I didn’t say anything about “special compassion”. I said that I don’t know what compassion is. I know only what K said about it.
I’m not sure that feeling guilty for our bad behaviour, is useful for inquiry. Surely it is at best a partial response - a habitual response from the known.
I don’t know what you mean about anything being “useful for inquiry”.
I’m interested in my reactions, my decisions, my feelings, fears, desires, etc. I’m realizing how mechanical and predictable I am; how I’m not actual but reactive.
Hello again Douglas. I would say that my level of attention varies a great deal. I can be sitting on a train and be very aware of what is going on around me. For example, I am observing the people, their faces, their clothes, how they move, and I am listening to the voices and sounds around me, aware of the smells drifting in the air with my senses sharp. At these times, my mind tends to be silent, not full of thoughts. At other times, I am on a train and completely lost in my thoughts and only very vaguely aware of what is going on around me. There are levels of attention when I am somewhere in between these two extremes. How do you see this?
Hello Sean,
I don’t know where to go with this. In the moments when we are at ease, and there is no movement of comparison/judgement of the situation from the center, this is a form of silence - but habitual judgement could be going on unconsciously.
I reckon that our conditioned projections of the world (our world view) feels so much like actual reality that we take it for reality. (rather than conditoned projection).
For some liberating insight to occur, maybe we need to be aware that what I see is always me. And all this without effort - no trying to observe the self.
We can always start by being compassionate with our self. This is what a daily meditation practise is about I think.
Here’s something I wrote the other day about non-self and compassion : Mindfulness, also called Love, because it embraces all that presents itself, is always there in the silence, ready to shine through all beings.
The mind is so busy and full of conclusions and opinions, whereas a still mind is alert and open to what is offered. I suggest from now on to speak about Mindstillnes
Yes - nice. As usual words are always interpreted subjectively.
Is what is being presented to our consciousness full or empty? Still or in movement?
The teaching of Sunyata or emptiness can be defined as : Reality is not filled with the concepts that I project into it.
The teaching of co-dependant origination or inter-being implies that it is difficult to define the frontiers of “independant things” - things are just useful concepts.
Anatman or non-self indicates that the image we have of ourselves is also just an image.
Whether or not reality is still or in movement, the important thing seems to be freedom of intelligence - freedom from the known - freedom to Love - which seems to arise from attention. Which is what we seem to be having trouble talking about.
PS - I posted this elsewhere : K says awareness is the habitual perception/interpretation via the senses and knowledge - and thus implies that there is not the usual processing of information during attention (which is dffferent from awareness)? But there were no takers - maybe it might hook someone here?
Yes. The ‘undiscovered country’ of ‘attention’. The ‘deeper’ awareness that surrounds all things, that can’t be ‘grasped’.
And the “trying to observe the self” is just another trap we need to pull ourselves out of…speaking of “we”, if we are the ‘world’, the world of humanity, then ‘we’ don’t ‘die’ until the last human has turned up his / her toes. N’est pas?
Hello Douglas. I’m not sure about this habitual judgement going on unconsciously. Can you give an example? As far as I can see, we really only have our observations when it comes to figuring out what is going on around us. As I said before, our levels of awareness and attention may vary a lot so we might be more or less in touch with what is going on around us at any given moment. If we can’t trust our observations, we have to depend on the observations of others, which may not be such a good idea.
I’m referring to unconscious habitual knowing via our personal/cultural conditioning. For example, I have been influenced by my experience with people of North African descent during my childhood (which includes what my entourage has told me about Arabs) - now as an adult, whenever I meet an Arab, I know stuff automatically - I may be aware of what I know, but I might not be aware of what is going on psychologically - I may be aware of my world view, but not that it is me projecting my conditioning.
We know we can’t trust our observations, so we trust the observations of those we trust are better observers than we are. Trust is risky, but if we can’t trust anyone to level with us, can we find level without trust?
I realise that my answer to this question was slightly off the mark - I’d like to try again though again I have moved the goalposts slightly, by using the example of behaviour.
