What is the relation of unawareness to awareness?
What is unawareness? When is the mind unaware? If a person is aggressive, is that person aware of that or unaware of that. Generally it is partial awareness which is unawareness. The person is aware only of the word. The word is not the thing as Krishnamurti says. Thinker which is absorption of thought is aware only of the word. A person who hates reduces another person to a word. Same we can see in media. It is a play of words. A film star is first a human being but he or she is looked at as a word, not directly as a person just like you or me. Our lives revolve around a play of words which is not real awareness but just words. We generally feel we know, but we know only the word, not directly without word.
Is this awareness? No it isn’t. It is just a story we tell ourselves about what the world is through judgement and we live in that.
Then what is awareness? It is not this.
We have a limitation in discussing or sharing this as it depends on whether we are aware, just listening without judgement, as we know word is not thing, word is not awareness, word is not reality. Either that or we are caught in this judgement process, word story, then awareness cannot be conveyed as then mind believes it knows, but all it knows is words not direct relationship with another. Discussion can only help us know that words are only for communicating, not judging.
A mind caught in judgements will probably only function on verbal level. It is not observing to find out directly but believes it knows
If we are torn between silence and the chattering mind, we are left with this conflict.
On the one hand we seem to believe that silence is essential, but cannot indicate why; and on the other my reality (my noise) seems of utmost interest and importance.
If we are to be free from experience and wholeheartedly, effortlessly embrace silence, something more than “because my guru says so” is needed.
Would it help if we turned the question around? eg. Whats the problem with noise aka my projected reality?
“Chattering is a normative description “. A judgement: Thou must not chatter….why not instead, ‘my narrative’? As for silence, well, we all know ‘Silence is golden’. 
We’re looking into the human problem of conflict, fear and violence and these ‘narratives’ of ours can run counter to one another and before you know it we’re hitting each other over the head. So isn’t that where ‘silence’, if possible, might come in? If the narratives come to an end, no more hitting over the head?
We are not “torn between silence and the chattering mind” - we are compulsive chatterers…we can’t choose to be silent.
Whats the problem with noise aka my projected reality?
It deprives one of the silence that solves the problem of noise.
Can there be a listening to the “chattering, noise” etc inside the head, realizing that there is nobody in control of it…without freaking out?
We know that incessant thought can be harnessed for the practical purpose of critical thinking, reason, etc., so at times it is being controlled by the intellect. Usually though, it’s just going on its own, doing what it is conditioned to do, and can be ignored or not, depending on how interested it is in what it’s doing when it isn’t being practical.
As for “freaking out” over what thought does on its own, that may be one’s initial reaction, but eventually one realizes that thought is a runaway train that can guide and govern its movement at times.
I would say the lack of a controller applies to the body as well and especially ‘little mister’!
Yes, but the autonomic nervous system is not the effect of delusion.
There is no action to get to the other shore.
Just change in the way one is living, be aware of the psychological conditions in one.
Watch the way thoughts influence the way one talks to others, the way one respond to others, the criticisms, the images one has created about someone and this image influences how one behaves with them. See the anger as it arises, the fears one holds, the attachments to someone or something, the desires, the greed all this is part of each human being. Seeing this in oneself is you, and the seeing is the change. It’s a constant living awareness every day.
You seem to be saying you’ve done it, you’re free, unlimited, selfless, etc.
Others have made the same declaration here and one has to wonder why anyone would declare it at all. The change is what matters - not whether others believe one has or has not undergone the change.
If you believe you’ve transformed, you need others to share your belief. If you know you’ve transformed, there’s no you to do anything.
No one outside can share silence or passive awareness with us, just like no one outside can share or give a good restful sleep. So how to discover for ourselves?
If you look at your own thoughts, what is that? Say you instead of watching TV or following someone, you sit, close your eyes and look what is happening in your mind. To look at your own mind you don’t need to read or gather some knowledge, you don’t need to follow someone. So in this looking at oneself which needs no doing at all, which needs nothing at all, which is just space, what happens. In looking at yourself there is no division, there is no doing, there is space to look which is space of non-doing, space that is not activity of thought. So in looking at ourselves without the outer movement of thought, we discover a space in which there is no division, we see thinker is actually just thought, that space is silence, non-division.
