Absolutely so. And it’s astounding when this listening occurs. What brings it about, I have no idea. As long as there’s a motive present, it’s absent. I wanted to add…not just astounding, but sacred…holy…probably the holiest of the holy…the most sacred.
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If there is “Psychological time” as in the idea of (or desire for) a futur outcome (need for deliverance, desire for conclusion/understanding) then there is no union with what is, there is no listening, no inquiry - time has robbed us of clarity.
There’s no inquiry without motive, is there? I’m suffering, so I inquire in order to understand or be free of it (in the future).
Yes. It may be the only part of human relationship that has no cause. Even though we have spent thousands of years cultivating our best behaviour by practising all sorts of techniques and following advice from the strangest of quarters, with one look we can see the sheer absurdity of those efforts. So this has been our whole dialogue: one look where we both see exactly the same thing. Chronologically, it takes time to look, to make sure we are both talking about the same things, not misunderstanding one another. Time as thought is useful then; it is a practical necessity. But that is the extent of its usefulness. It has no other role to play. Psychologically, we haven’t moved one step away. Our first step, which was to enter this room, is also our last.
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Hello @Dominic
I sincerely appreciate your comments and your extraordinary discernment. Thank you.
If you like, can you discuss in more detail the correlation between the selves, K and quantum physics? I can seem to connect it since the selves are an illusion.
Very well stated @anon78228991!
I read the newsletter with a small posting of your statements, the self made an image of you, the desire arose to meet and move with you and my action brings me here. Hello 
(I did not consider your postings before but as I read now they are sincerely profound!)
This thread seemed like the one to bring this up. I would like to hear others views and especially experience with this: ‘fear of madness’, Dominic mentioned it in passing in another thread I believe and I have come up against it: The fear of going mad. The brain has found security in the "patterns’ it has formed, its conditioning, its limited functioning. In ‘meditation’ or insight into these patterns that form the ‘me’ , the question can arise, what if they are ‘let go’, what would happen? What would take their place? What would I be? …Madness? I posted somewhere that John Raica told me that K. had told a friend something to the effect that if you ‘touch that other, you must take root in it or you will come apart…’ that makes sense. For me the fear was like a ‘Dragon at the gate’…very, very scary. Anyone?
The big problem as you say is this huge fear. The fear of not being normal again. If my vision and understanding of reality is suddenly turned completely upside down, this would be madness in relation to normality.
I think there is no good reason to worry: awakening or psychological death via insight is not like taking drugs - its not something you can choose to do. Your psyche must be in a state of calm silence because it is ripe and ready, and even then there is no guarantee that some kind of altered state will occur
Drugs - like LSD, on the other hand force the fragile, tense psyche into places it is not ready to see - which due to fear and rigidity, is likely to leave a traumatic trace.
And how are you coming to this place of fear where you are under the impression that you are on the cusp of falling into something weird? Through thought or through non-thought?
I don’t recall the ‘how’… just through ‘going deeper’ and then, there it was. The ‘wall’? And on the other side, what? Many years ago I had a few experiences with pure lysergic acid and there was no negativity in those ‘trips’, just a realization of the potentials of the brain that were not normally functioning. I remember after one of them saying to myself, that I would not forget what I had seen…people ‘acting’ as themselves. I watched them and wanted to applaud how well they did it. My ‘guide’ thankfully stopped me. And I did forget the feeling of it all of course. But what is one to ‘do’ when this fear arises? It says “don’t go there”. Is it just the brain’s reluctance to move out of its ‘groove’? The ages old groove of the self’?
Hello @DanMcD, @macdougdoug
Sharing stories is a nice way to meet with others. 
My stories are purely experiences with an experiencer.
I can share a story from this petty little Self that has experienced many moments of what I would point to as fear-the manifestations of many thoughts. Some time in the past during my first isolated/silent meditation (Vipassana) retreat after a couple of days of no reading, talking, writing, etc., with observing whatever arises and after some time it was deeply disturbing for the judgemental Self. All the deep unconscious thoughts, memories, knowledge, etc., came up like a flood and no escape. It rattled the Self and it just wanted to run. After sometime of staying and observing the Self it came to see the patterns of thoughts, the cycles of thoughts, the impermanence of the thoughts, the reactions to thought, etc. Then the Self figured out that whatever arises and whatever thought conjures you see it as only and simply as a thought and nothing else. And the moment the Self attaches itself to thought it would manifest all kinds of realities with feelings, thoughts, fears, pains, plans, etc. This realization was a bit profound that at some time later, I was in temple during a different meditation retreat and I was alone in the dark with what looked like a female ghost but the Self simply looked and no thoughts arose it was just seeing.
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Don’t feed it. Just accept the fear as just more movement of the self - as such it will dissapear - don’t give it any importance by judging yourself. And of course, don’t add a third head to your shoulders by getting upset about judging your fear. (easier said than done - habit is strong)
If you can remain calm in a storm (not add to the noise) that would be more powerful than a monk falling asleep in zazen.
The madness is now - suffering from our own fear of some imagined futur “awakening” - deluded snakes biting their non-existant tails. The problem is the reaction to my own beliefs - but to escape that one must at least think it important enough to sit down calmly everyday.
Of course, by sitting down calmly everyday, nothing spectacular will happen at all.
