I’ll let this simmer til tomorrow - but I’m wondering if this is like the argument between hinayana and mahayana - between bodhissatvas and whatever the geezers are called that put the teaching they hear into practise.
When you feel physical pain the body-mind reacts quickly and unswervingly: Make / it / go / away! That’s instinctual, reflexes sweep your hand away from the lit burner you just touched before you even know you touched it. Alas, these reflexes may be the wrong way for dealing effectively with psychological pain. At times staying with the pain is the appropriate way to be free from it. If pain is pain, staying with psychological pain goes against millions of years of conditioning!
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That’s why I guess that K is able to ‘do’ this because he has no ‘self’ that feels threatened, that needs to be defended, that needs to be supported and reinforced…’We on the other hand do have a self, it is our Achilles heel. I am all for ‘staying with’ emotions (negative ones?) to get rid of them but not fool myself that when the ‘horse’ really kicks that this doesn’t all go right out the window (to mix metaphors).
The dissolution of the self (freedom from the known) is what is critical.
Is there anything ‘known-er’ to us than our self?
My answer to your question “Can the mind be totally aware of total conflict?”, is that your question is as speculative as my question is hypothetical. Obviously, the mind is not totally aware of total conflict, so we don’t know if it can be. K assures us that the mind can be totally aware of total conflict, and we believe it because we don’t want to be totally hopeless.
The Buddha is supposed to have said that there is an end to suffering. He may have been a fraud, he may have been misquoted, but he made a proposition (if you like to put it that way).
It would be speculative of me to wonder about the mind of someone in whom all psychological suffering has ended; but it is an entirely reasonable question for one to ask ‘can suffering end?’ - isn’t it?
Similarly, K has proposed that it is possible for the mind to meet and remain with sorrow (or envy or conflict, etc) completely, and for that feeling-state to undergo a transformation (in that ‘meeting’).
Isn’t it then a reasonable question to ask whether this is actually possible for oneself (and another)?
Unless one has built a wall against all such investigation, saying it is ‘impossible’ - as it seems you are doing here? - there is nothing speculative about testing out whether one can ‘remain with’ a feeling or not.
K maybe put things in terms of the impossible; but there is nothing impossible about remaining for a minute with a feeling and finding out what takes place.
When I am in the throes of, jealousy in this case, I am jealousy. I recognize the sickening feeling of it, the diminishment etc. Then I remember to ‘stay with’ it and now I am no longer the ‘jealousy’, no longer ‘identified’ with it…now I am in relation to it as the ‘observer’ ‘staying with it’. The dynamic changes. I am no longer jealous, the staying with has transformed the jealousy. It can now be seen as in the words of Shri Anirvan: “ an emotion is a misplaced sensation”.
I’m not sure what you are saying here Dan? We are all doing our best to write clearly, but sometimes the meaning isn’t transparent?
As far as I have understood K’s proposal, it is not a matter of remaining with a feeling so as to “get rid of it”. One remains with the feeling because that is what is. There is no choice in it.
For sure, there are some feeling-states that are so overwhelming that it may be impossible to remain with them for very long - it may be that in an extreme crisis (such as deep loss, grief) the body and brain can only stay with that feeling-state for a few minutes at a time.
But there’s no reason why, ipso facto, it is impossible to stay with such feeling-states. The main reason why we don’t do so generally is simply because of habit, tradition, and the brain’s centuries old resistance to meeting psychological pain (as Rick was saying).
The self is the suffering to use a Buddhist adage. So in meeting psychological suffering (or conflict, jealousy, envy, etc) ‘head on’ we are meeting the self in its unvarnished immediacy.
Of course. I’m not arguing otherwise. I’m saying that because we’re confused and conflicted, all we have are inklings that give us hope, when what we need is for the incessant thought that creates and sustains the confusion and conflict to cease and desist.
But having inklings and hoping are not the limit of what we can do. We can “meet and remain with sorrow (or envy or conflict, etc)”.
Perhaps? But doesn’t this sound a little bit like what K was warning against in the OP?
I’m not rejecting what you are saying (I don’t have the expertise to do so), but I am just imagining what K might say if he were listening and participating in this conversation. Wouldn’t he question what we are saying?
