Exploring The Central Issue

To attend to being-aware… seems to bring in meditation… and in that, I remember K saying “during real meditation, there is no one meditating” (or something like that). In the light of that, it seems that attention, the one who is attending, awareness, and the one who is aware… I suppose must all be actually seen, by… the mind?

Ok, no problem. Easy mistake to make.

Hi again Nobody. I’m really not sure that you can work at being attentive, can you? I suppose we can eat food that is good for our bodies, take exercise and go for a walk in the countryside instead of going to a nightclub. But can we work at being better listeners, for example? Maybe we can but I’m not sure how. As far as I see, when we are attentive or paying attention to the movement of thought, the possibility of awareness comes. I mean, when our minds are silent, we can be aware of what is going on around us. How do you see this Nobody?

Philip, you used a quote from a msg I posted to make what seems to be an interesting point, but I’m afraid I don’t understand the point! Could you please try again?

Or does seeing happen without a see-er?

Say this is generally true for most of our lives. Isn’t this me experiencing life, albeit with a bit more awareness than usual? This is the experiencing, and is what the brain is accustomed to do in this case. The brain is in the mode of looking at the external, and processing it with thought. We have skill and ability to improve our way of looking, thinking, behaving etc.
With K we have been given a challenge to discover this brain that is working in division, with an external and an internal. It is pointing to a different brain, fully watching and living the watching, with no division.

(Sean, sorry for the delayed response. The System wouldn’t let me reply yesterday, so I (thought I) pm’d you … but I guess that as a Level 0 User I can’t pm people, so the msg probably ended up in Limbo.)

I differentiate between awareness and attention. Awareness is like radar, it detects/notices things: sights, sounds, feelings, thoughts, ideas, etc. It’s automatic and effortless. Attention is like focused awareness, it uses intention to ‘zoom into’ specifics.

Given my sense of what these terms mean, attention is eminently trainable. Think of Yoda and Luke: “Pay attention!” Awareness might also be trainable, I’m not sure. Training attention is like getting a radar operator better at their job of seeing/interpreting the little blips on the radar screen; training awareness is like getting the radar itself to be more sensitive and accurate in its detection.

Aren’t there times when we experience life with no “me” at all? If the mind is silent and there is no thought, where is the “me”? If you are really listening with no thought rushing in to interpret what you hear, you are probably in touch with the reality of the moment. It’s surely possible to move away from theory and to try this out for ourselves. Is observing with a silent mind really that complicated?

Hi once again Nobody. So by training attention, do you find yourself more attentive in everyday life? How do you actually do this though if I might ask?

I said attention was trainable … not that I trained it! :wink:

I’m pretty inattentive in everyday life, except for immersive activities like discussions here, conversations with my partner, taking my cat for an outdoor jaunt, gardening, reading a novel, etc. If I don’t need to be focusing on something, my mind generally wanders, daydreams, the good old default mode network.

How about you?

No but what is this “silent mind”? Is it the brain free from the attachment to the ‘known’ for its own false security? The part of the brain that is not ‘conditioned’ and is free to observe effortlessly what is? If that part is activated, can it ever go back to the prison of the known?

If you really see the tree once, can you ever go back to not seeing it? If you really listen to your friend once, can you ever go back to not listening to her? If you ever really see the beauty of the mountain, can you look at it another day and not see it at all? What do you say Dan? I’m not implying that I know the answer, by the way.

What we call seeing, listening, is full of a busy mind, working with thought, knowledge, memory. It is the workings of the brain, at a deep level, automatically. This is what is called conditioning. Mostly the brain is busy, not quiet, not clear, and while we can have a sense of quietness or clarity, associated with something, some experience, this is not the complete quietness or clarity where there is no separateness from the world.

Hello! Sorry for the late reply! Peter said something that I feel fits with what I was thinking:

being-conscious actually causes consciousness, “then” there is “the self”

In the common phrase “I am”… before am, there is an “I”. Before “I”, there is seeing.

In other words, There are so many ideas going around. We find one that we like, then assume it to be connected to everything. In order to “find out” what sees everything…

we, as pure/still-conscious, have to see the idea: “of everything” clearly.

“in order to do that”, we have to yield (even if only temporarily), to the possible fact, that identity might be simply an idea. The assumption of what we are, seems to be attachment to thought/ideas.

These might be dangerous words, and everything in my being tells me not to assume truth, nor that reality might be “completely an illusion”.

Regardless of any idea, being-aware, remains. We can only approach what causes awareness, with “our” ideas about awareness. Really, there only seems to be attending, miraculously present, with or without the obscuring notions of “motive” and “time”.

Seeing might not be remembered without a see-er, but its cause must be continuous. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be conscious in the “first place”…!

Is there a subtle difference between a silent-still mind without identification, and an alive mind without any idea whatsoever…?

Why do we talk about idea, as if it has some pivotal meaning? Surely it can be understood, thinking is thought. Maybe this understanding remains an idea, but can the the mind now continue relentlessly with more ideas? Isn’t there to some extent an awareness of this process of thought in the mind? Aren’t ideas, with all their implications for the thinker, the workings of thought?

Have you experimented with this Peter? Are you talking from personal experience here?

I don’t know how it works. Walking in the park, I am aware of the noisy brain. Then there is all the beauty of the blue sky, the white clouds, the greenery, and it blossoms, completely free of time and space. It is all fully there with no observer. It is a strange thing, but it is not an experience. It is finding true nature of living.

That seems to be the way it goes. We have minor breakthroughs or ‘insights’ but then go back to seeing in the usual way. And these may be occurring through all of humanity, I don’t know. A ‘softening’ of the brutality over time due maybe to religious ideas saturating the masses, becoming distorted for sure from the original over time but still in small ways making us less savage over the centuries? Christianity, Buddhism, JK, etc. My theory is that this is a ‘long game’ and all ‘efforts’ made by us to get at the truth are not wasted. Whether there is the time left to us as a species to '“break through” is a question. The breaking through to me then is the ending of the sense of division. And no I don’t think there could be a ‘going back’ after such a revolutionary realization. That there could be a returning to the darkness and its isolation.

People seeking consultation and endorsement look to join a line and want to know if it is the official line. If I see people all lining up, I can ask them, isn’t this line for official knowledge, and perhaps you are in the wrong line? Maybe you don’t need to be in a line, and can look immediately to the source and find out for oneself directly?

That’s why I asked you about your personal experience Peter. I think it’s important we stick with that whenever possible.