Do I, you, understand conditioning?

Aren’t we are saying the same thing? Where there are parts, there is a whole. Conversely, where there is the whole, there must be the parts. Not “must be” as speculation or idea. There the parts ARE. Are all the parts merely concepts which are delimited by the brain? There are no trees, only concepts of trees? There are no brains, only the brain’s concept of brains? No birds, no sky, no earth, no stars, no flowers, no scents, no anger, no injustice, no war, no affection, and so on?

Seeing the parts of the whole does not deny the wholeness of the whole. Seeing the parts as parts is not denying the whole. It is not fragmenting the wholeness. If there are no parts, how then can we look into any of it? Are we to pretend there is ONLY the whole and not its parts? “I am not the tree.” The tree is there, the person is there. The blind person who now can see is no longer blind. She might learn to make at least some sense of what she sees, but she is no longer blind. What she sees even at first is still not “nothing” with no distinctions.

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I don’t think we are saying the same thing. But what you are saying sounds very reasonable. Common sense however, is based on the assumption that our shared experience of reality is a true representation of what is.

Re- the blind person analogy: when I look at a modernist painting, full of splodges, colors and shapes - at first it is my brain that produces the experience of shapes and colors, then it is my brain and its memory that conceptualises and gives meaning (shape, parts, emotion)
Are we saying that these parts (or concepts) exist without the brain? (observation/perception/interpretation)

Re - common sense vision of reality. Initially based on perception, interpretation and imagination; and more recently influenced by science and rationality - our understanding of reality is constantly changing (see my topic “what is”). Some Physicists are now being forced to wonder whether even space and time (and thus the objects within them) are product of perception (rather than fundamental truths)

Re - Meditation (quickly): the main indicator of samadhi (silence) is that there is no knowledge (as in this is a chair, that is the sound of the train) of the parts, and no knower.

PS - Was Creation a creation of parts? Or did the parts arise somehow afterwards, but before brains could conceive of them? Is the Mystery a collection of known concepts and concepts waiting to be known?

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That’s it, so why does it seem the whole world in and around us is giving so much importance for logical conclusions? Is that just another conditioning? If logic never guarantees truth, what does?

Physically yes, that’s clear. Psychologically is there a separation, or parts creating the whole?

Another way to look at it “logically”.

If you put all parts of a whole together, do you get a whole? Obviously yes. Can we see and put all parts together? It does not seem so, because firstly, I have separated myself from the whole and exclude myself (psychologically) from the whole - as an observer.

When we see the whole, are there parts? Obviously no, because otherwise it would not be the whole.

When we see the whole, can we divide it into parts? Obviously yes, and then it is not whole anymore.

I’m not talking about putting all the parts of the Whole together. We don’t KNOW - and CAN’T know as far as I’m concerned - what all the parts ARE. I’m just saying that no matter how one looks at it, Man is limited. He can’t discover all the parts. Man’s psyche CAN’T solve “the world’s” total disorder and disintegration? His powers of logic and reasoning are limited. Man is limited in his understanding of Creation, of each and every natural process of Creation. Physically too, Man is limited. Can Man know and understand the infinite mystery of which he is a part? Is it a conclusion to say that we humans are limited in what we can and cannot do?

Is the source of Creation - of all things known, unknown and unknowable, of the galaxies, atoms, cells, black holes, life - limited? Can the source of that creative intelligence and energy be fully understood by Man? Man being limited, I don’t see that it can be understood by him. Can Man solve his disorder and disintegration, the brutality, corruption, greed, selfishness, and so on? To me, he cannot. He is limited. That’s all.

Beyond understanding this, as I see it, the only action left to Man is to “surrender” to what is, surrender to the fact of his limitations, surrender to the intelligence, to the energy, to the source of all Creation. I don’t know what that means exactly. To me, surrender in this sense happens when it is profoundly understood that there is NOTHING I can do to fix “myself”, “the world”. If there is no such surrender, the only other thing for Man to do is carry on with what he knows. That is what Man seems to be doing, isn’t it.

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There is only disorder initiated by Man. If Man would look at Himself without escaping, He might be able to stop making more disorder. But Man does not look, Man does not stop escaping to ideas and images and this is the world we live in.

If we conclude, that Man cannot do anything about his action, then we’re finished here. Then what means understanding conditioning of Man?

