Choiceless awareness

How can an image suffer? How can an image enjoy a good meal? Just questioning here.

Taking a look again at Tom’s example here, it seems pretty universal. Our human situation. There’s the ‘dependancy’ on another for my comfort, my companionship, my sex perhaps, my stimulation,etc. I’ve tried to get enough money to get by, have a decent place to live, have enough food…and now for whatever reasons, it’s all coming apart. And I want it to stay together. It is my security. And I fear what will happen when it breaks down. That seems to be the key right there, our achilles heel: fear of the unknown. I’ve found security in the known and I want to keep it. The ‘images’ of my being destitute, alone, miserable, lonely, etc., create ‘suffering’…not the fact, of any of those, but the image, of what it will be like ‘when’ those images become reality. But they are not reality. They are pictures, dreams of what ‘might’ be. And if they are intense enough can bring one to the point of suicide: kill the body and oneself rather than face the unknown. For me personally this is where K.'s teaching comes into the picture i.e. to understand rather than escape from the image-making machinery of the ‘self’, the ‘center’, the ‘I’…understand how, it, thought, creates a ‘future’ (time) in the mind where there is actually only the present.

How does this ‘understanding’ of the image making machinery act ? Does it eliminate fear and or anger?

Through experimentation and observation is for me the only way. A truly choiceless awareness sees the negative fearful projected images as well as the ‘positive’ pleasureful in the the same way, both as products of the image-making machinery. They both engender ‘time’. When the image arising from a disturbance is recognized and named ‘fear’ or ‘anger’, a movement of resistance is already set in motion to end it, substitute it, “eliminate” it…Is there a possibility to just ‘see’ it for what it is: a disturbance, without the ensuing thought/images that keep it going, that intensify it in an explosion of energy? If not the machinery will just continue to grind on…due to ignorance and a lack of understanding, will it not?

Such an understanding, in my view, aligns us to action for it’s own sake, for the inevitability of it; but without attachment either to the results of it or to the attitude itself, of ‘wanting to take action’. It leads to an ascetic spirit so to speak. Seeing IS the doing then. As for fear and anger, we win a distance in observation from them without creating the contradiction of a split off as the observer, or leaving a residue of guilt or self righteousness. In that process, as far as I see, the anger/fear complex will be compelled to exhaust itself without further accumulation.

So the end of ‘knowing’? Action out of seeing…seeing = doing? As opposed to action following thought/knowledge…which is conditioned action, which is always divided?

Could we say that this state of an awareness without choice or judgement or condemnation,etc., doesn’t ‘feed’ the flames of the disturbance, i.e. fear and anger…because the duality between the one who is frightened and his/her fear, or the duality between the one who is angry and his/her anger is not present? There is no resistance to what is taking place…there is 'no minding’? There is no one to mind!

As Max Greene would put it, there is then only the duality between the real and reality, wherein every bit of latter is caught in time. The illusion which is also a part of reality is discerned for what it is, the paradigm wherein the separate observer perpetuating the division is seen, understood and done with. There is a mastering of the situation which is gained through insight.

Yes

Are we putting ‘choiceless awareness’ on the ‘real’ or ‘truth’ side and everything else on the ‘reality’ side?

No, one is always the context of the other. When one is spoken of, the other is implied.

I admit that I did not grasp Max’s vision of things…would you Natarajan, if you can, expand a bit how this relates to our discussion here, and this duality between real and reality?

As far as I see, Max considered ‘choiceless awareness’ (or in his words,describing it as there is no ‘I’ in awareness) as a default state, he chose to speak from that standpoint always, not mentioning how one gets grounded in it.
There is the physical and there is awareness he said, corresponding with the reality and the real; until the reality of the physical slides into psychological/illusion through the means of thought. Memory and awareness is all that the organism needs to function sanely was his contention. And as I understand it, it is an ascetic way of living to not get attached to action which is often driven more or less by degrees of thought for the achievement of a desired result.

It is at this point where one is at the juncture of understanding that the forces at play in observation are the primal duality between matter/physical and awareness, or the matter and spirit, so to speak in religious or philosophical terms. The question of identity doesn’t arise as to which of the either we belong to, but rather there is a seeing/understanding of the interconnectedness of forces at play and therefore a deeper silence.

Very interesting question!

It seems that the main characteristic of thought is that it strives to acheive, to solve, to come to a conclusion about what it is considering. Not-knowing is not acceptable. If it can’t ‘know’ why we are here, it invents scenarios, gods, heavens, hells, speculations, etc. anything rather than “I don’t know and I can’t know.” Isn’t this what is meant by thought slipped from the practical, physical realm of survival into the psychological where it has no place? In the mind where there is no ‘time’, only the ever present, eternal Now, thought brought in the horizontal time of the practical: past, present, future. That set the stage for ‘becoming’. “I’m not enlightened yet but at some future time I will be if I work hard enough at acheiving it…” “I don’t ‘understand’ now but at some point I will…” Choiceless awareness is destabilizing in that it challenges the ‘order’ that thought as self has created by allowing ‘what is’ to be treated non- judgmentally, without priority, wjth no special significance assigned to this rather than that.

I think thought /knowledge only comes in when there’s suffering. If we’re happily living and enjoying our life we don’t usually ask “Why are we here?” As soon as we suffer we want to KNOW why…want to know how to get rid of the suffering. Does this seem right? Yet, according to K, as I understand him, it’s thought/knowing itself that has created the suffering in the first place. So as you say, thought moves from the practical…‘we want to remove the feeling of hunger so we gather food’ …we’re cold so we build a shelter…to the psychological. We want to remove fear as if we can act upon it in a similar manner to the way we act upon hunger or the winter cold and the need to build a fire.

I think so…It has brought the element of time, past,present,future into the psyche. In the practical, there has to be planning, changing, fiixing, calculating, learning from mistakes, choosing, accumulating knowledge as one goes. There has to be “minding” what one is doing, right? All of which involves the process of time. And the image-making machinery is necessary too isn’t it? To envision the finished ‘product’. To foretell where one might go wrong and avoid it…And image-making is also brought into the psyche and the images are treated as if they are truth.

If there is choiceless awareness would there be the perception of a “rotten apple” or would there just be awareness without judgement or labelling? Is choiceless awareness in any way connected to thought?

I posted earlier that my experience is that this ‘free’ awareness destabilizes thought and one’s mental status quo. Thought has established its own order, beliefs, conclusions, etc. and this awareness of what is going on in the mind as well as the sensations of the body, without any ‘guidelines’ and without any regard for what has gone before, i.e. what is of ‘significance’ , what is good/ bad /right /wrong etc. is threatening to the brain’s sense of ‘order’. That may be why this ‘choice-less awareness’ is so rare?

I’d like to add to this:

When awareness is ‘allowed’ without restriction, thoughts which have no relevance to anything appear, dis-associated thoughts. Like 'dreams but even more abstract and meaningless…this illuminates by contrast the associative flow of thinking which makes up the self; what I normally call ‘my’ thinking…strictly associative and to a degree, logical.

Can’t we “want to know” why so many other people are suffering even if we ourselves are lucky enough not to be?

I could be mistaken, but, I doubt that unrestricted or choiceless awareness itself is threatening to the brain’s sense of order. It’s thought itself that creates the threats to the brain’s need for order…thoughts that create fear. There’s one thought that gives a sense of order or security (my wife or my job or my family , in some instances) and then there’s the thought that my job might not be secure, my wife may want to leave, etc. There’s the stabilizing thought and then there’s it’s opposite. The need for psychological security creates insecurity? That’s the division inherent in thinking that creates division in ‘me’ and in the world.