What is disorder, @Teulada?
I am posing Teulada’s question about facts and opinions, and the different ideas we have about psychological and cosmological order/disorder, in my own words, to see how that affects our inquiry into the question.
Well that’s my point exactly. What is it? I believe for K it was psychological suffering and all that it implies (trying to escape from it, fear,attachment, the illusion of security etc.). But is it? Isn’t suffering present in all of creation? And because we are creatures with a psychological dimension, our suffering ends up being also psychological but still in the order of things. Too simplistic?
I am having trouble grasping this concept of non-psychological suffering.
What is that? Or maybe if its too difficult to explain, can we point at an example of non-psychological suffering?
The fundamental physical constants remain unchanged and these create the order, or are an expression of order.
And yes, chaos is the effect of order.
Yes, maybe an example, also offered by K if I remember correctly : gazelle being chased by a lion or other predator. There is fear, anguish and surely physical pain at the end, but is it psychological in nature? I doubt it.
Is psychological suffering “in the order of things” or is it a disorder that occurs only when there’s incoherent thought, the conflict of rational, practical thought infused with delusional thought?
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Are you saying that fear and anguish are not psychological? What do you mean by psychological ? - usually we mean mental and emotional states of mind.
No, i think it’s a good start
No, for K the psychological disorder (i.e.: trying to escape from it [without looking at it deeply], fear, attachment, illusion of security, etc.) is the cause of psychological suffering, not its synonym. I think it is important to understand this, for if there is no cause, there is no result.
If you ask whether psychological disorder leads to psychological suffering, I say yes. I think this is quite obvious.
Now, for many people most dissatisfactions are not seen as suffering, let alone that there is some psychological disorder in the perception of it, which causes it. So I spend my whole life trying to solve (escape from) that dissatisfaction (without looking at it deeply) with more or less success, feeling proud that I have been able to solve it and move on. But then I go to a doctor for a little pain in my back and he says: “You have such and such cancer and unfortunately it has spread all over your body, so you probably won’t live more than three or four weeks”. So I try to apply the old pattern that I’ve used all my life to escape from whatever dissatisfaction I’ve been faced with, and suddenly I realise that it doesn’t work. And not only that, but I also realise that in fact some of those dissatisfactions that I thought were resolved and that provided great energy to the “I” are actually still unresolved because it turns out that I still have some wounds stored in my mind that I wasn’t even aware of. And then arises this tremendous psychological pain (which is disorder) that I feel I am unable to escape from, producing despair, frustration, remorse, etc, which will inevitably be added to the actual physical pain of the illness and/or the treatment to cure/relieve that illness.
So, do I realise that I am always trying to escape the disorder, believing that I have achieved some kind of order, when in reality I am adding more disorder to the current disorder, and that eventually my usual tricks will be of no use to me because life itself will show me that I can no longer use any more tricks to escape dissatisfaction?
In short, on the one hand there is this psychological disorder from which I try to escape all the time by trickery, believing that I have achieved a certain order. And on the other side, the fact that at some point in my life I will realise that in reality I have been living all the time in complete disorder, which will bring me despair, frustration, violence against myself and others, remorse, and so on.
So, can we look deeply at the root of that disorder that causes suffering in oneself and others, and put aside any comparison of whether or not that disorder is similar to the ‘ordered’ chaos of the universe (which leads to nothing in observing the suffering caused by that disorder) without adding more disorder?
You asked whether that disorder was a factual reality or a subjective perception…
What do you think @Teulada ?
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Physical pain?
“To be aware that physical pain don’t touch the mind requires tremendous inward awareness” - K. Brokwood Park 1975, Public Talk 2.
A “tremendous inward awareness” that is not another trick’? A total self abandonment?
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No. It means physical pain without any projection of the self onto it; or in other words: being the pain without any identification of the self with it.
Would it follow: being the body / thought “without any identification of the self with it”?
The body has a tremendous pain, now can the mind be the pain without any identification with it? … Answer: “it requires a tremendous inner awareness”
Of course, only one can know if that “tremendous inner awareness” is yet another escape from disorder, or an actual fact… no one else.
[quote=“fraggle, post:55, topic:2241”]
Of course, only one can know if that “tremendous inner awareness” is yet another escape from disorder, or an actual fact… no one else.
[quote]
For K it seemed to be a fact: “I don’t mind what happens “. I think also his pointing out that the state of watching oneself without any judgement is arduous but necessary; to see oneself just as one is…and something may follow from that.
Cont.
But not if ‘motive’ has entered the picture… then it is just another desire to ‘change’ and the ‘watching’ becomes a means to an end…like you say deceiving oneself.
Yes!
Now, the question is: can I look without any motive, just look?
And we all know that the mental pattern of most of us will say “How can I look at dissatisfaction, at suffering, at mental disorder without any motive?” Because our minds have been educated to think that way. So most of us will only do it if someone assures us that we are going to get something in return at the end of the road. Which means that over and over again we fall into the same pattern and thus perpetuate disorder.
But it turns out that K (and some others) simply said: “Don’t accept what others may tell you about the end of the road, walk the road yourself and then you will discover for yourself whether or not that which is beyond any words trying to describe it exists.”
And we, who are lazy and always looking for rewards, decided to answer him (and those others) that “If there is no prior guarantee of what I’m going to find at the end of the road, I’m not even going to try.” So we chose to wander whether what he(they) said was true or not, without ever touching the possible beauty that their words might hide. And we started creating religions, external saviours, gurus, methods and all the rest of the blah, blah, blah, trying to find order within disorder.
That’s how this world, in spite of K (and those others) goes on, century after century, with its supposed order that is nothing but more and more disorder… because as I said before, we are lazy, and we will never do anything “arduous but necessary” if we are not sure that there will be a reward at the end of the road.
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I don’t know if I can “look deeply at the root of that disorder” without digging it up, so I look closely at what’s on the surface.
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One cannot spend a lifetime “looking closely at what is on the surface” and making all sorts of guesses about what lies beneath the surface. It is said that it only takes a few hours to look at the surface, and an eternity to look at what lies beneath the surface.
The human being is lazy by nature, and always expects some reward for everything he does; rejecting anyone who says that there is no reward at all… for what reward can there be for a self that has been torn to pieces?
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