We are starting out with the thinking process, using ideas and concepts. This is what we are using and this context is what is going along, verbally, intellectually, in a field of thought, making it difficult to understand choiceless awareness. Don’t think this means stop thought. The point is we can not use thought for this. When I am seriously attentive, listening, watching carefully, to what someone is saying, or to nature, I am not using thought. This can easily be seen. So the words, choiceless awareness, are simply highlighting this experience of quiet effortless attention. The words are not a goal, not an instruction, not a something complicated to know. All those concepts, ideas, etc, are thought.
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OK, I can see that. I’ve spent countless hours out in nature simply observing. It only becomes an issue when we suffer…when there’s deep conflict and confusion and contradiction tearing our life apart. K said that we can be ‘choicelessly aware’ of all that. But can any of us actually do that when we’re suffering deeply…deeply afraid, despondent, angry, and so on? Even when I’m greedy or full of a powerful desire which takes over my life momentarily. Am I aware of it choicelessly, or am I moved…carried along…by the desire?
What occurred to me Tom about this is that it doesn’t ‘matter’ what you do, how you react…that isn’t awareness. You suffer and then you look for a way out of the suffering, drink a beer, take a drug, watch some entertainment, etc, etc…the ‘choiceless awareness’ doesn’t ‘differenciate’ between the action going on if you see what I’m getting at. When you suffer, you are that suffering, when you entertain yourself, you are that entertainment…Choiceless awareness doesn’t need ‘ideal’ or certain conditions in order to be present. It sees simply, whatever is there.
It’s not a tool of the self to ‘become’ something other than what one is at any moment.
It also may be as you describe that when there are these 'explosions of emotion, that there is little or no energy left over for awareness and it can only reappear when the dust has somewhat settled. So if that is the case then the danger and wastefulness of these intense blowups becomes more and more evident. Experimenting with ‘being aware of oneself’ may somehow forestall or lessen the severity of the episodes when they happen?
Pondering this brought up something interesting regarding awareness in the face of moments of great conflict and stress. It was something Pupul Jaycar wrote in her memoir I think. Discussing death she reported K. as saying that at the moment of physical death, you “just step over” (!)… so is there a preparation for that incredible moment of passage(?), the ‘shock of death’. When he reported in a talk he was having with a woman and she was not getting the sympathy she thought she ought ,she said,“but Krishnaji, I am dying!” …he said “I die everyday”… That’s interesting isn’t it, especially in regard to this ‘choiceless awareness’…
When one is in a state of choiceless awarness , it happens that there is a challenge, a desire arises.When the energy behind the desire is high, it forces one to act and awarness etc is forgotten, i/ego becomes fully active, strengthening itself. But if the energy behind the desire is not strong, one remains in state of awarness, aware of the rise of desire and then it dissipates.
But here will like someone to throw light on one doubt i have.
In a state of choice less awarness, when I/ego is absent, what/who that is aware. During discussion with Buddhist scholars K said there is no such thing as soul.
But in K’s biography it is is said that, K told the biographer that once he left his body and was lost in clouds, but ‘they’ brought him back saying his time has not come. K being free from ego, and there being no soul, what left the body? Will someone in this discussion forum clarifies this.
Thanks.
That is something worth noticing. I had thought the same thing reading that passage. I can only make suppositions based to my knowledge of K.'s teaching.
When K. argued that there is no soul or atman, he was meaning that everything we can suppose it’s just a product of immagination or something we read or heard of and so just an idea, Just like God. One cannot talk or think about God because what one will do will always be talking of a mere abstraction. He never denied the existence of God, he only said that the god we “know” is not god (actually once he said: your god is not god). So the soul we know from religion is not the real soul. After all God could be something completely different from the concept religions have postulated and that makes something futile to talk about it. Similarly the “real” soul could be something we cannot imagine or postulate, yet something is there when we are living and something goes away when we die.
This for what concern K. Now I try to make my own (perhaps futile) postulate. Often etimology can help.
Soul in latin is called anima, it comes from the noun animale (animal) and the verb animare (animate or liven up in English), so anima (the soul) in ancient times was just the vital energy which animated a living creature. It corresponded to the greek anemos which meant “wind” or breath, and also the latin word for spirit (spiritus) originally meant wind or breath. Same thing in ancient Hebrew, rauch (spirit or soul) meant breath. In the bible god blows in the mouth of the clay statue of Adam and in this way he gave him the life. In ancient times people were more practical (
and didn’t have many abstractions like us today. And even K. talks about an “energy” (remembering not to cling to words), and I think we should also reformulate the idea of what energy is… (
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So it won’t help us one bit to change then…and K spoke of the urgency of change.
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Well I agree that it would be ‘great’ if there was a system or some method to bring about this "urgent’ change…but it looks like after all this time that there isn’t. So it looks like if this urgent change is to actually come to pass, it really is all up to us.
It’s not clear why we’re often talking about ‘choiceless awareness’ then. It won’t change man nor bring about the total transformation K spoke of, so why even bother talking about it?
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Because through an awareness that is not directed by the self, the self (you / me) can be exposed , revealed, to itself. Without that discovery the self / thought / time will continue and will stay in control with all the misery and destruction we have seen. It will resist… K. said thought / time must have a stop. It seems that it will not “stop” until it has been completely revealed to itself. Choiceless awareness is nothing more than a light shining into the darkness of the ‘I’ process…but without it, change will be just exchanging one ‘pattern’ of thought for another. It must stop.
We first and last have to realize that we are in the ‘stream’ …before there can possibly be a “stepping out” of it. As I see it.
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" So it looks like if this urgent change is to actually come to pass, it really is all up to us", you wrote. But if it’s choiceless what does that mean…‘it’s up to us’? Up to who? The one who chooses…who decides?
Someone says that you are living in ‘darkness’. Everyone around you is also living in that darkness. Some hear about the ‘light’ that they are missing and seek it. But the search is useless because what they are searching for is just another product projected in the darkness. Some people promise that if you follow what they say,do, they will deliver you into the ‘light’. But they are also living in the darkness and we can’t know, discern their motives for wanting to ‘help’. We are on our own in it. with no guarantee that we will ever emerge before our death. Supposedly the brain has shut out the light and opted for a safer more orderly security. It unwittingly sold its birthright for a ‘mess of potage’.
Now if any of that is true and not just fancy, there has to be a breaking out if we are to come into the ‘light’ before the physical death. which can happen at any moment. Only a total awareness of the workings of the self-image, this “I process”, could do it. That is the ‘darkness’ that ‘passes’ for light. Suffering ‘helps’ as a stimulus but it isn’t necessary because living as we do there is always an undercurrent of pain and fear. And the exquisite thing about this ‘light’… it is always there. It is always now in this instant.
How do you know it’s always there? This is conjecture or perhaps recollection of a past experience in the ‘light’. If K were here today on the forum with us I think he’d strongly disagree…or question that statement.
Well don’t take my word for it, take a look yourself!
@DanMcD If I see the ‘light’ now, that’s not proof of your statement that it’s always there, however.
Well in a way it is, because there really is, always, only, ever, Now… Yes?
Well I may get angry and smack you in the head now. Where’s the light then?
Tom: well I may get angry and smack you in the head…where’s the light then?
Dan: In your eyes? 
The eyes see and the ears hear. It’s the human mind that’s the issue not the senses. What is relevant to the world disorder is what the mind does, no?