Awareness without the ability to discriminate between the various sensations occurring simultaneously is worse than being unconscious. For instance, I’m aware of the sound of birds, but if I can’t discern the difference between the calls of different birds, the variation of tone, volume, complexity, etc., it’s the dullest kind of awareness and probably more harmful than helpful.
Looks like I cannot post more than 2 replies as a newbie per day.
I would say that where there is intention there is no choiceless observation. A willed observation is no observation at all.
You are conflating the faculty of awareness with the response of thought in this reply. Thought discerns, awareness - as used in Krishnamurti-sense, with the modifier ‘choiceless’ - does not.
But that wasn’t implied at all.
I think it’s a bit tricky. Sometimes choiceless awareness is depicted as just aware-ing without doing anything beyond like discerning, understanding. interpreting. Other times, like in this quote from Wikipedia (so take with grain of salt), awareness seems to go beyond just aware-ing:
… an individual who perceives a given situation in an unbiased manner, without distortion, and therefore with complete awareness, will immediately, naturally, act according to this awareness – the action will be the manifestation and result of this awareness …
No, it was stated. You said that choiceless awareness is without discrimination.
Yes, the finer energy, the more potent energy is the energy that does not disturb or attempt to change ‘what is’. It ‘sees’ what is and is always ‘free’ of what is. That is what is being labeled, choice less aware ness.
It’s not at the command of the coarser energy of thought.
Aren’t we all choicelessly aware all the time? Awareness, which aisi precedes and enables sensation and perception and thought, is always ‘turned on’ and doing its thing. It doesn’t need (or pay attention to) our intentions, whatever they might be. It just awares whatever it happens to aware, all on its own.
???
Note that I’m talking about low-level awareness here, the awareness that sees the shapes of these words, not a higher-level awareness that interprets the words or pays attention to some words more than others. This low-level awareness is what simply awares whatever it happens to aware, always choicelessly. It’s like a beam of light in a dark room, illuminates without choice.
It isn’t part of what-is?
By discrimination I meant ‘I like this, I don’t want this, this goes against my ideal so not acceptable etc. etc.‘
Don’t think it is helpful to categorise as low level and high level awareness. Either one is aware or one is not.
Low and high level awareness is an attempt to point to two meanings of awareness:
The low level awareness of the Direct Path and Advaita.
The higher level awareness-cognition of Krishnamurti.
But never mind, it’s not important, not worth the time or energy to discuss.
Can you explain something about Advaita in few words? As I don’t know.
If possible.
Advaita means not two. It is a strongly nondual view of reality. It holds that the world (objects and events) is an illusion, that brahman is the only true reality, and that you are brahman. Brahman is unknowable, unseeable, ineffable. We know it is real from the words of the scriptures: Upanishads, Bhagavad Gita, Brahma sutras.
I think somehow that ‘what is’ is always undivided. “All is one” as it’s said. But I was thinking of a different ‘materiality’. That this awareness that seems to be ‘in’ and ‘around’ everything’ is a ‘finer’ energy maybe in the same way that ‘intelligence’ can ‘read’ between the lines of thought. That without ‘awareness’ there would be no life. That awareness goes ‘hand in hand’ with creation. That in our case this awareness of ourselves, if it doesn’t discriminate, can affect thought by revealing the ‘false’, the ‘traps’, the 'conditioning?
For me it boils down to:
Can choiceless awareness – in the Krishnamurtian sense of choiceless all the way through, from beginning to end – happen, for/in me?
I ask the question, and I watch.
What happens? Can you say?
But is it understood that ‘you’ are not ‘doing’ the watching, but that you are being watched? No matter what.
I see things arising in my mind/consciousness: thoughts, memories, sounds and other sensory impressions. I see (hear) a voice judging and commenting on them and on the entire process. I feel the urge to stop watching, to go back to my happy(ish) little nobody world. And so on.
I feel that I am watching objects arise and fade out of my consciousness. I can quite easily see that these objects are not me, they are temporary arisings that pass through me (my consciousness). It is much (much!) more difficult to see and feel that the I ‘doing the watching’ is also a temporary arising. This rarely happens. The I seems real, as real as it gets.
You?
That’s funny. I’m dreaming away and taking care of some business. But now that you mention it, I feel that something else is called for. Some being ‘in the moment’. And I can see that that has taken place and I have no idea how to describe what hasn’t happened yet! Correcting some typing errors. Waiting for something brilliant to pop up. Guess I’d have to go back into past / memory for that 
So now welcoming the ‘silence’. Thanks.