If I can’t bring myself to do what I think I should do, and I can’t stop myself from doing what I think I should not do, why do I bother thinking?
Do I need to think I know what’s going on, or is awareness of what’s going on sufficient?
…
Psychological Death
I do not know why I’m dead right now
I do not wonder how
All I know is there’s no escape
All I know is Now
Yes! And without any choice that something ‘should’ be different in you than it is. Freedom is not a ‘prison’, it is what is! The ‘ prison’ is wishing that it was different. The resistance to what is.
Yes, but for escapists, not escaping is prison.
The brain that seeks no escape is choicelessly aware of the way things are, how ever awful, evil, beautiful, or ugly.
Living without constantly escaping through the tunnel of what should/should-not-be, is living choicelessly, here now, regardless of how one feels about what’s actually happening.
Another way to think about it is that our feet are never on the ground because we are always floating in our stream of consciousness.
This is what I understand to be ‘attention’. K put a lot of significance into the word; as being the one word he would use to describe his ‘message’. For me it has come to mean choicelessly ‘attending’ to ‘what is there’. That is what I see as the ‘work’ if that is the right word. To attend to whatever is there inside and out…attention goes beyond the search for any particular ‘state’ and ‘takes’ whatever is there. I may be wrong in this but it makes tremendous sense.
Those who live without escape will likely feel from time to time intense psycho-emotional pain, perhaps intenser than the pain brought on by escape. And there is no guarantee this feeling of pain will have a ‘silver lining.’ Perhaps not escaping needs to be intention free, who (in their right mind) would ever choose to feel intense pain?
I escape from psycho-emotional pain by denying or distorting what awareness makes clear. But when, if ever, do I feel “the pain brought on by escape”?
If escaping is as painful as not escaping, I won’t do it because I don’t want pain. But if I realize that choiceless awareness (how ever painful it can be) is the only way to live. Pain (no less than pleasure) is part of being alive.
The pain brought on by escape is the pain of resistance, I think. Felt unconsciously?
We choose the pain of resistance because it’s always the same pain and we identify with it. But the pain that comes with choiceless awareness is always new.
Freedom is the prison. Not-freedom is the prison. Is anything not the prison?
As an escapist I can say that for I, freedom is prison.
And this newness makes it painfuller.
No, because when the only pain you know is your resistance, you don’t really know what pain is.
With bars around us we feel free, with no bars we feel trapped. We are grid-oholics!
If you make ‘freedom’ into an image and seek it, chase it, of course it’s futile. You are not seeking anything real but escaping from what is. It is not the same thing. Freedom to me is not a thing, it is living without psychological pain and that is only possible when there is no self image to protect. The self with thought is fear. Self knowledge has to do with seeing without judgement how the self comes into the moment bringing the past. It is the past. It’s also obvious as time goes by that this ‘system’ is pretty firmly established no matter how ‘incoherent’ it has become!
Yes, the grid is our security…until it fails and we’re lost and helpless.
The psychological grid is the contents of consciousness which enable us to live on earth with all other earthly inhabitants, but on our terms - not in accordance with the way they live.
To be self-centered, one has a systematic way of trading pain that undermines determination, for pain that supports the status quo.
Living without without “psychological pain” is our idea of freedom because psychological pain is what we are. But it seems to me that unless I’m constantly aware of psychological pain, I am sometimes free of it, and I live for those moments.
I can’t help thinking that egocentricity must be absolutely unbearable, demonstratively unsustainable, for the brain to be free of it.
My feeling is to be fully free from ego identification, the established order must fall. To be partly free the order needs to be questioned, evaluated, understood. We questioners here are all partly free from rule-by-ego. I doubt any of us is utterly free.
‘The truth will set you free’ or ‘from darkness lead me to light’ are all about freedom, there’s nothing here about prison or escape. Krishnamurti says that ‘truth is a pathless land’, all there is is our condition as human beings and fully realising this condition.
We know we’re not free, but we can’t imagine what freedom is because all we know is having our way, which means being at odds with actuality.
The essence of the ego is our belief that humans know better than any other earthly beings how to live on this planet. And this belief persists in spite of the evidence that we are the only species that does not know how to live on this planet.
But don’t forget that we are the only species as far as we know that has been able to develop outside the bounds of instinct. And if you accept that, because of that freedom, a ‘wrong turn’ may have been taken …
Some latitude of judgement is in order?
Humans write poetry even while being bombed. (With bombs)