And yet there is: to bring about order where confusion, violence, etc is found in myself. To not run away from what we normally do try to escape from, what we normally try to change in ourselves…not a ‘positive’ improvement but a negation of what is seen by a ‘staying with’ it. We can’t know it seems what such a ‘small’ action could bring about in the big picture, but is there anything else?

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re: post 29

As far as I know, we are UNABLE, we CAN’T deliberately, willfully, bring about order inwardly or outwardly, can we. As for running away, all one can do, as I see it, is to actually SEE, OBSERVE, one’s efforts to run away from what ails us through entertainment, drugs, by engaging in argumentation, philosophizing, speculating, theorizing, by pretending that one is not bothered, worried, anxious, afraid, lonely, tormented, depressed, and so on,

Doesn’t the actual perception of our inner efforts to escape engender the understanding that there is nothing that “I” can do about it? Doesn’t this observation and understanding spontaneously bring about an effortless surrender to what is, an ending of the old efforts to of escape from what is?

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Yes - thought loses all power, silence is automatic in the light of awareness.

it may in fact be that selfish action is actually fundamentally violent and detrimental to the whole, not just useless

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I think that I’m using ‘staying with’ in the way you use “surrender “. That any reaction to what is other than a surrendering to it being what it is, is just more of the same…I think K was referring to this when he wrote, real change is the “denial of change”.

In discussion we may talk about surrender to the grand Creation, but it is making it all too hard. When I sit quietly, and the mind is still, there is a feeling of an all encompassing vibrancy, an energy not being activated or generated by the sitter. It is like when the bell rings, it permeates the whole being so that there is no separateness. I call this a living energy, like the plants growing. At a subtle level it is showing the mind to be alert to the distraction of thought, ideas, concepts, etc.

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Perhaps “staying with” one’s reactions does come to the same thing as surrendering to one’s limitations.

I agree with you, Dan. But there’s something else about surrender, as I see it. Where there is the perception or understanding that there is nothing I can do to change myself or the world, there is naturally no longer the preoccupation with change, or the effort or desire to change. Is this the denial of change?

Peter,

I don’t mean surrender to the grand Creation. That does sound too hard.

I’m talking about surrendering to the fact of one’s limitations, which is that I CANNOT right the wrongs within me or in the world. SEEING the fact that there is actually nothing “I” can do to fundamentally bring about the necessary changes, is to surrender to the fact. The fact is, I don’t know how to do it or what to do. It’s a simple fact.

Seeing the limitation is surrendering to it, not keep fighting against it, not keep on trying to overcome it. That surrender is not hard, is it. What IS hard is to endlessly try — to rectify what I cannot rectify, to keep fighting against my limitations. Hasn’t mankind been trying to do this for millenia? And has anything in or around us fundamentally changed or improved? As I see it, it certainly has not.

I think so. The doing nothing is the only real ‘change’. A different energy?

#31:

Yes, I see. The psychological process which produces the imagined self is not just useless for ĉoming up with the healing action needed to bring inner and outer peace. That same psychological process may at times even appear to be acting in ways that are harmless, amusing, cordial, kind, “thoughtful”, “civilized” and so on. But that same process also erupts into the violence, brutality, corruption, and so on, which gravely endanger the whole planet.

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#36:

To be clear, the “doing nothing” itself is not a positive action. It is not a positive “doing something” in the sense that a positive choice is made to do nothing. Rather, the doing nothing is a negative action or “non-action” of sorts. It is the spontaneous action engendered by the spontaneous (effortless) understanding of the fact of limitation, as I see it.

As for it being a different energy, I can’t say. Can it be that the energy which was held captive by the psyche is liberated, unhindered by memory and knowledge?

Could be. Rather than being channeled through the usual which is to change, substitute, judge, ‘do something ‘, etc, that energy is freed? The default is the ‘becoming’ and to not continue in that mode needs the presence of a ‘different’ energy (intelligence?) that sees through the conditioned responses of will and negates them?

That’s like saying that the statement above is a shape without characters or punctuation.

A whole, by definition, is a unity of parts. If there were no parts, there would be no use for the word “whole”.

Yes.

But is this a conclusion that Man cannot do anything about his action, or is it understanding of a fact?

And if it IS understanding, it is not the end of understanding, is it. If it IS understanding and it is clung to, it becomes memory, knowledge, and understanding is lost, isn’t it? It must be released like a dove.

And if it IS understanding, it is not the end of understanding. There is no end to understanding, as I see it.

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