So, for instance, in the OP K says
Is there a part of the mind that says, ‘I am aware that I am totally in conflict’? Or is there a part of me watching conflict? Or is there a part of me wishing to be free of conflict? Which means, is there any fragment which says, ‘I am not in conflict’? Or is there any fragment which separates itself from the totality of conflict? … is there a fragment, a little part, which skips away and says, ‘Yes, I know, I am aware I am in conflict. I am not in conflict, but I know.’
Doesn’t this sound a bit like the ‘observer’ you are talking about, which is slightly separated off from the jealousy?
My question would be whether one can remain with complete attention in the state you start out by describing (where you say):
and to find out whether one can remain in that state without bringing in recognition, remembrance, associations of any kind - including the notion that ‘one must remain with jealousy’.
Do you see what I mean?
I’m not saying I can do it or have done it - but that is what I think K is pointing to.
Yes - I would put it: We can meet the confusion directly in its feeling-state, rather than through the incessant thoughts that created and sustain the confusion.
I think something that is missing here is K bringing in the idea that awareness is ‘caring’. To care for what is happening in ourself even the violence in oneself. Caring awareness as ‘observer’? Caring not judging?
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Yes. I think that adds another dimension to the discussion. Meeting these intimate feeling-states is not just an act of attention, it is also an act of love, care.
K often said that we must care about sorrow (etc) like we would care about a child or a young plant that needs great care.
But would it be correct to call that care and attention an ‘observer’? Wouldn’t it be more correct to say that it is a form of sensitivity, a form of intelligence (where such caring attention takes place)?
There is no ‘me’ doing the caring or the attending - it is taking place (if it is taking place) because that is the nature of attention?
In the caring of awareness, the ‘observer’ is the awareness itself, it is not the observer as ‘I’ or self. It is a ‘state of observation’.
Always present but rarely heeded?
A ‘state of observation’ sounds better to me (an ‘observer’ has connotations of self, or ‘Self’ with a capital S) - but it is the caring that is the important thing.
Okay another killer question to eliminate the cherry pickers ! (though my confidence in the effectiveness of killer questions has been somewhat undermined) :
Can a confused person (like me say), decide to be aware of myself (when angry or sad etc), and for there not to be division in said awareness?
By which I mean : in the noticing of the anger will there not be a sense of a non angry me observing.? In the “awareness” will there not be the known, motivation or effort for example, troubling said awareness?
“Is your mind totally aware of conflict? Or is it just words? Stick to one thing. Is my mind totally aware that it is in conflict? Or is there a part of the mind that says, ‘I am aware that I am totally in conflict’? Or is there a part of me watching conflict? Or is there a part of me wishing to be free of conflict? Which means, is there any fragment which says, ‘I am not in conflict’? Or is there any fragment which separates itself from the totality of conflict?” (K in OP above)
I think K once said, if you are confused, don’t do anything. I think he meant mentally. Activity of mind will not know inactivity. Thought will not know sleep or silence. It is not outcome of decision as it is natural. Sleep is natural. You cannot decide to go to sleep or for your heart to start or stop beating. Awareness is something natural but thought or ego or thinker is conditioning, is unnatural. So we don’t have to do anything to be choicelessly aware. If we see what it means to not do anything mentally perhaps that helps.
I think one conditioning we have is we mistake thinking with action. Thinking to me is reaction, paralysis. Learning, doing happens.
Them’s most excellent advice - let not confusion be your guide (Amen)
Probably because “house is not in order” ie. wrong tool being used in wrong circumstance - thought probably being used to bung up holes in its own thinking - psycho tail biting.
I think that’s right. If one is confused (i.e. one is aware that one is confused), then K would say simply: ‘be confused’ - don’t add anything to that state of confusion by analysing it, thinking about it, ‘being aware of it’ (in the sense of trying to be aware of it). Be confused. Don’t do anything mentally about it at all (as Adeen says).
This is non-action with respect to confusion; which is paradoxically true action.
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- what is a fragment and what is darkness ?
The observer/seer is a fragment.
The observed/seen is a fragment
The envy-er and the envy are fragments in the mind.
The mind is made up of fragments, which are not different from each other.
In a fragmented mind, there is this belief that one fragment can be made whole by another fragment…
This belief is the darkness in the mind, and it is self maintained by the futile effort of a fragment to improve it self … the envy-er is looking to improve the envy, which means: There is only the state of envy (whatever the mind does is (to move) from envy to envy).
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