Long ago when the first experiments with LSD were happening, I had occasion to take it. My major memories of those few times was the intensity of the colors around me. I was also struck how people in the street seemed to be ‘acting’…I thought something like : ‘my god, they are good at this!’ The policeman directing traffic in his uniform and his white gloves…I wanted to go up to him and congratulate him on the wonderful acting job he was doing as a ‘policeman’!
Happily my friend convinced me that congratulations weren’t necessary and that I could just enjoy the show!
So I can’t answer your question. What I think K was pointing at though, with “nothing not-a-thing” , was that what we ‘actually’ ARE is pure unmixed awareness.
The brain has memory, recorded experience needed for practical - not psychological - reasons.
Yes for sure! But the me and the mine ‘structure’: the ‘individual’ edifice and its memories may fade. Who knows?
I suspect the memories won’t fade, but that the meaning and significance of them changes when it is clear that the sense of self was imagined.
You were “lucky.” When I was young (18-19 years old) I was also interested in experimenting with LSD, but every time I met up with my friends to do it, something always happened that prevented me from doing it. And as an adult I no longer felt the need to do it.
Did you also feel part of that “acting” or did you observe if you were also acting, or did you simply feel totally outside of that “acting” of others?
Do you mean a pure and unmixed consciousness coexisting with thought?
It seems what K meant by nothing- not a thing is there is awareness of things all around but with no centre being present, there is no labeling or recognising - just what ever is IS. As he once put it in anotherway by saying everything in me and me in everything.
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Thought is a ‘thing’, a material movement. Awareness is not a thing. It is in every thing and every thing is in it? As TNP (above) put K’s statement.
Which is another way to say: The observer is the observed. No ‘centre’?
So if the brain is filled with the reflex actions that make up ‘me’ the self, the ‘center’ and all of which are not under any control but act on their own, what could possibly bring about a ‘radical’ change? Obviously not thinking or talking about it? What then? Anything?
It has to happen in our brains. so any ideas on how this freedom from the known, the unnecessary brain baggage of the past can fall away? Anyone?
I think K asked the question this way: “Can the rhythm of thought come to an end?”
You’d have to get a very good, detailed look at this “baggage” to know what to do with it, and it seems we either can’t examine it, or we don’t really care to examine it.
We know there’s a body of beliefs, fears, desires, and godknowswhat in that content, but we may not want to review it because its disturbing, and we’re more averse to disturbance than we are interested in finding out what we’re desperately holding onto.
So the ‘content’ cant review the content? What can?
Doesn’t water and mud coexist in a puddle? And isn’t mud one thing and water another? And does mud change the nature of water? And does water change that of mud?
I’m very sorry but I don’t see any statement from K in @tnp’s post, Dan. So maybe @tnp could post the actual quote so we can see what exactly K said about it.
That’s like asking why a book can’t read itself.
The brain knows it holds content that it doesn’t examine because the content is its false sense of identity and security.
So what if anything will make the brain/mind consider that being ‘nothing’ is infinitely better than holding on to this ‘mess of potage’ it has attached itself to? As K said, being nothing is being everything!
He also implied that it could be done when he said somewhere that we’re going to die and that somewhere in time our death had already happened so why not get out now before it does.
Does anyone remember this remark by K which just came up for me and spoke to all this? It was something to the effect that, if one didn’t create an image in the present moment, that affected the images of the past somehow. That they had no place? I don’t remember the wording but at the time I read it I had the feeling it was very significant.
Is this what you are looking for?
K: Keep it very simple. I say something that doesn’t give you pleasure. You have an image instantly, haven’t you? Now at that moment, if you are completely aware, is there an image?
Q: If you don’t have that new image, all the other images are gone.
K: Yes, that is the whole point.
Yes Can We Be Free of Images?thank you fraggle that is it!
Can We Be Free of Images?
From the book Truth and Actuality
I highly recommend reading the ‘source’ piece fraggle
Has posted.
Feel danger in the changing of the thing, the name, the word…
How about being the Father or the Mother of everyone or everything so that I am the keeper of the Eternal Law…?
This way is more practical than thinking or talking about freedom when I don’t know what freedom is like…
I am free now if I ever was.
If I am not free now but I was before, this phenomena or thought of freedom is illusion.
I remain with myself if I know what and who I am.
How can I remain with myself if I don’t know what myself is?
The only thing anyone can remain with is the ongoing unfolding of actuality. Trying to hold onto anything is desperation, and desperate behavior has consequences.
Myself is whatever I decide it is at this moment, so how seriously can I take myself?
Right, so ‘judgement’ isn’t intelligent…just seeing yourself without judgement is. K. called that the “highest form of intelligence “ and you can see why that is so. Judgement about myself implies a ‘judger’ that stands apart from ‘me’ but the judge is the ‘me’. Any judgement about myself implies this illusion of separation. It implies that what is ‘could’ be different. That I could be different than what I am. That the world could be different than what it is.