This makes no sense to me, though it might make sense in French.
Its suddenly seeing that the situation, which appeared to be the whole of existence, that focussed all my urgency, anger, righteousness, was actually just a tiny self projected experience.
I don’t know what you mean by this, either. Sorry.
Awareness would be seeing the movement of self and opening up a whole new world of possibilities
I get what you’re saying here. I can be aware of my conditioned response to what awareness reveals. Since I’m reacting constantly to what is happening, there is constant awareness of I, the reactor, the actuality reacted to, and awareness of how confused and conflicted I is.
We spend the majority of our waking life unconsciously aware of ourselves, others, and the world. I think Douglas is talking about conscious awareness, which is a quite different state than unconscious awareness. When Krishnamurti talks about being serious, he may mean living the conscious life?
If I’m determined to be rich or famous, I’m serious about becoming, achieving, arriving at something imagined, and that means being selective, choosing to be conscious of some things and unconscious of other things. I can’t achieve my goal without charting my course, and that means ignoring as much as I’m exploring, leaving much of what I’m aware of unexamined on my quest for success.
But if I’m serious about finding out what I am, I’m serious about being conscious of everything I’m aware of, and not because I know or can imagine where this is going, but because it’s more interesting and less obsessive to live with what actually is than to live for what-should-be.
Then let’s keep it simple. First of all, what is it that you are trying to understand? Is there an ‘it’ separate from the ‘you’? Is there an object of enquiry separate from its subject? Is there anything observable at all out there in the world that is separate from you as the observer?
K says stuff to the effect of : if you think you are meditating, you aren’t - its tricky folks, calling the state of liberation from experience “conscious awareness” is problematic, as it suggests agency and intent.
When I am lost in my experience, driven by what I know, reality is focussed into a certain state - awareness is kinda like seeing that whole situation from the outside, which changes that whole experience (eg. it can go from feeling that I was doing something highly important, to realising that I was the cause of pain - aka a jerk in common judgemental parlance) - awareness is not something that I provoke consciously.
“if you think you are being aware, you aren’t” - because thinking x, and believing x is true , is inattention. Is experiencing the projection of the known as truth rather than noticing that the projection is being experienced as truth.
I see what you mean. The ‘conscious awareness’ I’m talking about is a state in which you are aware of X (a thing, idea, event, flow of phenomena) and you know you are aware, the awareness takes on a kind of vivid clarity, an illuminatedness. Not in a dramatic sense, the ego does not proclaim “Behold, universe, I am awaring!” But in a modest and simple sense, the awared has a glow to it, an aliveness.
Can thought penetrate into and thus perceive the actuality of existence? Or there is actuality of existence only when thought is totally absent. Then there is only what is with no interference from thought.
For example, there may at first be some element of confusion to all this, either confusion about what is being said or some other confusion about where we happen to find ourselves in the midst of this so-called existence. This confusion may manifest itself as a feeling of frustration or loneliness or fear or jealousy or anger. These feelings are the result of thought. These feelings are what is. Whatever feeling exists right now within the mind of the listener or the reader, that is their what is. If any such feeling is there for you then that is your what is. It may be boredom or indifference or some other such feeling. The point is to find out only about what is and not to move away to something other than what is. The moving away is the flow of thought. Which means one never meets entirely what is. Or - to put it perhaps slightly better - the entirety and the actuality of what is gets denied by any flow of thought. So although thought produced the what is - whether it is a pleasant or an unpleasant feeling - it never just remains with it. It is thought that has created confusion - or boredom or jealousy or whatever else it is - and it is thought that then moves away from it. So the flow of thought is always denying the actuality of what is.
However, if you are serious enough to live completely with the thing which thought has created and to live only with that, you will find something else takes place that is not just another flow of thought.
When you have done this for yourself - that is, when you have observed only what is and not moved one fraction away from it - then you can talk about the nature of the actuality of what you have each discovered with another. And you will find that there isn’t another at all. The thought that created the confusion, the jealousy, the anger, the boredom and all the rest of it, this same thought is also responsible for creating the other as a way of escaping the what is of its own apparent isolation.
But we are moving very quickly now and so it takes a quick, alert mind to keep up. And you can’t come to this with a quick, sharp, alert mind if you have already reached any kind of conclusion about all this or if you have merely accepted a pathetic theory or two. Yet if at this point you are feeling confused and rather muddled in your thinking then this is exactly the right moment to be quick, sharp and alert about it. Then there is only that feeling of confusion and nothing else to interfere with it.
Okay - how about this : there is either consciousness of what I want, or there is consciousness that I am desire.
If there is not a complete picture (consciousness) that includes the movement of the known, but only of what is known (ie. the objects of desire) - then the awareness/consciousness is incomplete.
I can know that I want something, and I can know that I know that I want something - but this is not liberating, its just self referential.
If I wanted to vibe with what you’re saying about conscious knowing in a mystico-spiritual sense, maybe we could say something like : clarity feels like coming home from the wars, it is like a cool comforting breeze that cannot be touched by confusion.
The only war is whatever is going on inside oneself. For the most part, this war is the everyday what is of human existence. Now, to approach this war - which is the actual war of all mankind - without either negativity or positivity, is that possible? Without running from it as well as without attempting to get nearer to it in order to understand it.
You see, either we can continue to fight or we can just be the war. Do you see the difference? We fight for our own corner of beliefs, prejudices and ideals. That’s obvious. We fight endlessly over ideas. But it is impossible to fight with a fact, which is that there is war within oneself. Thought resists the fact with ideas, and with more and more outlandish ideas as the fact refuses to recede. But when thought stays completely still and there is only the fact - the war, the battle, the violence of consciousness - then what happens?
First-order awareness is simple awareness of an object: X. Though there is no explicit self sense involved, there is often an implicit sense: *I* am aware of X.
Second-order awareness (as you described it) is being aware that I am aware of X. There is a more explicit sense of self involved, as you suggested. But there is another kind of second-order awareness (as I tried to describe) in which I am aware of the (not my) awareness of X. This may be leaning towards Krishnamurti’s no observer, no observed, simply observing.
When I “think I’m being aware”, am I aware of thinking?
Is experiencing the projection of the known as truth rather than noticing that the projection is being experienced as truth.
Is this a question or a statement? What do you mean by “experience”? My guess is that my experience is my version of what happened - not what actually happened.
Uh oh! sounds like fighting talk! surely this means war?