I would say that it is so, even from a very early age. It’s just that most of the time we are not aware of it, thinking that we are exploring something other than our own brain.
Is that so all the time?
Unless there is resistance to what we see in that following, why should following a leaf fall from a tree be “arduous”?
Could you please elaborate this?
This is what I was trying to point out, but that possibility was denied by saying that awareness was beyond the brain, as if the brain were one thing and awareness another.
You have confidently stated that the brain will never be ready to be silent and still, and now you’re confidently stating that the conditioned brain cannot act outside of its conditioning.
The brain is conditioned to favor thought over choiceless awareness in spite of knowing that thought is more often mistaken and misleading than reliable and trustworthy. Thought is more like a stopped clock that gives the correct time twice a day, than like a functioning clock that gives the correct time, yet the brain is either unaware of how fallible and unreliable thought is, or is so identified with thought that it can’t acknowledge what it is doing.
There is resistance. Not from watching a leaf, from following one’s thought / feeling without judgement. I am surely not the leaf but I have been conditioned to believe that I AM my thinking. That I am the thinker of my thoughts. So in the attempts to see thought as objective (a material function) , there is a conscious ‘going against’ the entrenched reflex that there is a thinker (me) who is having his thoughts…that’s why the word arduous describes the excercise.
Could you say, the ‘system’ wants none of it!
We could ask the question the same way of a drug addict : why are you more interested, identified with that; highs, thrills, than in sobriety, which is what you need?
So as long as the brain is high on the belief that constant thought is what it needs, the brain is identifying with thought, and the sobriety of silence is the end of its identity, its false sense of self.
But does acknowledging this make much difference to the brain high on belief? If all the believing brain needs to do is to allow the constant movement of thought it’s been sustaining for thousands of years, what incentive does it have to stop? Will it get higher, feel better being nothing but awareness and nothing but human? Can it answer that question without actually finding out, by believing it knows what will happen?
Thought can be as honest as the brain dares to be, and when it is honest enough to know it does not know what happens when the mechanism of belief fails, there’s no telling what will happen.
Yes in a nutshell…but even if it is suffering, miserable, etc , the occupation of thought is preferred, it seems, to emptiness. (thought’s image of emptiness or thought’s image of nothingness)
Yes, because all it has to go on is belief, and all belief has to go on is continuous thought. So until/unless the brain realizes that it knows far less than it believes, and believes too much to act without fear, it isn’t ready to find out.
I think that is what K was getting at: it will take the perception that “freedom is essential” to break through the spell, to awaken the brain to its situation…to its captivity…to its addiction.
Let me ask: Have we been conditioned, or have we accepted the conditioning? On the other hand, do we resist giving up all conditioning, or only having to give up the conditioning that brings us pleasure?
Both. We grow up with conditioned brains that punish, ignore, or neglect brains that are reluctant or resistant to conform, or at least appear to conform.
Interesting, looking outward may actually be looking inward. Is the division into outward and inward ultimately real? Is there an inner world and an outer?
If I understood you correctly, I only see one of the two scenarios I was proposing, namely the second one: that we have not been conditioned, but merely accept the conditioning (sometimes as a reward, sometimes out of fear, sometimes because we don’t care).
Why is a child capable of defending his toys to the death, and not capable of defending himself from the imposition of conditioning? Do you want to go deeper into this?
Absolutely not!
Looking outwards IS actually looking inwards, and vice versa. That is observation.
By the time the child is conditioned to believe in I, me, mine, it’s too late.
At what exact time do you place this “by the time”, and “too late” for what?
It’s too late to stop the accumulation from beginning around the ‘center’ or self-image; the feeling of being an individual…instead of the ‘world’. The memories, experiences, likes, dislikes harden into reflexes and become entrenched in the brain, what K has called the “me and mine”. Thought becomes constant. The brain is only silent in deep sleep….we know the rest because we are living it!
It may be that the ‘right’ kind of education in the child’s early life can offset some of this but I don’t know.
What we are looking at here is if anything can be done about it at this stage of our lives. Can the perception of what has happened to us break through the spell that, ‘everything is, or will be alright’?
We know the snake is not a snake but a rope. But we don’t Know it!
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How does the song go: Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die? We humans want to have our cake and we want to eat it too. Yum-yum!
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When the child is learning to speak and think, parents, relatives, siblings, neighbors, teachers, etc., are teaching the child what and what not to say or think.
By “too late” I mean that when the child is being pressured to conform to the norm, unless it is unusually intelligent or in the care of someone who is unusually intelligent, the child can’t help but be conditioned.