It’s a parody of an enthusiastic K student…
Haha! - sorry Inquiry. I don’t want to tire you guys out with yet more quotations. But I guess I find that researching a topic sometimes helps clarify things, and maybe I hope that by condensing the matter down for others it may help them help me clarify it still further…
There is some missing piece in my understanding of this topic that I’m sure can be by-passed by some simple insight or perception - some ‘reading between the lines’ of what K has said. So I suppose that this is part of my attempt to ‘read between the lines’ (if you know what I mean).
A few things seem to stand out so far: the cause of conflict in the world is fundamentally due to the existence of human egotism.
This is one thing we all share in common.
But our consciousness is more than just a simple, easy-to-recognise and annul egotism. It is more nuanced than that. It involves our feelings, our reactions, our emotions, our thoughts, our prejudices, our hurts and fears and desires and wishes… It involves our whole conditioning in fact.
And this conditioning is the human condition. It is not a personal thing - it belongs to us all, to everyone (even Rick 
). So, at one level, this conditioning - the human condition - is what we all have in common.
Furthermore, this conditioning goes back centuries, millennia, and involves our collective background, the activities of our ancestors (our parents, their parents, their parents’ parents, etc), our culture. So it is not individualistic or personal - even though it obviously involves personal elements.
So when we suffer, it is not merely our own ‘new’ content of suffering that we feel - it is a re-statement, a re-presentation, of old ancestral pain, ancestral grief, the grief of old wars and old hurts that have never been processed, have never seen the light of attention; it is a flowering of ancient seeds of grief that were deposited in the human psyche who knows when?
Because our brain is not our personal property - it is the genetic inheritance of the entire species, going back thousands of years.
Moreover, the structure of grief, the structure of fear and pleasure - even though each person may express it differently, or manage it differently - is common to people everywhere. It’s as though this reflex of the ego in the brain creates the same fundamental reactions (with superficial variations) in all brains.
So it is the same river of sorrow that runs through the canyons of every separate brain. The river may spring up separately in different heads, in different brains - but deep down the river, the content of the water is water, the content of sorrow is sorrow; so each distinct rivulet of grief shares a common source.
So it is not my sorrow when I am in sorrow - it is the sorrow of ancients, as well as the common sorrow of all other human beings (for whom, in that moment, I am their representative, their ambassador). Each of us is an ambassador for the country called human consciousness.
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Objection: Calls for speculation!
Yes and yes - although “getting to know” is perhaps putting it too strongly. I met Friedrich at Brockwood and in Switzerland (and elsewhere), but we weren’t friends or anything. He was (or is) a sweet person, gentle - not intellectual, but sensitive and very active - doing yoga every day, walking and running (at least in those days); and pretty down to earth. He converted to vegetarianism sometime after meeting K I think, so he was always sharing that book The China Study (about the value for health of a plant-based diet).
Haha! - ok, maybe you can be the exception (to the human condition) that proves the rule Rick 
I ask in all seriousness here Inquiry. Do you not agree and see that James is being very logical, sane, rational, precise here in his inquiry and also that the K quotes he is posting is helping all of us to stay on track and see what K was pointing at in regards to the topic we are exploring?
Do you not see also that James is not teaching us, is not a teacher or an authority, but is looking with us, and is learning with all of us? Is this not the proper spirit and approach to explore Ks teachings?
I guess what happens in Brockwood, stays in Brockwood, haha.
I find that cool that you got to meet and interact with him in person. It makes interacting with him on here, on this forum or in zoom dialogue that much more interesting and connection. Sometimes our images of people on this forum just doesnt match reality, but when you get to know someone in person a lot of images drop away naturally.
Finally I get the respect I so egregiously deserve!!!
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Dead " k society"!
Are you a member of such society. That means are you dead?
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Yes, David, James is doing an excellent job, but my reply was my facetious response to what you said, and has nothing to do with James. Thanks to your request, he posted those K excerpts.
It’s a reference to “The Dead Poets Society”.
