I found another relevant passage on this topic I thought worth sharing:
Love and mercy, kindliness and generosity do not cause enmity. When you love, you are very near truth. For love makes for sensitivity, for vulnerability. That which is sensitive is capable of renewal. Then truth will come into being. It cannot come if your mind and heart are burdened, heavy with ignorance and animosity. (Talk 9, Bombay, 14 March, 1948)
Inquiry is imo like an early warning system: He raises an alarm when he spots potential self delusion. The upside is this helps keep us honest by showing us how we might be fooling ourselves. The downside, like any good early warning system, its sensitivity to danger has to be set high making it prone to registering false positives: Alarms that are triggered erroneously, without taking into account the context or subtle nuances of the ‘self-delusional’ statements. This can be annoying and offputting, even seem arrogant. But, for me, the upside trumps the downside, especially considering how prone we all are to falling into self delusion!
Yes Rick, I see things the same as you here.
We still try and address the person, not his presumed (by me) function
People are messy! Functions are tidier, more manageable. (Guess I should look at that, eh?)
“The person” is what one imagines. Since all we have here are the words published by a human (or a bot), all we can reply to is what those words say, imply, suggest, or allude to, if anything.
Yes, that’s a good analogy James. I was just interested in exploring a little more what impact intention or the lack of it has on awareness. Any ideas anyone?
Thanks Sean. I don’t recall the aspect of intentionality (in relation to awareness) being mentioned (at least explicitly) in your previous question, so I’m glad you’ve brought it out more clearly here.
Yes, this question of intention is a little bit ambiguous in Krishnamurti’s teaching. Although on the one hand K often unambiguously denied any place to motive, will, determination or premeditation, he also encouraged his audiences to put his teachings into action, to act positively in relationship to the things he was talking about.
He often encouraged his audiences to “listen”, to “pay attention”, to “negate” or “deny”, etc - all of which are positive actions. And the fact that he lambasted his audiences for not listening, for not paying attention, for holding onto opinions, etc, implies that he felt some degree of agency is natural and to be expected.
So what are we to make of this implicit agency in relationship to awareness? Perhaps there is a space - as K himself seems to have suggested - for setting aside some time to play with awareness, to become physically and inwardly still and quiet and then see what happens.
At the K schools sitting in silence at the beginning of the day, or for some moments during the day, is a daily activity that the schools actively encourage - and K was instrumental in creating that culture. And to make space for such an activity obviously requires implicit agency and intention - an intention to sit still and be quiet (at least verbally quiet) for 5, 10, 15, or 20 minutes.
But in parallel with this, K’s teachings warn against making quietness into a conscious and deliberate “practice” or mechanical habit. So it seems to me that there is some intelligent balancing act that is required between being a self-conscious agent and being completely negligent (in relationship to sitting quietly).
K’s general teaching on this topic is ‘negative’ (i.e. not appealing to a positively deliberate act) - in that it is by becoming aware of the fact that we are (presently) acting ‘positively’ through motives and intentions (of conscious likes and dislikes, of choosing and resisting, preferring and rejecting, etc) that we begin to be negatively or ‘choicelessly’ aware:
[Intelligence] comes into being only when we are passively aware of the whole process of our consciousness, which is to be aware of ourselves without choice, without choosing what is right and what is wrong. When you are passively [choicelessly] aware… the problem begins to reveal its content… Most of us are incapable of being passively aware, letting the problem tell the story without our interpreting it. We do not know how to look at a problem dispassionately. We are not capable of it, unfortunately, because we want a result from the problem, we want an answer, we are looking to an end… [So] one has to be aware passively [choicelessly]. This passivity is not a question of determination, of will, of discipline; to be aware that we are not passive [choiceless] is the beginning. To be aware that we want a particular answer to a particular problem - surely that is the beginning. (The First and Last Freedom)
What do you make of this?
Sean and James
Nothing wrong in having intention. What’s more important is whether we are aware of the intention. If we are aware of the intention, letting it fill our being, it has a certain effect of acting out.
For all the talk of not having intention, desire etc. K in his biographies is described to having said that if he really wants something, it expresses itself and gets fulfilled.
Perhaps you could expand on this a little bit? K talked about allowing one’s reactions and responses inwardly to flower (by which I understand him to have meant an inward, rather than an outward, “acting out”). - Is this what you mean, or something else?
Yes. This is why I was saying that there is some ambiguity about what K said about intention and agency (by which I don’t mean that he did not point out the problems of conscious agency, because of course he constantly highlighted this).
