I’m sorry for your friend and hesitate to offer anything. Pain is a distortion as I’ve experienced recently myself.
As I said before, this is not the accumulation of anything…in fact, it’s the opposite. When the brain corrects an error or realizes a belief or assumption it holds is false or a misunderstanding, it is relieved of content that was part of its confusion.
The best conclusion we can come to is to be more tentative in our beliefs - which is still not freedom from belief - is it even a step towards that goal?
When you realize you were mistaken, confused, misled, about something, do you think of it as a step towards a goal (or a step backwards), or do you just adapt to your new reality?
But you don’t see it - you’ve just changed your belief.
So after that understanding [which is not an understanding but a revised belief] I try to change that image through my newly acquired knowledge of myself [which is not self-knowledge]. Would you call this a “partial insight”?
Of course not. Self-knowledge is acknowledging your own dishonesty, confusion, error, misunderstanding, etc. It is revelation that diminishes the content of consciousness instead of adding to it.
what do you mean by “partial insight”?
Partial insight is not total insight.
If I may point out, there is also a flaw in this reasoning… since for a “brain free of its conditioning” there is no longer any imagined self, neither of itself nor much less of others. So such a brain has no psychological thought to negate beyond the practical thinking necessary to relate to the world. For if there is any kind of negation, that brain is not yet a “brain free of its conditioning”.
Then the flaw is in the way I put it. The brain free of its conditioning has negated all psychological content and the psychological thought that sustains it.
When you realize something about yourself that effects a necessary change in your behavior, does that “get old”?
When you see something for the first time ever, does that get old or does it bring about a beneficial change?
There has been a lot of dialogue since i left yesterday.
Nevertheless …
Let me try to explain why i find it demanding to look at other people, whether they are close by, or further away.
Most of the time we are not aware. In this unawareness things happen. Pleasant as well as unpleasant things happen. And that is also when people are demanding, like f.i. if you are uncarefull in traffic f.i. you will get reactions.
You might be looking to another girl and your partner might get jealous and act upon it. This is demanding!
You, yourself, are evenlastingly demanding ( so it seems) except for these rare moments that you yourself are not.
Tricky stuff - it hinges as usual on how our psyche is marked by our experience.
The questions Inquiry is asking about how our self image is able to adapt, and whether the conclusions we arrive at via “insight” can also get “old”, become accumulations, is part of this question.
What is meant by the self-image? Has this to do with identification?
The self is who I identify as. The self image is what I see when I look at/think of myself : Good looking, intelligent, communist, one armed, chess champion for example.
Yes, identification.
My name is Joost. I am from Belgium. And you are Mac? From Scotland? Just words to make acquaintance.
I see no problem here. Why does thought see it as a problem. Is it because it is trained to have problems and to find a solution? Out of everything we can make a problem, as we well know.
We might have little problems and bigger ones, but the question stays the same. Why?
You are asking why the human brain is always on the lookout for potential problems - and can usually find one, even if a problem is not immediately apparent?
Isn’t the ability to ‘image’ a big factor here; to be able to call up past experience and to imagine future possibilities? As a result we are almost never in the actual moment, the immediate now, except perhaps in a crises. If I am seeking some sort of ‘enlightenment ‘, a continuous state of happiness or ecstasy, the search is never now but in a time yet to come; a time that doesn’t exist.
I am able to understanding this intellectually. Why do i ask for more?
Is it because i presume that this might have nothing to do with “real” understanding? Why isn’t it enough? Why do i want more? What is “real” understanding if not that what it is that i think (odd sentence, no?)?
Yes, but I think I can translate: 
Why do I always worry about problems, and want solutions? even if both the problems and the solutions are imaginary?
Why do I always worry, why do I always want stuff, even imaginary stuff?
Is this what you are asking?
Real problems are practical and find practicable solutions. But imagined problems like Who am I?, Who is so-and-so? What should I do (considering who I think I am)?, What’s going to happen, etc., are not real problems, so there are no solutions for them.
But we can’t see this because we are confused by our incoherent thinking which can’t face facts, precludes direct perception, can only choose what to believe or not about what we are facing.
We can see the evidence that we are creating and sustaining the confusion of incoherent thinking (the fusion of psychological and practical thought), but we can’t stop thinking incoherently because we are conditioned to be more acquisitive than inquisitive; conditioned to have and to hold instead of being empty, free to see, having nothing to lose.
We can say what our problem is but we can’t actually see it because our brains are conditioned to see only what our conclusions, our content, limits us to.
This is our problem, but can we solve it when we are sustaining and extending it with every incoherent thought? It seems all we can do is be increasingly aware of what we are doing.
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Plz let me ask the question again:
What is real understanding if it is not what I think it is? We cannot answer this question, can we?
Perhaps we can begin or having a dialogue when putting the right question?
We know that “real understanding” is not what we think it is because we know we are limited by the confusion of incoherent thinking, which, until/unless it stops, we can only be acutely aware of what thought is doing in response to what is happening.
Sure.
Are you asking : what is a bdfjvdk? And saying there is no point talking about bdfjvdks?
This question makes me wonder in what way bdfjvdks even exist if we have no concept of them.
Or, to put it another way : If nobody knew what a teapot was, and we found something like this
growing on a tree on another planet, would it be a teapot?
Are things concepts or actual intrinsic realities that exist independant of my image of them?
Am I detecting the truth out there or forever dealing with what I think is out there?
If you want to speak of real understanding, we must have at least some idea of what it is we are talking about. If not, it is like discussing jvkdfkvfh.
I have “some idea of what it is we are talking about” when we talk about “real understanding”, but I’m not sure that helps.
Are things concepts or actual intrinsic realities that exist independant of my image of them?
Both, but we can’t always discern the difference.
Am I detecting the truth out there or forever dealing with what I think is out there?
In practical matters, we are “detecting the truth out there”, but psychologically, we are “dealing with what I think is out there”.
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Let’s look from a different angle:
Relationship!
Are we related at all? Are we related when we look at each other with our intellectual understanding, which is that we know that we are looking at each other with the image-building machinery.
Does this understanding (intellectually) bring a change in our relationship with each other? I seems not to be working that way as we can see over and over again.
So one dare to ask : is there a complete other kind of understanding?
Sl, not making an assumption whether there is , or not, but just simply put the question. Not hoping that anyone else will give you the answer.
Yes. We are both doing the same thing without knowing enough about the other to do any more than guess what’s going on.
So one dare to ask : is there a complete other kind of understanding?
I can’t imagine “a complete other kind of understanding”. If you can, please tell us about it.
It’s good to see how something can be repaired or improved, but it’s escapist to apply this principle to the human condition when I don’t really know how conditioned I am. I have an idea, a description of the human condition, but I can’t see the whole of it unless/until free of it, outside of it, which is to say, no I.
If I can know no I, I can be free of itself, but alas.