Is there anything wrong with doing what everyone else is doing when you realize you do it because you don’t want to be an outsider? Can the brain see how a compelling notion of what could or should be, can be irresistible; that it can take one to a place so much better than this place that one must abide there?
That’s idealism, of course, and eventually the young brain realizes that ideals are just goads to achieving, acquiring, gaining, profiting, growing, getting better, etc., and the more experienced brain, having ceased to be enthralled by one compelling notion or another, is carried along by the force of the demand for Better.
Can we do better than “better”, or is better the best we can do?
Can the brain do what it cannot presently do without fully awakening to what it is constantly doing?
The only reason the brain might want to discontinue what it is presently doing, is to get something better…which is more of the same. Unless it ‘comes upon’ something , a discovery radically different about itself that pierces its normal perception and illuminates itself, why should it “awaken “?
Yes, the brain can’t do anything beyond its ability to pretend to know what it’s doing.
Unless it ‘comes upon’ something , a discovery radically different about itself that pierces its normal perception and illuminates itself, why should it “awaken “?
I can’t presume to know what, if anything, “pierces its (the brain’s) normal perception and illuminates” it, but I can reasonably surmise that if the brain was to cease its incessant thinking, something elucidating (if not illuminating) would occur. To think otherwise would be to downplay or deny the effect of incessant thought.
The suggestion that I get from K is that IF the brain is not too damaged and somehow becomes empty and silent, it becomes one with Mind, it is aware of what he calls the “immensity”. Now those are just words but they ‘point at’ something potentially revolutionary taking place in that state of emptiness.
Yes the kind of thought that is seeking, that wants to ‘know’. That has been the ‘direction’. This is a human problem. The drive for knowledge spilling over into the silent realm of the mind? Silence has no direction, no goal. Self is direction and goal. A confusion?
I would say, No, that’s practical thought. There are things we must learn and know to survive.
Incessant thought, it seems to me, is inevitable when thought is confused, which it is when it’s incoherent.
The drive for knowledge spilling over into the silent realm of the mind?
Is it “the drive for knowledge”, or is it the demand for answers that quash questions? For instance, why believe in God? Why believe in something instead of acknowledging how little you can ascertain or demonstrate is true?
Silence has no direction, no goal. Self is direction and goal. A confusion?
Self is confusion itself; the effect of incoherent thought. It presumes to know what it’s doing to keep going. Believing is the incessant activity of self-deceiving.
The brain is a problem solver that works excellently in a technical practical sense. However life itself is not a problem that is there, that cannot be solved and isn’t that the meaning of the comment living with death?
Not seeing the ‘big picture’, ending or ‘death’ seems ‘wrong’, something that shouldn’t happen…especially to me and others who I care about. We can rationalize it but not ‘solve’ it…the misunderstanding is our creating opposites: Life / death. Also the illusion of the continuity of the self? And our identification with the thought / self?
If we are not living in the sense K seems to mean , one could say we are dead. So if the ‘psychological’ self comes to live we better let it inmidiatly die.
Easier said than done? And who is going to “let it”? We are not ‘dead’ in the sense that we are serving some ‘purpose’; we take in, we let out, we procreate as all of Nature does…but we also have this other possibility that can atrophy if not realized. That is the ‘living’ I think K and others have pointed to. The “blossoming”?
Am I, are we able to leave judgment behind? Fully, from head to toe, conscious to unconscious. Are all our thoughts and actions, even in meditation, tinged with self? Is no-self like a limit point that the asymptote can never quite reach?
Yes, when it’s seen what ‘judgement’ consists of. Judgement is based on knowledge, experience, belief, temperament etc. As these factors vary from person to person so will the judging. These differences create conflict. Identification with one’s thoughts, beliefs, self, nourish, maintain, strengthen them. Non-identification reveals their subjectivity.