence it necessitates an abstraction, an unconscious, mental projection super-imposed on the present. It is entirely possible (and customary) for us to take an idea - such as that of being nothing - and turn into a prescription for action. No one is disputing that. But that is on us. What we are considering here is what it would mean not to do that or to be consciously aware of that movement.
Makes sense.
Thanks. I understand your pov, though mine is quite different.
Guess I am more concerned with the significance of opinions rather than just their content, the latter being constantly in flux. And, given the degree of conflict in ourselves, in this forum and in society at large, this content is not something to be trusted, surely.
Your statement seems to deny the whole of nature. Is this your intention?
There is a pheasant sitting in a tree across from my window - I can only see its silhouette because it is dark outside; but it is really there, sleeping.
Is that bird, that animal, a symbol? Is the tree it is sitting on a symbol? Is the moon shining on its feathers a symbol?
The words I am using to communicate this perception can be made into symbols, but they are not the thing perceived - right?
The word, the concept, the symbol, is not the actual thing: the word or concept ‘pheasant’, is not the actual living creature sleeping across from me in the darkness of night.
I respect that.
………
Sorry - I missed this. No, I wasn’t implying that I know everything there is to know about myself (!). I was only pointing out what seems to be so obvious:
if I want to learn about something that I do not know, then I do not start by telling it what it is. Right? I start by listening, looking, observing - being passively watchful. If you’ve ever spent time in nature, or with animals, you will have done this.
Oneself is the nature, oneself is the animal.
(I like your story about the pheasant, I could see it!)
It’s late here, I’m getting sleepy and I need some time to think about this. More soon!
Identification,
“So, we are saying something entirely different, which is, “The observer is the observed”. Let me go into it a little more. I observe the tree but I am not the tree – thank god! That would be too stupid to say, “I am the tree”, or “I have identified myself with the tree”, and so on and so on. All this process of identification is still the observer trying to be something, or become something. So, we have to enquire into: “What is the observer, who is the observer?” The observer is the result of all the past knowledge.”
K: Ojai, 1st Public Question & Answer Meeting, 6 May 1980
Tolerance is the civilized acceptance of division. There is only one truth.
Yes, I follow this and agree with this.
But I didn’t mean an identification (if this is what you were implying) with nature or the animal - I was merely making an analogy: the relationship that one can have with nature (with trees, plants, insects, birds, squirrels, etc) is analogous to the ‘relationship’ (as it were) that one can have with oneself.
That is, I don’t ‘tell’ the wild animal how it should behave or what it should be - I watch it, passively, and let it ‘tell’ me about itself, about what it is. If one has a domesticated pet, then it will show its needs if one is patient with it; it will ‘tell’ me what is going on in its world.
Similarly, if one can look at oneself (one’s mind) in the same way, with passive watchfulness (without theories, without the ‘observer’ telling the mind what it should be, or how it should behave, etc), then the very movement of the mind ‘tells’ its story without my having to do anything about it.
There is no identification here, only a passive alertness. That’s what I meant.
Ok, here’s another way of putting it (or another story if you will):
Thinking, thought, exists in a less developed form in almost all animals (in mammals there is evidence of a neocortex from at least 200 million years ago), but it has evolved in humans to an especially high degree. This enables us to draw inferences and abstractions from our perceptions: to help us plan, think ahead, learn from the past.
Thinking is the capacity to create abstract images of phenomenal objects, which can be held in memory and projected into the future.
To be clear: these images are no more, no less, than abstractions drawn from concrete perceptual experience.
Now, in his book Homo Deus (you might have heard of it?) the historian Yuval Noah Harari argues that around 70,000 years ago a cognitive revolution took place in homo sapiens (partly related to ongoing developments in the brain and its neocortex, partly due to a changing environment). This apparently led to the development of agriculture (around 12 thousand years ago).
Yet the inability to store thoughts, ideas or symbols in anything other than an individual human’s brain severely restricted the power this cognitive revolution had unleashed - until, that is, Sumerians invented writing (around 5000 years ago).
Harari argues that this new technology (of writing)
habituated people to [experience] reality through the mediation of abstract symbols.
Because of this power the new priestly elites began to see
anything written on a piece of paper [as] at least as real as trees, oxen and human beings.
This is a habit we continue to be nurtured in and by to this day, through our educational conditioning. That is, we are educated to believe that our thoughts are concrete realities like the objects to which they were originally supposed to refer - so we create intersubjective fictions (like religions and nations), as though they stood independently of our thinking about them.
However, the image, the symbol, the concept, remain what they always were: forever incomplete and fragmentary representations of the ever active (sense-perceiving) present.
So the concept or image of a pheasant is not the actual living thing ‘out there’ (to be perceived). The symbol is not the real. The word is not the thing.
Refracted uniquely through the mind of each of the gazillion mind-ful entities in existence.
‘Nature’ too is, wait for it, wait for it … a story! 
Easy to see when you focus on the word or idea of ‘nature.’ But what about nature itself, that which the word nature points to? The pheasant in the tree, not the description of it, but the thing-in-itself. How is it also a story? Or isn’t it?
Finally, we agree about something!
Is there “the thing?” In what way?
Maybe, to aid in my reply, you could attempt to respond a little more explicitly to the detail of my post? For instance, where I wrote
what are your reasons for rejecting this (if you reject it)? Do you not see that
?