Examiner, as Inquiry says (and as is mentioned in the OP), the title of the thread is a reference to a famous film from 1989 - directed by Peter Weir (who also directed The Truman Show and Witness) - called Dead Poets Society.
It is a film about an ultra conformist, elite boarding school, in which a small group of students form an illicit (i.e. unsanctioned) poetry reading society called “the dead poets society”, which they use to express their actual state of mind (states of mind that the boarding school actively seeks to suppress).
Dead Poets Society itself, though a classic movie (I recommend seeing it if you haven’t), is also imperfect in different ways (one really needs to have seen it before the age of 30!), so I’m not suggesting that anyone here needs to use it as a template for what we are discussing. It’s more the spirit of free inquiry that it represents that has value (to me at least).
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So the next step, it seems to me, is to become directly aware of this consciousness - of its contents - in ourselves. This where choiceless awareness, or non-judgmental observation, comes in.
We don’t have to go far to unearth this consciousness, because it reveals itself whenever we react to another in relationship, whenever we form a judgement or an image of another in our minds - whenever we feel elated or depressed or irritated, and so on.
Or we can be sitting on a beach watching the waves ride up to the shore, or sitting in a wood listening to the sound of the breeze among the leaves - and the content (of consciousness) is there as soon as we close our eyes, rising up in our mind to meet our awareness.
No content is ‘wrong’, no content is ‘right’ - it is all just the consequence of past unfinished business (both personal and collective) rising up in the mind as though seeking release (to put it poetically). So every moment is an opportunity to shine a light on content, to liberate content.
The ‘trick’ (this is merely a turn of phrase btw) seems to be to leave judgement at the door - judgement being the “observer” in K’s language, the entity that separates itself from content and passes judgement on it as though it were ‘outside’ consciousness looking ‘in’ (when it is itself merely a content ‘in’ consciousness).
That is, to observe - observe the content of one’s actual consciousness, one’s reactions, images, feelings, moods, etc - without judgment.
James, hi. I agree that choiceless awareness is a useful tool to become directly aware of the content of my consciousness. (Though to conclude that it is the only useful tool for this is imo counterproductive. We can talk about this in another thread sometime, no rush!)
But what I would ask is: Why should I (should we) bother to make all the effort to become directly aware of the content of my consciousness? It’s a frickin’ mess in there! Why not, instead, discover the source of the mess and work on that? Not that these two activities are mutually exclusive. But it doesn’t take 24/7 observation, like a cop on a stakeout, to discover the source of the mess, does it?
Its not so much the observing (though when something happens its useful to notice) as the seeing. Not so much the following along a line of thought as realising what thought is.
I hope you don’t mind, but I would perhaps object a little to this kind of language. I wouldn’t call choiceless awareness (or non-judgmental observation) a “useful tool”, would you?
Useful for ‘who’? Useful for ‘what’?
A tool implies utility, doing something as a means to an end. But if one carries this attitude of ‘means and ends’ into observation, isn’t this then a part of our judgmental habit (based on our conditioning), which only does something for a reward, for a result?
A tool also implies a tool-worker, someone who specialises in using that tool. But who would this specialised agent (or tool-worker) be? It would only be another part of consciousness, right? - I hope you don’t mind me pointing this out.
So, to answer your first question: Why should we bother to become aware (not through effort!) of the content of consciousness (as it manifests in one’s own brain)?
Well, first of all, why shouldn’t we be bothered? It is our actual consciousness, right? It’s not as though we are talking abstractly about what is on TV this evening, and whether we prefer watching Stranger Things or Ghosts! The content is playing itself out in our psyches whether we choose it to be there or not - the algorithm has already decided what content to show us!
Maybe if we were able stand ‘outside’ our own consciousness and pick and choose whether or not to think or feel a certain way, we could use the language of being “bothered”. But this doesn’t make sense if we are the very feelings and thoughts doing the choosing, does it?
One aspect of the content feels bothered, and another does not. So all that one can do is to be aware of it (or not).