Our actions are caused by a whole load of different stuff of which we are conscious of practically none. For example ;
I’m walking my dog and she is pulling too much on the lead for my liking, and suddenly I react by jerking the lead back or shouting an order at her in anger. Was I aware that my amygdala was still in a hightened state of stress from a bad phone conversation that happened 10 minutes earlier? Would I have pulled the lead as hard if my dog was of a cuter variety rather than the rotweiller type? Would I have gotten as angry if I had eaten a sandwhich or drank some water before heading out for the walk? What about my testosterone levels - were they maybe still a bit high from stuff that happened last week? What about the stress that had been happening at work last month? What about all the times in my life I had looked in amusement at other people being pulled around by their big dogs - had that affected my experience? What about my childhood experiences with violence in the playground - did that affect my experience? What about the stress levels as a foetus in the womb, or the cultural world views of my ancestors? Surely we are not aware of all that is going on that affects my consciousness and behaviour?
You are of course right that our behaviour at any given moment is the result of myriad, complex reasons which are near impossible to disentangle. As far as I see things, all we have to work with is K’s assertion that conditioning - the result of past knowledge and experience - distorts our experience of the present moment. The filter of conditioning operates through thought, and in the choiceless observation of the movement of thought we can be free of our conditioning and able to experience the present moment without the distortion of the past. That’s my understanding of the teachings Douglas. How do you see this?
Thats the theory - which I could reiterate as : choiceless observation frees us, in this moment, of our current relation to what is.
Moreover, the theory seems to state that choiceless observation arises from an understanding of the movement of knowledge and fear aka who we are. And that this insight arises if we can be free from knowledge and fear. Tricky. Does this seem correct?
Our “current relation” being no relation. I am the observer and all that ‘out there’ is the observed. Two worlds: the world of ‘me’ and the world of everything else. I want to belong and I don’t know how. Have I been going in the ‘wrong direction’ to find a solution?
Does reciting this as if one knows it is true help to find out if it is?
Is it any different than testifying to one’s faith in God?
I may be of the opinion that Krishnamurti spoke the truth about the human condition, but does this belief do anything but strengthen my sense of myself, the very thing that needs to be brought to light?
Yes, I think it does help to have a certain clarity about what K’s teaching actually says, or at least what my understanding is of what he says - there seems to be a lot of confusion about what we all understand. I have no idea what point you’re making about “testifying to one’s faith in God” but it seems you are that you are a little angry that I have stated my understanding of what K’s teachings say about conditioning. Again, I have no idea why you should be angry about this, if indeed you are. But then people and life are very mysterious at times.
Hello Douglas. Yes, the theory is there but how we put this into practice is where I think we have different understandings. How do you understand we can become aware of our conditioning in our day-to-day life.?
Hi Inquiry, thanks for your reply. Am I a proud believer? I don’t really think of myself as such but I might be. Always good to doubt even the wisdom of K and remember that he was a fallible human being like the rest of us (although an extremely rare specimen).
I’m not sure why you rejected Sean’s statement here Inquiry?
Maybe you took him to mean that he believes himself to be completely free from “conditioning”? - because that’s not what I understood him to be saying.
I took him to be saying that when we are aware (without choice) of our conditioning - of the movement of our thinking and feeling - then we are naturally more available to what is occurring in the “present moment”. - Would you strongly disagree with this?
On another thread you say that
if these tunnels [of conditioned thought] were illuminated, revealing thought’s heretofore hidden content, thought would stop in its tracks
Isn’t this somewhat similar to what Sean was saying (even going a little bit further than what Sean was saying)?
All I hear Sean saying (in his original reply to macdougdoug) is that we are conditioned by all kinds of factors (such as the ones macdougdoug enumerated in his post), and that these are carried over into our present experience by habitual thought and feeling (which distorts the present).
But, if we can become aware of this process - at least to some degree - then the conditioning can break down (to the degree that we have been aware). I think this is valid - not as a statement of belief, but as a reasonable human statement of present experience.
Perhaps you are reacting to some things that have been said by other people elsewhere on the forum who may genuinely be being dogmatic? But - in my opinion - I don’t think Sean was in this case.
