How to reduce duality in our thinking process?
Roger that.
What can we know about not-duality?
No, absolutely not. There is no part of the brain that is free from its conditioning. Therefore can the brain be the totality of its own conditioning with nothing else whatsoever added in? Then the brain is not split into two parts as its conditioning and as a separate entity which views this conditioning and hopes to do something about it. It is not anger and the observer of anger; it is not loss and the observer of loss. It is the totality of conditioning.
Iâm saying that there is a part of the human brain that is basically dormant, unused. Iâm not a brain doctor, maybe someone here is, but I have heard that we humans only utilize a very small part (10% ?) of the brain. K. has said its potential is âinfiniteâ, etc. I read your statement as: â no conditioned part of the brain is unconditioned.â which I would agree with. I donât see how âpassive awarenessâ could be conditioned. Itâs not a âseparate entityâ at all. It doesnât want to âdo somethingâ about anything. Itâs âawarenessâ, not my awareness or yours. It must be âawakenedâ and as Iâm seeing it, that will be a bringing to life (bringing on line), a different âpartâ (synapses, connections) of the human brain. Not in the future but in the moment.
Another way to say this is that the brain can resonate to a higher energy. But in order to do that it must be âemptyâ, free of the accumulation of the past, the structure called the âselfâ, the âmeâ.
Added:
âAlthough there is no continuity except memory, is there in the whole human being, in the brain, a place, a spot, an area small or vast, where memory doesnât exist at all, which memory has never touched?
âŚâŚ
The past is vast accumulated memory as tradition. And when you have trodden that path diligently, sanely, you must inevitably ask: is there an area in the human brain, or in the very nature and structure of a human being, not merely in the outer world of of his activities but inwardly, deep in the vast quiet recesses of his own brain, something that is not the outcome of memory, not the movement of continuity?â
Krishnamurti To Himself
Mon. Apr. 18, 1983
Then you are reading it wrong. The very phrase âpassive awarenessâ is part of our conditioning because it raises the possibility of something separate from the confusion in which we live. This confusion is the actual daily energy of the brain, not higher or lower energy but just the mundane fact of what is.
Can the brain be the totality of this confusion? Which means it has no escape from itself via any channel.
I understand but K. and I are asking if there is not a âplaceâ in the brain that is free from the âconfusionâ?
That place exists when thereâs an end to all confusion. But while the brain remains even partially confused, such a place is merely the stuff of dreams or legend.
You asked whether the cause and the effect can âbe as oneâ, but now youâre deflecting. You havenât addressed your question. Why did you ask it?
As much as we can know about anything the actuality of which, is unknown.
We can speculate up the wazoo. We can quote scripture, quote âawakeneds,â paraphrase to promote our views. We might have an altered-state experience that feels like The Real Thing. Or we might think of nonduality as a metaphor, a way of talking about the ineffable.
No, I am not deflecting. It is a vital question and I am glad you have come back to it. Our knowledge breaks everything up into fragments. Practically, this is a useful trait to have everything categorised and separated. Psychologically, however, knowledge of the inner workings of the mind has very little importance and yet we seem perpetually to be chasing it. The cause and the effect of anger or loss are not two separate movements, but the desire to understand the nature of these outbursts or crises within us has necessarily created a breach between the two which comes about from the assumption that there is an observer separate from his feelings and thoughts. When we label a feeling as anger or loss, it is this reaction of the observer to understand and gain control of what he is observing that creates the division. At this moment, the experiencer is refusing to be what he is and is jumping for rescue to an image of himself as something special and immune from pain. It is this jump that creates the entire experience of human sorrow in psychological thought because it is always a jump into an imagined future. So the pain itself is never experienced, never gone through totally; instead, it is stretched out into an infinite postponement.
The pain of loss and anger is never divorced from the pain of attachment and attraction, but the former pain is visible and the latter pain invisible. One can perhaps see this logically and intellectually, but it is only at a moment of real crisis in relationship that the entire energy expresses itself as pain or hurt. The moment we act on this hurt we guarantee all our future hurts because we are acting as though we exist separate from this energy, which is the vanity of thought as self-becoming.
The âcontinuityâ of the situation prevails because there is an effort or action, no matter how subtle, to change âwhat isâ. Becoming aware of this is the awakening of intelligence.
There is no what is. Psychologically, there is no what is. So it is not a matter of becoming aware of this fact. Indeed, our awareness of it serves only to interfere with the fact. Psychologically, one has a past or a future, what was or what will be. What is now is not ours to see. But here we can meet; and here we can be together. Here is love.
Can you make it clear why this is so?
I think what he means is that, for the conditioned mind, there is only what-should/should-not-be, oneâs peculiar way of distorting what-is to accord with oneâs convictions, confusions, and conflicts. What actually is cannot be directly perceived by the conditioned mind because, âpsychologically, there is no what isâ.
Yes, thatâs it. Existence is not ours to see as though we are outside looking in. Yet this is how we behave when we see things from a centre. Therefore we get caught in time, which must inevitably come into being when we feel we are separate from the rest of the world. So our feelings are unreliable. Take the statement, âI am the world and the world is me.â Our feelings and thoughts about this are all distorting the truth of it.
Both of your posts have clarified this by K from The Urgency of Change:
Any movement from what I am strengthens what I am. So change is no movement at all. Change is the denial of change, and now only can I put this question: is there a change at all? This question can be put only when all movement of thought has come to an end, for thought must be denied for the beauty of non-change. In the total negation of all movement of thought away from âwhat isâ is the ending of âwhat isâ.
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I thought we had resolved this question. What exactly is âwhat-isâ according to Krishnamurti? Is it actuality as opposed to my conditioned response to it, or is it my conditioned response?
In the context of this particular passage, it would appear to be the latter.
This whole âwhat-isâ thing needs clarification.