For example, K spoke about awareness as being effortless; and yet he also sometimes talked about the fact that paying attention to one’s conditioning involves “arduousness” and “real work”.
This doesn’t negate the emphasis K put on effortlessness and non-intentionality (“there must be no motive”), but it points to a certain nuance in this area that perhaps we often miss.
I haven’t done a search, but even though K never (or only rarely) spoke about the importance of having a ‘pure intention’, it is clear from his talks and discussions that he encouraged (in his audience) an attitude of listening or sensitive receptivity to ‘what is’.
Such sensitivity or receptivity (what he also termed vulnerability) implies having a relatively quiet brain, and therefore might be thought of as something like what is meant by the words ‘pure intention’. - Though whether we can consciously or deliberately create such sensitivity and receptivity through a deliberate intention or effort is questionable.
What do you think?
There is often confusion between the general, amorphous desire that one might have for moksha, freedom of intelligence, enlightenment etc… - And the deliberate practise of willing oneself to become enlightened/compassionate/choicelessly aware.
In Zazen we say : “No goal!” which means you might have some goal for coming to the dojo and sitting down, but during your zazen you are not trying to become something.
Hopefully, there is no need to explain that the latter (intent to become via intent itself) is meaningless - Although, I’m probably being too hopeful (as humans are involved) and stuff like the “secret” (believe and you will receive) has affected our world view.
Maybe @Drax is actually proposing something a bit like the secret here :
What I meant was intent is no obstacle so long as one is aware of the intent.
Yes, to be aware itself is effortless. But to stay with it is indeed very arduous. When there is Anger/hate etc etc depending on conditioning don’t go away hastily and one needs to stay with those energies. Then ‘what is’ sometimes changes quickly and subtly and we need to learn to catch those subtleties in our awareness. This does lead to increased sensitivity as we are aware of the subtler aspects. And vulnerability is there because our psychological defences melt away in the awareness leaving us stark naked to ravages of energies of ‘what is’.
No, deliberately/ willfully sensitivity cannot result. But if we are aware of our wilful/ deliberate attempt at being sensitive it does lead to increased perception.
Don’t know if I am being clear here.
Tricky stuff indeed. One surely cannot ignore our own conflict and confusion - especially when we express them so clearly. (We can, I mean its not useful to seeing)
Thanks for your replies Douglas, James and Drax. I will reflect and reply.
It’s confusing. Adhering too closely to K’s words doesn’t help. How does one who is free, unlimited, tell those who are bound by fear, desire, belief, and insecurity, what to do? All the unlimited one can say is, “Watch yourself and find out what you’re doing, and why”, and all the bound, limited one can do is attend as assiduously to the inward (one’s stream of consciousness) as the outward.
All the pointer can do is give a clue as to what to do, because the more the pointer says about what to do, the more significant the pointer’s words become than the self-knowledge they point to.
Yes. The whole of K’s teaching (as I understand it) is merely an expansion on this singular suggestion. As today’s daily quote (slightly edited) points out:
self-knowledge … is not the fixation on a particular picture or idea, but a constant awareness, a constant understanding of every thought, every feeling, as they arise.
But nobody else is in a position to be aware of ourselves except ourselves. This is the natural limitation of any teaching (whether K’s, Buddha’s or anyone else’s). The teaching (the “pointer”) is merely putting into words an action that must be taken (by us) spontaneously, non-verbally, without any motive.
We cannot will such an action, or coerce it into being. Self-knowledge is not a matter of suppression or decision (the use of force). So any effort we make to be aware must deny awareness. And yet negligence is not awareness either.
So self-knowledge implies creativity: it is like witnessing the birth of something that has never been before and may never be again, something that (therefore) cannot be mechanically repeated.
Right. So maybe a little of the Zen attitude is useful in this regard. The word is not the thing, the finger pointing at the moon is not the moon, if you meet the Buddha walking on the road, ‘kill him’, etc (obviously not literally!).
If the pointer’s words are no longer being heard as “Watch yourself and find out what you’re doing, and why”, then we can simply drop them (for however long we need to).
I’m new here, but a long-time on and off student of K. I used to believe that identifying or belonging to a well-established institution like the church, would bring comfort, protection from fear, and/or certainty to my life. But I recently surrendered that belief and the freedom that was almost immediately experienced brought me a deep awareness of compassion for others that I did not have from my pre-conditioned belief system. The bird is free from it’s cage.