For there to be any altered states of mind, the psyche must be really focussed on self questioning and in self observation (like Conditioned mentions above) all day long for days at a time.
You’d be dead…in response to the part in bold. There would be no ‘you’…no self. It’s likely fear of death…fear of losing everything, which we equate to fear of madness. Perhaps we’d even prefer madness to the loss of everything.Fear of the unknown is actually fear of the known, because we can’t know the unknown. We can only fear the known, I think K said.
We can easily meet and move in a dialogue together. Do you have a question? If not, we could consider the structure of image-making in relationship.
Thank you, sounds good . Yes, image-making in relationships. I am not sure how you want to move with this but I’ll give it a shot in this direction.
I read the newsletter, I gave it my total attention and nothing else the mind was not distracted at the time. Then some time later the present was not appealing and then thought arouse something like “those statements are straightforward and alive”. And the entire circus began. Then I saw the old desire and emotional reactions of wanting to connect with other like minded people arose. Then a while later, I conjured the newsletter from memory, I went back to re-read it, I saw your name, and I tried to remember if I read any of your postings. Then the desire to read more of your statements and meet you arose. The more I read, I accumulated thoughts of your statement and added to the landscape of the image.
Is this not the fear of being nothing? Self cannot let go or surrender since what it is identified with, it in fact is, just as it is the sacrificer of that. So this is about seeing what I am, and what all pattern is built of, which is fear. All my clinging, all my identification is fear, and the end of fear is death.
Is it possible to look at the thing labelled fear, without the word? which is a later addition. If at the very outset it is said there is sensory sensation, then recording, prior to the formation of memory, is it there in the sensation and recording that attention must focus?
We would like a specific operation to carry out, is this because we would like to be involved in the process, take some credit for slaying the dragon? Or just from our habitual paradigm of subject applying force to object? If I concentrate on these details (or if I visualise this concept, or repeat these words - as they do in other traditions).
But as you say, in this case the subject is the object. Beliefs and emotions acting upon each other will participate in their own transformation, but the underlying function of the self will still remain, and so probably its hold on our behaviour and comprehension.
We are told that freedom comes from the insight of seeing the whole movement of the self in this moment, in its entirety. Fear and pain dissapear (and in this way is seen for what it is) when identity is not considered to be sufficient. The King falls when his authority is called into question. By not reacting to my own fears and conclusions, they lose their power.
Meanwhile, we take time to calmly observe the bubbling up of all that is perceived and its passing away - thus we see its movement without reifying its content. No focus, no effort, no thing.
Maybe start with smaller stuff (its all connected - or one as they say) whatever comes up next, is it labelled ? is the label taken to be truth? Is this process inevitable?
PS - Sorry I’m making contradictory statements - basically its not up to me to decide what to focus on, just accept whatever comes up and see if I must be its slave. (And if I must be a slave, this too must be accepted)
PPS- In the end there must be the “give up” - as the self focussing on itself is also the movement of self. (Its interpretation of the outside world also being itself)
Yes, focus attention is the wrong expression, as that implies a motive which is not what I meant to convey. If I have a motive for learning, that won’t be learning, but I can learn about motive. And if ordinarily I can spend a whole day not seeing anything, I can spend a moment seeing, so learning is not an issue as such.
I understand what you’re saying, and this does come across in what you say generally, though it can be a bit like pay no attention to that man over there cutting off people’s heads, he’s just a chronic attention seeker - psyche, always the drama queen! sort of thing - whereas I feel we need to learn what this actually is, as we cannot just leave it to play itself out.
Yes, for me it is the same thing, as thought as a response to memory being is now, just as recording is, just as sensation is. What I am looking at here is where is the thing called fear, before the word, before the memory. Is it there in the recording, and what is that, or is it there in sensation, and what really is sensation given the conditioned brain’s hand in everything. Is what is called fear in sensation, or is what is called sensation in fear. When I sit and there is just the fact of sensation, and there is simply the fact of colour, is there fear in colour, or is colour in fear. That is, how deep does conditioning go, and how far back does what is called fear go?
‘I hope you have clarity. Clarity means there is no centre from which you are functioning, no centre put together by thought as the ‘me’, ‘mine’, ‘they’ and ‘we’. Where there is a centre, there must be circumference, and where there is a circumference there is resistance, there is division and that is one of the fundamental ‘causes’ of fear. So, when we consider fear, we’re considering the whole movement of thought, which breeds fear. And clarity is possible only when thought is completely in abeyance, that is, when thought has its right place, which is to act in the field of knowledge and not enter into any other field. (…) Without clarity skill becomes a most destructive thing in life, which is what is happening in the world. (…) When there is that clarity, skill never becomes mechanical, because whatever the skill may be, it is functioning, acting from that clarity that is born out of compassion.’ (From the PT in Saanen, 14th July, 1977).
So, no centre, thought having its right place and compassion, that is, no place for fear to be.
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Yes, where there is a centre, there is a circumference, snd that circumference is as the centre.
What is the idea of space self is identified with? From here to the farthest reach of space; is that the immeasurable or the limited. Is far or near anything but an idea the brain holds?
Krishnamurti has pointed out that mind, which is the immeasurable, which is space, is outside of the brain, and that the conditioned brain has no contact with, no relationship to that. He has pointed out that the space the brain knows is generated by thought as idea. So the space the brain experiences is itself.