The last ‘shock’ was the Second World War. But has seeing the consequences of nationalism prevented us from continuing to nurture nationalism to this day? If you remember during the 2020 pandemic, everyone said, ‘this will change us, we have learned that solidarity with others is important. The world will definitely be a better place after this!" But has it?
So my question is, does humanity really need yet another ‘shock’ to remain as it was at the time of the ‘shock’… or maybe even worse?
The ‘shock’ or what ever we call it would have to be powerful enough to make us ‘see’ that we ARE the other…that the ‘other’ IS me? Killing the other then would be killing oneself! The shock would have to dissolve the ‘self-image’ totally. To ‘see’ that the observer is the observed…it is the self-image that creates the duality: me observing that. It is my self-image that allows the hatred for the ‘other’.
Why do we humans beings always look for something external to ourselves in order to change ourselves?
Seeing the need for freedom and wanting freedom are not the same. Freedom as Krishnamurti uses the word (freedom from the conditioned self) is terrifying for most. Like free-fall with nothing to hold onto, no points of stable reference, no substance.
This is the reason I think very few choose to make the leap to freedom, they need a push from the visceral realization that not-free is worse than the status quo. And we are all quite good (to brilliant!) at optimizing the pleasures of our status quo. Alternately there are people who use psychotropics to ‘get there.’ Mushrooms as pushers into emptiness?
This is the whole ‘problem’ of the human being after having attended for centuries to the talks of other human beings who discovered for themselves that change was not possible unless oneself alone bring about that change by looking deeply into oneself and one’s relationship to the world around him. However, after centuries we are still waiting for something or someone to liberate us without us having to do anything to liberate ourselves from the anguish, loneliness, and suffering that the life we live offers us.
So is anyone interested in taking a serious look at that visceral fear that seems to keep us from being free?
Thought has no awareness. The brain generates thought and the organism is aware of its thoughts.
When the brain is as wary of its thoughts as it is dependent on them, thought slows down because the organism is aware of how potentially dangerous thought is; how it can effect the health and well being of itself and others.
So is it the lack of awareness of what thought is doing each moment as it moves, that is responsible for the chaos in and around us?
Yes, but it’s more than awareness of thought that matters.
The brain of an evil genius is aware of its thoughts, but having rationalized its evil intentions, it is more concerned with achieving its goals than with the ultimate significance of what it’s doing.
Freedom is a word for what I imagine freedom might be. So not knowing what freedom is, I can’t talk about it. Do you know what freedom is?
All I remember about the 2020 pandemic is the anti-vaxers and conspiracy theorists sowing confusion and undermining trust.
Yes - lets do that - but first my brain would like closure on a couple of things :
I agree with @fraggle - Hopefully we have put aside this idea of external situations leading to freedom - Covid and WWII and the current mass extinction being good examples - freedom from the known is not dependant on the known (our experience of ourselves and the state of the world being a part of the known aka “reality”)
We definitely should not be hoping for a shock that changes society out there - experience is personal (in here)
This also has nothing to with “enlightenment” or “freedom from experience” - an altered inner world is no different from a change in the outer world. Though I do think that trips abroad can help loosen our grasp of reality, or its grasp on us.
Sorry fraggle, I think that something is going wrong in this conversation about “awareness” - there seem to be logical inconsistencies, or we’re not understanding each other.
Do we agree that “magical awareness” means : an awareness that allows for a complete liberation from the experience of reality that we are experiencing?
And that apart from the liberatiion that it provokes, it is exactly identical to “normal awareness”.
If we say that normal awareness also liberates us from experience, but that that liberation is instantaneously (as in immediately, in 0 seconds) hijacked by the known so that it has no effect - then we can also say that it doesn’t exist (liberation that exists for 0 seconds and has no effect = something that doesn’t exist).
I understand what freedom from conditioning means, mostly intellectually. You?
What we know about ‘freedom’ is from this or that thing. The ‘freedom’ that K is talking about (that “no one got”) is not a freedom ‘from’ but I think he called it ‘ the state of freedom’, which we can’t ‘know’ because we’re not in it.
The freedom we can define is not true freedom. The map is not the territory.
Same here, but when I look closely at that “understanding” it’s just an attempt to imagine what it might be like to be free of conditioning…it isn’t knowing what freedom is.
Then why think or talk about the map?
Did you notice that @rickScott has used the adverb ‘mostly’ in his sentence, which would imply (at least to me) that some of that understanding would not be merely intellectual?
I don’t know why he qualified his statement with “mostly”. Why don’t you ask him?
My relationship with the map is strong, with the territory weak(er). I talk about what I ‘know’ and feel comfortable with. Besides, the territory doesn’t need words!
By ‘mostly’ I mean I have, we all have had moments of freedom from conditioning. Times when we, usually fleetingly, see things clearly and without (egregious) bias.
I did my military service in the communications company (you know, radio stations and all that). So when we went on military manoeuvres I was in charge of the transmitter in the jeep. Luckily (at least for me, because it allowed me to see some wonderful places) my superior was a sergeant who liked to check the army maps, which everybody says are the best. So a lot of times he would take the jeep during rest times, and as I was responsible for the jeep’s transmitter, I had to go with him. So we would go around the territory to see whether or not the map reflected the reality of the terrain, and sometimes we found that the map did not exactly reflect the reality of the terrain.
Do you see what I mean with regard to your question?
Come on @Inquiry, I know you react all the time (you told me so), but we’re talking together. What does it matter who asks the question or not. I was simply trying to point out that in @rickScott’s sentence he used an adverb that was relevant to what he was saying, and that you made no reference to in your answer. Possibly because you wouldn’t have noticed it, or because you didn’t consider it relevant. So it wasn’t my intention to bother you in any way with it. But if you prefer, I’ll stop commenting on anything you say, and we won’t run the (apparent) risk of getting into “conflict” anymore.
It seems that way to me, too, because the brain’s conditioning doesn’t react to everything its aware of, but only to actualities that don’t support its beliefs. It may be that we’re as free as we dare to be.