If the brain was aware of how insensitive and inattentive it is, it would immediately quit chattering, quit reinforcing and updating its psychological content, remain silent, inactive, and choicelessly aware…but since the brain is not doing this, it seems the brain can only conclude, believe, that it is too insensitive to do what it needs to do.
Belief is powerful. It enables the brain to deny, dismiss, or distort actuality according to the pack of lies and half-truths that compose its content.
So the question is whether the brain can choose to quit believing, or whether it must be free to see that it has no choice.
I do not know if being empty is at the beginning . My question would be : at the beginning of what? Meaning that there is no time involved, no thinking?
So, if I may continue, that there is no thought about emptiness and that every discription or explaining falls short.
How do we proceed from there?
We are confronted with this vast feeling of emptiness and we have named it. By naming it we have created a distance, haven’t we? We might call it a seperation between the observer (I) and the observed (emptiness) and the I remains the I and the emptiness remains as well and nothing changes till this feeling of emptiness comes back, over and over again.
Mind you, this is not a complaint!
Do we ever learn from this?
It sounds like ‘self pity’ or ‘self despair’. When it comes we have to try to stay with it rather than change it or replace it etc…This is not the silence / emptiness that I am speaking about. This emptiness or freedom that I am imagining, may come when the brain becomes more and more aware of how it is continuously ‘occupied ‘ by the image of myself…me. As K put it, the “me and the mine” It isn’t the feeling that you describe.
What I get from K is that this content cannot be discarded piece by piece which involves ‘time’. So how does this state of ‘emptiness’ come about …IF it does?
We are not able yet to see we are full ?
We continue to fill the cup (the mind) with the past ?
Seeing that the cup (the mind) keeps filling up may generate the emptying of its content ?
Interestingly, this filling of the cup can continue to infinite, which means it is never sufficient or full.
We are full and we continue to add more.
When the fragmented reality is glimpsed with its subjectivity, the brain is quiet and the connectedness of everything is there…It seems then that, when the brain / mind is silent without any motive or effort, it IS ‘universal mind’ as K stated.
Somehow I think that this emptiness might be there for a reason.
Take away whatever you know about yourself, your name, your identity, your opinions, your beliefs or non-beliefs, what will rest of you? Seriously? Are we not empty? And don’t we try to avoid it with filling it up with all that we know or supposedly know?
Are we really in touch with it and abide by it? Maybe we should cherish it and welvome it whenever it occurs …
No. A cup can only be filled to its capacity. We can’t increase our psychological content - we can only modify it, update it, revise it, etc., and we do this constantly. We make sure that this content, how ever we configure it, effectively sustains the illusion of self and the power of belief.
We are full and we continue to add more.
As I said, we can’t add any more…we can only update and revise what we have so that it effectively serves the purpose of sustaining our illusions.
Perhaps because the ‘I’ realises the fear that living in insecurity causes him, so he tries to create some security, even if he knows it is apparent? … What do you think?
Yea, I see your nuance about the nature of the content of the cup. You say that the accumulation is never new, it is the same old stuff, which is the past, rearranged. Agreed.
So, going back to what I said initially, I can say that the cup (the human brain/mind) has reached it’s capacity (to use your word) or, to use my word, the cup is full.
So, we prefer a full cup rather then an empty cup.
Krishnamurti said our problem is the conflict between psychological and practical thought. Bohm called this conflict, “incoherent thought”. To use the cup metaphor, we need the cup of practical thought, but not the cup of psychological thought. But the conditioned brain can’t tell the difference, so practical and psychological thought are fused, with makes the brain confused. This confusion is the human condition.
So what is one to do, seeing as how the conditioned brain can is limited to seeing only what accords with its conditioning? I don’t presume to know the answer to this question, but it seems to me the brain must be free to see what it cannot see any more what it is conditioned to see.
As K said, the seeing is the doing, and the conditioned brain cannot see, so as long as it believes it can do something, anything, to bring about the freedom to see, it doesn’t see what it’s doing, doesn’t see how it is perpetuating the problem it believes it can solve.
This ‘freedom’ comes with the excercise of being aware of one’s thought. The brain is conditioned to NOT be aware of thought…becoming aware of thought brings the sensitivity necessary for it to discern the practical from the psychological.
You’re missing the point I made to Cria. If you (the conditioned brain) believes it can do anything to be free of its conditioning, it is just doing business as usual.
The conditioned brain can’t see that everything it does is self-perpetuating as long as it can believe it can do things it cannot do.
The freedom to see is the inability to believe. Awareness can’t be choiceless until/unless there is clearly no choice.