Thought cannot touch that space, so nothing outside that is based on thought can touch that, so gurus are useless, reading books for knowledge of thought cannot help. All that is division. We need to discover for ourselves directly, otherwise it is just words in area of thought with its division. It is thought that is dividing and it does not know silence. Dialogues are only helpful in pointing to us that our mind is not silent, but outer thoughts which are words cannot experientially directly show silence.
Yes of course - hopefully everyone can see that.
The question we are asking is : what is the difference between noise and silence? why are we saying there should be more silence and less noise?
@danmcderm is proposing that its got something to do with violence.
Why should there be inner silence and not thinker as judge. It is difference between sanity and insanity, peace and conflict, compassion and hate, learning mind and habitual mind. The reason to listen to K is also same. To discover a different correct way of living without conflict, without fear, without sorrow, a way of freedom
By it’s very nature of happening now, not in time, is it possible for an insight to be partial?
Talking about a state of selflessly observing of how John evaluates. Dropping something isn’t a goal but it seems my prejudging something you say is worth looking at within the context of man’s destructive behavior. Is seeing that I’m prejudging something you said, a change in seeing what you said? If so, it seems this allows for the possibility of something getting dropped but I don’t really worry that part. More interested in seeing whether a misinterpretation has taken place.
This way I understand this, correctly or incorrectly, is the nature of the immeasurable, the unknown, awareness, silence, whatever you call it can’t be seen directly. It’s existence is revealed as that from which insight arises, the insight that says OMG John in prejudging what Doug is saying. Where did the insight come from ? That seems like magic.
I’m uncomfortable talking about that. I’d rather talk about what of John’s mental activities actually are, the emotional reactions, and the images he’s creating, and his prejudgements and misinterpretations, seeing the specific conditionings and perhaps even a little about their source (which is ultimately all of humanity as learned from K) but the sources in my own life, and all the havoc that all of this has created and continues to create. That’s why John is having reactions to the personal and emotional getting shut down in the discourse. It’s because the witnessing of all of that, revealing it, saying it, sharing it, IS living now moment to moment. It’s an unraveling of the conditioning. I feel the suppression of it traps us in thought.
All of this is just a perspective, held provisionally, open to new revelations, subject to change,
If you’ve ever had a partial insight you wouldn’t theorize about insight because you’d know that whatever insight the conditioned brain can have is partial until/unless its total.
Thanks John - I’m mostly hearing concerns about communication, care for each other, and harm reduction - in which case I’m with you.
Yes, we have agreed (for the sake of this question) that silence is good (aka sane, compassionate, peaceful) and thinking is bad (insane, conflictual, etc)
The question I’m trying to ask is why? How does the process work? What is it about thinking (or experience or knowing) that inevitably leads to suffering?
How would we describe the process that leads necessarily from knowledge to suffering?
How could we explain to someone why freedom from the known/meditation is essential?
Thought isn’t the problem - it’s the way thought is utilized.
We know we must have practical thought, reasonable thought, unbiased, open-minded, critical thinking, but for this thought must be limited to its place, which it is not when the brain can’t see thought for what it is has limited itself to thought.
The human brain did this to itself a long time ago and has yet to see the error of its way and put thought in its place. Why it hasn’t is an interesting question because if the brain is capable of putting thought in its place right now, yet doesn’t do it, it may be that the human brain is hopelessly corrupt.
We hope this isn’t the case, but hope is the means by which the human brain perpetuates and sustains its corruption by equating hopelessness with despair, and choosing the former. The human brain is caught in its own trap.
The only way out, it seems, is to lose hope without finding despair.
What do you mean by ‘suffering’? Mental not physical. Sadness? Fear? Unsatisfied desires? Desperation? Seeing the poverty, violence, cruelty, ignorance etc in the world? Sickness, loss……?
Animals suffer physically, I don’t know about mentally, maybe some.
My ‘opinion’, living in nature around animals is that if we don’t find a way out of this, we won’t last……Pessimism? ( we have a word for everything!)
Btw does anyone have ‘opinions’ about why we’re here in the first place? Aliens planted us here? (someone suggested that to me!)
Isn’t our ‘magnificence’ being squandered here amidst the roaches and the rats?
Btw They Are ‘suffering’ big time!