Agreed. Though I’m not so sure about the ‘content’ part. It’s more like I have no choice, so I make the best out of what I have/am. The boat can be pretty delightful (and horrific).
Aye tis not a question of choice - as I interpreted the above : we are pleasure’s slave, for we are the need.
Otoh I definitely take Krishnamurti to heart, or I wouldn’t keep hanging around him.
Otoh there is something in me compelled to (try to) negate everything, Krishnamurti included.
Krishnamurti – and my relationship with (my image of) him – shall likely forever remain a mystery.
Oh - my faulth - I wanted to say something quiet different (I now think it was too far fetched) and it is due to difficulties expressing myself in English and additional to differing use of terms. I hope that I’m grasping English better than I’m speaking it. Hopefully I’ll improve through practice…
I’d like to continue with what useful tools mean to you.
We know to a certain degree how other people will react because we know how we would react. To know about that is useful and may indeed avoid conflict.
I guess this is the context you are asking for?
One might say it is the past looking and acting now.
I was actually trying to explain the context (whilst also engaging with other stuff going on in the thread - it was messy) - but lets just move on shall we?
Yes and K also uses the dictionary definition of the word :
experience noun
an event or occurrence which leaves an impression on someone.
So it is, as you say, our conditioning projecting onto the world, and at the same time the accumulation or reinforcement of further conditioning.
Experience is also what we call Reality. I feel that I am experiencing reality.
I’ve been reading a Krishnamurti quote today, where he is distinguishing experiencing and experienced, which seems to fit and to complement our context.
The quote was seemingly taken from a book (Leben!), which had been translated to German, and this is the revers-translation:
"The experienced, the known is our consciousness, this can never experience directly.
What it calls experiencing is only a connection to the already experienced and known.
Our conscious thinking knows only connections and therefore cannot take up the new, because it holds on to the thread of the connection, the persistence of the known.
Experienced cannot possibly be a bridge to real experience that takes place outside of everything known and remembered. …
Our thinking can only experience its own creature, the known.
Before it does not stop with it, there is no experiencing of the unknown.
Every thought is the expression of an experience, a response of memory, and as long as the thought interferes, there is no real experience.
There is no means and no method to put an end to the intrusiveness of the experienced, already the will to do so would be an obstacle to true experiencing."
Translated with DeepL Translate: The world's most accurate translator (free version)
Our senses, sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch are directly perceiving, experiencing the world
In the moment. The information coming in through the senses is filtered by the past, the known? Thought is not the “instrument” that can change this situation. The brain must be silent, open, unoccupied to receive the ‘new’ and thought is ‘noise’ no matter how subtle is its movement?
How do you know this is rtue and not also filtered?
The brain may have a filtering effect in terms of damping down the intensity of the energy coming in, organizing it?
The eyes receive a certain bandwidth of energy, color etc. the filtering is the naming, the liking, disliking, reactions to what is seen but the ‘seeing’ is always in the instant? And the energy coming in through the eyes is always absolutely ‘new’…for the senses there is no past and no future?
Awareness is immediately translated, interpreted, by the known, and this reaction, our “take” on what’s happening/happened, is almost invariably a self-serving distortion. This we know retrospectively. If we could see our reflexive reaction as clearly as we feel its self-affirming effect, that seeing would be the end of it.
Pure awareness, sensory input on its own before thought kicks in, is mechanical, isn’t it? The visual system, auditory system, touch, mentation, all sophisticated little machines. If both awareness and thought are mechanical, is intelligence too? If not, how does non-mechanical arise from things that are mechanical? Is there a ghost in the machine?
Realized after submitting how similar this sounds to the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness!
What is the hard problem?
Is it the question of why I would feel the way I do, rather than just behave in an appropriate manner? Why we would need such a rich array of feelings, including the sensation of being a me.
Or the specific (physical, chemical, neurological, energetic) details of how consciousness expresses itself in humans?
The hard problem is, in a nutshell: How does experience (the rich complex personal feel of it) arise from the brain’s anatomy and physiology, i.e. its physical-ness? How exactly does the firing of neurons give way to the feeling of watching a sunset, or eating chocolate, or falling in love?
According to Krishnamurti intelligence is beyond the brain; it isn’t until the brain is still, silent, has ceased it’s futile effort to be intelligent, that it can come into contact with intelligence.
This is not the complete story of eyes , isn’t it?
Both eyes have a blind spot and the energy from each of them are different and the brain is needed to make from this two energies one figure.
So this is the biological process and has nothing to do with the psychological process,
Our senses, our body is now. Our recognition of what we see is depending on our past experience - we know what we see, we recognize it, we have a name for it.
Does the belief that intelligence will manifest if your brain is still and silent and unhampered by futile efforts drive your spiritual quest? (Spiritual and quest are not dirty words for me.)
Motive drowns out many signals - that surely it is possible to see? Just like blinders on a horse, or when we look down a microscope.
Consider if you will a young man so besotted that he is the only one unable to see.