“Yes/no see it.” Yes but I am still learning about it. I am still allowing thought to be conditioned by sensation, although when I sit intently for some time or get into a good discussion about it I feel I see it start to change or pause. Sometimes in the morning before waking I feel my brain can relax there, but it gets going again before really waking.
I’m down! Is this what you mean? For example I would say
Do I feel enough personal responsibility to fully sus out and investigate how my chasing experience/sensation has highjacked thought, its relation to suffering?
I was using the word in its general sense of : how we are perceiving events - or in K parlance : the contents of our consciousness.
Cool! So this game isn’t like a normal/habitual converstaion or debate - its all about listening, accepting and revealing where we are now in the dialogue - no resistance, no “where we should be”. We just repeat/share what we think the last person said.
I don’t know whether @Inquiry is playing (everyone’s welcome - and we’ve tried playing it before a long time ago) - and if we want, at a later date we can always come back and defend any particular idea we feel should not have been skipped over.
Back to the game :
What I hear you asking :
Does it matter that the purpose of thought is to fulfill desire? Are desire and suffering part of the same process?
Isn’t thought used most often in the wrong place to direct us toward our desire. Its an automatic process now which we’ve bought into and don’t question, but it does seem important too.
Its a circle of pleasure/pain and so related to suffering completely. I think I can stick to the side I want but the other one come inevitably.
If, as K said, consciousness is its contents, and its contents are practical and psychological concepts and beliefs, our thinking is incoherent because practical and psychological thought are in conflict.
Awareness is choiceless before thought chooses how to react to it, so there’s conflict between awareness and our chosen confusion, i.e., the fusion of practical and psychological thought.
If you’re using “experience” as the word for the conditioned brain’s reaction to awareness, you’re giving the word a special meaning. But why? Krishnamurti redefined certain words because that was his prerogative.
Are we actually saying that its bad that the purpose of thought is to fulfill desire? Thought shouldn’t be used for that purpose? Its true that you used the word “highjacked” previously.
What should the purpose of thought be?
Or maybe I’m not getting your drift - maybe the words “in the wrong place” are doing a lot of heavy lifting.
Maybe you’re saying that in certain “wrong places”, thought shouldn’t bother striving for some goal? (if so, what wrong places?)
How so? In what way are practical and psychological thought in conflict?
We use words as we have been conditioned to use them - for me that includes my experience of K, dictionaries, books and videos about psychology and neurology etc
Practical thought is knowledge based on self-evident and demonstrable fact, whereas psychological thought (self-image) is based on belief.
Practical thought keeps one alive and well. But if one imagines oneself as a character in a world of other characters, confusion and conflict prevail because that’s the effect of relying more on imagination than fact.
Psychological thought is the reason why we have all this bullying and oneupmanship going on. Its probably why we have difficulty communicating, or to be more precise : why we are communicating such egotistical confusion.
Psychological thought is about me in comparison to others, my position now and how I can improve my position in my mind and and in the minds of others.
Practical thought, though not necessarily always correct, is more about dealing with useful, mundane matters.
Or, making a call to arms, like us vs him because i can’t stand him.
The pronoun I will probably suit your post better, if you make a habit of it.
Also, you may want to consider, not everyone “tries” to be superior. Effort is for the inferior. Some are factually demonstrably superior. Not to accept that fact, is a pointer to inferiority, jealousy, envy etc. not to mention a skewed way of looking at things. Some may say a friitcake way of looking at things.
In the Merriam Webster Dictionary we can find definitions like the following :
“observation of or participation in events as a basis of knowledge”
“something personally encountered, undergone, or lived through”
“the conscious events that make up an individual life”
“the act or process of perceiving events or reality”
You are the one bringing up the idea of direct, as opposed to conditioned or distorted perception - and it is undoubtably an important concept to clarify.
We might ask what we mean by direct perception : Is it to perceive as if I wasn’t me? A perception that occurs in the absence any past conditioning?
Is this possible - and if it is, so what? Is perception without interpretation fundamentally superior to a subjective, a relative experience? Which would in itself be a necessarily discriminatory conclusion.
It would also imply that clarity or freedom from the known is dependant on circumstance : the absence of the known (which is not freedom but dependence or determinism)
The absence of a center, would seem to necessitate the absence of a point of view.
(nb. intellectual analysis of this stuff might actually come at the price of increasingly complex conclusions)
Krishnamurti used the phrase “direct perception” because, we assume, choiceless awareness without reaction to it was real for him. What we know, however, is reaction to choiceless awareness according to our conditioning.
So yes, perception without the reaction of past conditioning, the chosen psychological content that reacts to choiceless awareness.
Is perception without interpretation fundamentally superior to a subjective, a relative experience?
Why wouldn’t it be?
Which would in itself be a necessarily discriminatory conclusion.
It would also imply that clarity or freedom from the known is dependant on circumstance : the absence of the known (which is not freedom but dependence or determinism)
This is where you go off into a world of your own. If choiceless awareness is not
“superior” to chosen presumptions about actuality, the burden is on you to explain why not.
Right - its simple A equals A, and A is not equal to notA.
Freedom from the known is not equal to dependance on the known.
Preference is a form of discrimination.
Superior and inferior is always relative or subjective - ie. requires a center and periphery.
Me wanting direct experience, or choiceless awareness (or any other “superior” stuff) is just my usual conditioned responses at work.
Me wanting stuff that I don’t understand is just my usual confused response to authority.
Pointing out that things are not as we vaguely imagine they should be, is just that.