Secondly, if one’s main objection to this (being choiceless awareness) is that the content is a mess, then surely this is a good reason for wanting to be aware of what is going on, no? If it is a mess, isn’t it maybe a mess because the mind has never really looked at what is going on properly? Maybe the mess is the result of the mind rarely being aware of itself in this choiceless way?
Aside from this, a mess can be interesting for itself, can’t it? There may be a simple curiosity to find out what is going on for us “underneath the hood”, as it were.
To answer your second question: Why not just discover the source of the mess and work on that?
I would say that, first of all, who or what do we think is going to discover the source? Would it be some other mind or consciousness than the one we presently are? - or some other form of awareness than the awareness we presently have?
K has said that the source of consciousness is thought. So must I analyse thought before I become aware of its effects in my mind (i.e. as my reactions, my feelings, my images, etc)? Or can I not become aware of the activity of thought in my consciousness directly, through non-judgemental observation?
And is not the direct awareness of the operation of thought in my psyche (as images, as fear, as pleasure, as hurt, as suffering, etc) sufficient?
Or do you mean something else by “source of the mess”? Do you mean ego, self-interest, the search for security, etc?
But this is still all part of the content of consciousness, as far as I understand it. So direct contact with any content - any reaction - is already implicitly contact with the “source”. The question is merely how thorough-going is this contact, this awareness (of the content).
Yet to stipulate a comparison or a measure for how much one ought to be aware seems to bring in judgement again, which means we are no longer aware of ourselves choicelessly.
Do you see what I mean?
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The observer can pass judgment on the contents as if from outside the container because what’s outside is nothing more than what the inside has to say about it. In other words, reality is what the contents represent for as long as it takes for the container to be permeable enough to dissolve.
Useful for nonintrusive observation and understanding of what’s really going on. Which is in turn useful for lessening the stranglehold of psychological conditioning. Useful for the person using it and others affected by the thoughts and actions of that person.
So, to answer your first question: Why should we bother to become aware (not through effort!) of the content of consciousness (as it manifests in one’s own brain)?
Ahh but there is effort required for me. It’s hard work and not something my brain particularly enjoys doing. If there were no effort involved, the issue of “Why bother?” might not come up for me.
Secondly, if one’s main objection to this (being choiceless awareness) is that the content is a mess, then surely this is a good reason for wanting to be aware of what is going on, no? If it is a mess, isn’t it maybe a mess because the mind has never really looked at what is going on properly? Maybe the mess is the result of the mind rarely being aware of itself in this choiceless way?
Maybe. But maybe not. Maybe the mess is inevitable, a consequence of being human. Maybe with a lot of effort and hard work the mess can be tidied up to some degree. (Maybe not!)
Aside from this, a mess can be interesting for itself, can’t it?
Exactly what I was going to say, but with a different spin: The mess can be a source of creative energy, also great fun! Why would someone who enjoys the mess want to intrude on it, ‘fix’ it?
To answer your second question: Why not just discover the source of the mess and work on that?
K has said that the source of consciousness is thought . So must I analyse thought before I become aware of its effects in my mind (i.e. as my reactions, my feelings, my images, etc)?
Or do you mean something else by “source of the mess”?
I don’t know the source of the mess. It (probably) involves thought and memory in various guises: image making, belief systems, psychological time and becoming and conditioning (nature and nurture).
It seems important for the well-being of both individuals and groups to discover and understand the source of the mess. If choiceless awareness helps a person do this, it’s a useful thing for that person.
Okay that makes sense to me, because it zooms in on a source of suffering and delusion: thought.
For me the terms choiceless awareness and mindfulness are synonymous: nonjudgmental awareness of whatever arises in consciousness. But that doesn’t sound like what you’re describing. ?
When you are being mindful, what are you doing? and why are you doing it? Is it a conscious effort to catch thoughts as they arise? What happens when you notice you were thinking about what a dweeb your secondary school teacher was?