Why does it require any pointing to? My life is painful. There is nothing to point to. The truth of it is right here, all around me. And not just around me but within me too.
Your looking only goes so far as to see that you are in pain. That limits the exploration. It may even be seen as ending the exploration before it begins.
Maybe you yourself donāt have this feeling, which means it is difficult to explore this much further. For me, seeing only the relevance of the pain brings about or opens up a very clear way into the exploration.
Thank you. I take that as a compliment. An irrelevant one, but a compliment nonetheless.
What does the exploration entail for you?
Just speaking the truth as it appears. First, that my life is painful. Second, that I am self-centred. This doesnāt have anything to do with perception or realisation or anything of that ilk. It is just about speaking out loud the rather obvious truth.
Apparently, I am a good example of what Krishnamurti said about the self-centred brain. So I take that on board, without any reluctance, without any sense of restraint. There is no pain in it because it is the truth about myself.
In the same way, when I look again at the truth that my life is painful I now find that this pain itself is ebbing away. It is extraordinary. The two truths donāt contradict one another, but when they come into the same orbit they exert their own special influence on each other.
Any two people involved in this enquiry or exploration with a calm and sensitive passion would naturally exert the same kind of influence on each other. Then imagine what might happen with five or ten such people.
Maybe now you can also see the next miracle that is being fomented in all this, but I donāt want to say any more about it at the moment.
Is the truth whatever appears, like sharing your stream of consciousness?
The stream of consciousness is the brainās psychological contents aroused by actuality or by the compulsion to never be quiet. So speaking honestly is vocalizing oneās conditioned responses freely without fear of being exposed, judged, or indicted, but that happens only in fiction when someone has taken a truth serum.
Self-knowledge does not involve or require exposure to anyone but oneself, so when someone says they are speaking honestly, theyāre not completely honest. One needs only to be honest with oneself.
That would be too silly because a lot of what appears in consciousness is irrelevant nonsense. Isnāt your life painful? Arenāt you also self-centred? If what is true for me is also true for you then we have something interesting to look at.
I am not sure that this is true. I feel we have to work it out a little more carefully than just accept such a bold statement. For this is an example of the kind of a statement which may be working against itself in its efforts to reveal or convey something profound. For me, at the moment, the only truth around this particular issue is a feeling that I really donāt know what self-knowledge means. Self-knowledge may be one of those things which we aspire to as an ideal without ever reaching the whole truth about it.
Besides, I am much more interested in finding out what happens when there is an exposure to others, as there is now, purely from the fact that we are talking and interacting with one another. I am not even sure that there is such a thing as the self even, let alone self-knowledge, because just as the pain ebbs away once we start to look at it so too does the nature of our self-centred activity begin to undergo some form of transformation when we are faced with the truth of it.
Perhaps then a better way to express this would be to suggest that the truth is not fixed. The truth seems to be something that changes in the looking at it. But it is necessary to look first at the relevant truth of our own situation or existence without shying away from it or shutting it down too quickly. In this sense, the relevant truth is all about what we are feeling right now as the actuality of our daily life in relationship to those around us. A lot of this is therefore inevitably going to be based on our nervousness about engaging with other people.
So I am nervous about what you might say next. How nervous are you? This is important because it will determine what happens next between us.
Also when undergoing Freudian psychoanalysis: free association. It would be an interesting experiment for a dialogue to say/write the first thing that came to your mind unedited unhoned.
Free association is interesting enough without bringing someone else into it.
Continuous thought is free association when thereās no other purpose in its movement but its movement. It is my busy-ness and no one elseās. If Iām listening to my free association, Iām interested in self-knowledge. But if Iām not attending to what thought is doing mindlessly, compulsively, for fear of silence, Iām interested only in the status quo, i.e., self-improvement.
By the time a word or a phrase comes to a point where it can be articulated, hasnāt it already been edited and honed? The first thing that happens in a dialogue or in a conversation between two people is that there is usually an unvoiced reaction or response, something akin to a grunt or a murmur, something very primitive within the nervous system. So by the time something comes to mind, an awful lot of stuff has already taken place.
Also, what about self-awareness? Where does this sit among what we are calling self-knowledge and self-improvement?
This stuff is often automatic, reflexive: unconscious processes. Can we be conscious of these? What are the consequences of being conscious of them?
Thatās why I asked about how nervous you are. I know that I am nervous to some degree. Each time I engage in these kinds of conversations one is aware of a certain nervousness from the start. It is completely different from what I might be feeling if I were thinking over all these questions to myself alone.
Also, it is different reading a K quote alone or watching a K video alone than when it is a group activity. The presence of the other people makes it a much more vibrant experience. Yet all too often I find that people get lost in a discussion about the finer nuances of what K said at the expense of tuning into the actual, visceral experience of direct human interaction. This is why I asked my original question about relevance.
Conditioned response is a visceral reaction thatās usually articulated, whether vocalized or not. This we know, so whatās your point?
ā¦what about self-awareness? Where does this sit among what we are calling self-knowledge and self-improvement?
Thereās no self-knowledge without awareness of self, but it thereās little or no interest in what self is doing, thereās little or no self-knowledge.
Iām not sure I know what you mean by this. Can you give an example?
How nervous are you in this dialogue with me? Our nervousness of one another is something we have to navigate all through our lives, whether we are two strangers talking here or two friends who have known each other for years, or two members of the same family, or even just a customer interacting with a shop assistant. How nervous are you? Are you aware of it at all? Or are you going to say it is none of my business?
There is the joy of connection and the fear of connection.
Iām not sure ānervousā is the word for what youāre describing. See if one of these is more accurate:
Itās a fairly neutral word, which is quite useful, I feel, because there is no communication possible without the nervous system coming into play. Sometimes we agree or disagree with each other, which may be about pacifying or antagonising the other person.
Does this mean then that there is actually no connection at all when the nervous system is involved? What we experience as joy or fear in our relationships with other people is actually the nervous system trying to come to terms with a disconnection between self and non-self. However, self and non-self are concepts we have adopted to make sense of the world in which we live. Maybe both of these concepts - you and me - are illusory products of the nervous system.