It’s happening moment to moment when thought is increasingly aware of how reflexive, mistaken, and unnecessary it can be.
Is it a case of thought being increasingly aware of itself and its limitations or is there complete awareness of this at some moments and unawareness at others?
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Wouldn’t “complete awareness” of what it was doing be the ending of it? I think its awareness is partial, random and that more and more depending on one’s interest, there is a growing awareness that it is operating unnecessarily as well as being in the ‘wrong’ place?
First baby step of awareness : realising that I’m reacting to my experience as if its the truth again? (and yours isn’t)
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Thus, there is identification with ‘my’ thinking process (as truth) but…not ‘yours’?
Is that the illusory ‘thinkers’ job, to react to thought as if it were ‘truth’?
unless you are an ally, part of my tribe. Then the truth is ours.
heading into the weeds here (again, sorry) : but all thought has to do with utility as a basis. (both psycho and useful thought) and utility is rooted in need. (just saying, no worries)
This is what brought out the ‘thinker’ idea…he’s the ‘reactor’ isn’t he/it? It’s just all taking place, no?
There’s not a ‘me’ separate from the experiences is there?
Weeds?
I meant that I was heading out into the weeds.
As for your focus on the “me” feeling - identification is definitely a powerful force : don’t question me or my ideas, it hurts, I will defend/attack instinctively (because it is urgent that I am correct)
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Sorry. Of course you’re correct! 
I suspect that for the conditioned brain there is complete awareness on occasions when one is about to sustain serious injury or death. On such occasions, time seems to slow down enabling one to act swiftly enough to escape or minimize the impact of what follows.
This suspicion arises from what others have told me about automobile collisions and race car driving. And I think we’ve all had experiences when we acted reflexively in a way that prevented more serious injury.
As the brain groggily awakens to its conditioning, there may be occasions of complete attention that are not responses to imminent physical harm, but to shockingly obvious facts of life that had gone unacknowledged.
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I’m not sure that the brain can awaken to its conditioning through thought, can it? Maybe you are saying the same.
Thought, through conditioning, will always have a distorting effect on seeing, right? I think awareness of thought, or anything else, through silent observation, may have a different quality altogether. Even if the silent observation is brief, there is the possibility of seeing clearly. Is this not so?
How does this relate to listening to someone else’s thoughts? Someones thoughts about conditioning and the human experience for example.
Are someone else’s thoughts in a way more liberating, newer than our own?
Or are these questions based on an erroneous presupposition about thought?
As I see it, conditioning is all there is. Or rather thought/conditioning is the totality of human experience. We can only imagine or believe there is some state other than our thought/feeling-based reality. Which is not to say that there isn’t something else. Just that we - as conditioned beings - have no access to anything other than to what we can experience.
However, there is reason for some of us to suspect that that experience is not what it portends to be, namely real. As @Sean had put it:
Thought, through conditioning, will always have a distorting effect on seeing, right?
But again as I see it, it is thought itself that is doing this doubting, not some external force. I think for most of us, that doubt is not totally across the board, not complete enough for thought to realize itself that it must end for distortion to cease, for the real to be. So we continue to speculate about things that lie beyond thought rather than remain with the problem of reality as it is: distortion.
Thought is a distorting force and it must end for reality to be. It is as simple and logical as that. And the ending of thought cannot be a matter of will. Will is fragmented. It isn’t whole, total. It is one thought dominating another. A solution, a way out is still being imagined and action is postponed to another day as we settle for an imagined solution. Crisis avoided.
Simple as it is in theory to stop thinking, the fact that it practically impossible to do so proves once again that it is not a matter of determination or discipline or will but of understanding that distortion will always occur when thought is present. Only silence can let life in, in unadulterated fashion.
We can trust nothing we think, no matter how justified we think it to be.
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It depends on how much more aware the brain is of what thought is doing. A dull, insensitive brain is not as acutely aware of what thought is doing and can’t acknowledge the implications and effects of what it’s doing.
Thought, through conditioning, will always have a distorting effect on seeing, right?
Right.
I think awareness of thought, or anything else, through silent observation, may have a different quality altogether. Even if the silent observation is brief, there is the possibility of seeing clearly. Is this not so?
Yes. Silence is the absence of conditioned response, and as I’ve said, there seem to be brief moments when the brain responds unconditionally, but always returns to its conditioned status, its cage, so to speak.
A domesticated animal feels at home in a cage or a fenced-in environment because it is fed and sheltered without having to live by its wits. It is dull, defeated by its captors/keepers, and doesn’t sense that this is not its fundamental nature.
Likewise, we humans have captured and enslaved ourselves to beliefs we are too dull and confused to see through, and we live these beliefs by maintaining our dim-witted confidence that this is the way to live.
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Hi Douglas! I hope you’re keeping well!
Well, I’d say that talking on this forum, we have to accept that K’s teachings have passed through the filter of our conditioning and have probably been distorted, at least to some degree. Having said that, I think we can share our thoughts and maybe challenge each other’s understanding of the teachings and possibly learn. What do you think?
Hello Emile. Much of what you wrote seems to make a lot of sense to me.
About the quote above, rather than speculating about things that lie beyond thought, what about experimenting with silence? In silence, there is no thought, no conditioning, right? What place does silence have in our lives? If we accept that conditioning operates through thought, and that conditioning distorts our experience of life, surely silence has a strong connection with freedom from this constant distortion.
Yes, this seems to be the case. Is the problem that our level of awareness of our conditioned status is variable, but generally quite low?
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What is it that gets us to the point of deciding that we should experiment with silence?
Thought might have more power than we give it credit for, and less power than we blame it for.
If thought and the self are unwilling to go, they cannot be forced. Freedom cannot be forced.
Me and my thoughts (with the help of the rest of the cosmos) got me here, I cannot just hope that some magical intelligence, separate from me and my thoughts will save me.
Conditioning is not over. There is no law that states that psychology is somehow separate from evolution. If freedom from experience is more useful than mechanical dependance on experience, no law prevents the adoption of this new relationship to experience.
“as we think, we live” Whitehead.
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All too complicated for me Douglas. Where is this magical intelligence coming in?
It is an invention of thought.
I’m suggesting that we are creatures of thought, that thought must participate, be part of the movement of psychological death.