Acceptance is choosing, drawing a conclusion about myself, which is something I do all the time to perpetuate the illusion of myself.
One knows how well or how poorly one listens by hearing all the interjecting, interfering, denying, dismissing, distracting, ignoring, and distorting one does while supposedly listening.
When one truly deeply accepts that one is not listening, what happens in that moment?
What happens is what always happens: one is deceiving oneself, choosing what to believe about oneself instead of realizing what one is actually doing.
Thatās a confusing question because itās meaningless to accept a fact and impossible to reject a fact when you have no choice. Facing a fact has nothing to do with acceptance because It just is, regardless of what I do because I am not real, not factual. What I accept is invariably whatever upholds or supports the illusion of I.
You can neither accept a fact nor can you argue with one.
It may be a matter of semantics, splitting hairs so to speak, but I think the distinction is critical.
This immediate hands-off perception of fact is what I understand to be Kās version of meditation.
Experience has no place in the revelation of fact. Any idiot can do it. In fact the idiot may have a better chance of doing so. Which is why in my view K warned about steering clear of anyone who is convinced they have gotten it.
Dev, what is āitā? And would one (not self) know that one has gotten āitā? As I sit here pondering what āitā is, I am only speculating and so, stop because itās fantasy and of no value.
Steer clear of K? Or had he not gotten āitā?
Confusing. Was he the only one who could possibly get āitā? He said anyone whose brain was not too damaged could get āitā, didnāt he?
There is nothing to get, that is the point. Nothing that can be held and cherished. We canāt rest on the laurels of previous discoveries, whether they be real or imagined. K himself, if we take him at his word, did not fall back on his previous experiences. He started from scratch every time in his talks and dialogues, from knowing nothing, having no idea what would transpire. So he didnāt āget itā either. He presumably spoke as if it was the first time he was looking at any of this. He insisted he was working hard every time and implored his audience to do the same along with him. His teaching is wholly negative. There is no positive assertion as to what needs to be done, what stance needs to be adopted, regardless of whether we deify it as awareness or anything else we hold to be sacrosanct. This levels the playing field for all of us. There is no one who sees more clearly or is better off than another. It is our positive assertions that separate us. This is about being consummately human. Happy is the man who is nothing is how he once put it.
Is that the same as āhappy is the human who knows what it is to be humanā?
I ask because K seemed to be saying that for the human brain to be sane, it must realize its limitation, and that realization frees it be silent, nothing but awareness, not only of itself, but of what is beyond its conditional boundaries.
The brain has created a telescope that lets it see for the first time more of the vastness of the universe it is part of. Can this image of the immensity bring about awareness of how the self-image, the āknownā, the āmeā, limits it , binds it psychologically?
Knowledge of āthe immensityā doesnāt make any difference to the self-limiting brain because its notion of freedom is being free to believe whatever it chooses to believe when and where it decides to exercise that choice.
Back in the sixties it was believed that one could learn by sleeping while a recording is playing, but research didnāt confirm the belief because there was no evidence to support it. Is there new research on so-called āsleep-learningā?
K makes the positive assertion that listening is necessary for transformation and it is not done. When it was suggested to me that, because of the things I talked about, I would like what some guy named Krishnamurti also talked about. I read Think On These Things almost 50 years ago. It was his insistence of the truth of listening that drew me to stay with his talks. It was, back then, and is, now, also a truth for me. And, still, almost nobody listens.
The great thing about written dialogue is that we can carefully lay out what we want to say - thus what we have written can enlighten us about what we are saying, who we are being - it tells us a story about what we are, what drives us. If we care to listen.
PS. Like here above - Iām being a bit preachy and a bit cowardly.
My introduction to Krishnamurti was āThink on These Thingsā, too. But I donāt think I listen or see any better than I ever did for having studied Kās teaching. All Kās teaching has done for me is to lay bare the self-centered sensibility that confinement to the limits of the brainās conditioning sustains, and the false sense of escape from this limitation that imagination and belief provide until (if ever) the brain awakens to what it is doing.