Have you participated in this dialogue as if it is an argument? Have you read my comments as if they are the other side of your argument? My participation isn’t an argument.
Wasn’t my first response to you an answer to what you are asking? Something must not have been clearly expressed.
You said, “Have you ever in your life listened to another?”, and we talked about listening. Then you asserted that there can be no listening when thought is active, as if it is a self-evident fact. When I suggested that the conditioned mind can be as curious about its conditioning as it is bound by it, you reacted.
The conditioned mind is bound by the limits it establishes for itself, and those limits are the beliefs and values it identifies with.
My struggle to control is an effort, a conflict - a move away from what is. Actual control is not - it is merely imagined
We have discovered that suffering is the knowledge of good and evil. All effort away from what is happening is due to our fear. We cannot stay with what is, because of what could be.
If we have discovered this fact - it would seem that our first reaction is to try and find a way to escape the fact : how can we un-eat the apple? how can we be free from knowledge? etc
Which kind of proves that we haven’t really integrated the fact at all.
The fact, not being something to figure out and act with a strategy, but rather an unknowing integration with it all?
Is the effect on listening the same, whether control is actual or imagined?
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In effect, am I eating the apple, not just in the distant past, not even yesterday or even the last reaction, but each time that I react? Every reaction IS the eating of the apple.
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The fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and bad in the book of Genesis represents the conditioned mind; the way one fragments the wholeness of life into concepts that empower us to act according to the authority we create for ourselves. But we don’t actually know this because we are completely conceptual, except on occasions of unbearable pain or ecstatic bliss.
We are illusionists, but because we believe in our illusion we can’t dispel it…it’s all we know, and to be without all we know is to be what we don’t know and can’t know without believing.
Thought must be involved, for I am thought.
If I can see that fear is suffering, that the movement of suffering can only reinforce itself, then we see the dog chasing its own tail.
The silence of awareness can only arise if thought is free from itself.
Attention to the movement of fear, rather than to the details of my experience, is key.
When motive ends, seeing what is arises. Mundane reality loses its dullness, and appears to shine as if brand new.
mac,
I don’t understand this question. Are you suggesting that these two are opposites, that either of them doesn’t exist in reality, that either of these are just ideas?
There is thought when the brain receives the input from the senses and when memory is accessed for the body to function in some way (driving, making a sandwich, doing a job and so on). Is that ‘thought that must be involved’ that you referred to? If that thought did not occur one could not function. Right? If there were no other thoughts would there be fragmentation, division and conflict in one? Obviously not. If there is division and conflict with others it would only be because it is initiated by the other(s). Right? Also, as you wrote, ‘Mundane reality loses its dullness, and appears to shine as if brand new.’ Would it be accurate to say that it shines, not ‘as if’ but, because it IS brand new? One simply responds to ‘what is’.
Unfortunately, thought does not stop there, does it? As this other thinking and accessing thoughts (memories) start up, now there is fragmentation, division and conflict. Right? The evidence that this is occurring is that, instead of a simple response, there is a reaction, is there not? A feeling also arises with the reaction, yes? Now can that reaction be simply observed (no motive), without a reaction to the reaction, for a simple observation may reveal something to be learned? Any reaction to the reaction is just taking one away from the initial reaction, which is a form of escape, is it not?
I was just summarizing where this thread/dialogue seemed to have led so far. I think it means that listening cannot occur if we are bound by motive.
Also, I am referencing the definition of human suffering as described in Genesis (Christian Bible).
Thought/time can’t extricate itself from the ‘stream’ because it is the stream. Psychological thought is fear, without its images projected of an illusory ‘future’ there is no fear. It scares itself and then attempts to solve the illusion it has created. The ‘solver’ is the ‘me’ that it also has created. It is a trickster.
I say bring the worst part of yourself to the table and make it look. Don’t leave the most important part of you out of this - your core. The part of you that will push old ladies out of the way to get what you want. (or save puppies from getting run over)
The fear that is me, make it look. If I am serious about getting all the good stuff and avoiding the bad. If I really want to understand the mechanisms of suffering, I can, because its simple. In any case, how would you keep me away from the table?
If I think that this kind of thought is separate from that kind of thought, this does not mean that there really is an actual barrier between them.
Mac
ah, lol, that knowledge, okay, thanks for clarifying. Was wondering whether it was a reference to Nietzsche’s “Beyond Good and Evil”…
re: motive
yeah, motive impedes listening
which reminds Charley of how some people like to do things for others because it makes them feel good (their motive) - which doesn’t - of course - result in them actually being good (or in laying a foundation of goodness within)
Yes, but I’m not always aware of the movement of fear because it ranges from subtle and subliminal to explosive and all-consuming. I can consciously attend to what fear does in the mid-range, but I can only suffer the effects of what it does in its lower and higher ranges, despite my earnest intention to attend.
No matter how earnestly I intend to do something about the human condition, it’s always the human condition reacting to itself, chasing its tail, as you said. So unless one sees this clearly and unequivocally, the tail-chasing continues until one is contentedly tail-in-mouth, or free.
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Intellectually you do seem to have a notion of what it is to experience life as a human being : the experience of being an all important center that somehow has to control what it sees.
And we do seem to grasp that this angst and effort is due to our experience.
But we still seem to think that there is some effort that can free us from the experience.
The effort of attending, is effort, whatever I’ve decided to attend to. (The same as any effort, it is trying, it is fakery)
The thinker that is fascinated by the subject of their thoughts, the painter in joyous creativity, the reader fascinated by a piece of writing - no effort is involved.
Also why do you think you must attend to your experiences? What purpose might that serve? And whatever the motive, are we here to achieve some further goal?- Achieving goals is my curse, my prison from which we are asking : “Is freedom possible?”
No - thoughts will arise. The only question is : when you realise that you are on some habitual train of thought, what happens?
First we must be aware of what thought is. Which is also awareness of what I am, and suffering is. Once we know the process and where it always leads - to a strengthening and repetition of the same - then whenever the process comes to our attention, it dies.
This is the you that creates fragmentation, division and conflict. Totally unimportant and must die. When these thoughts are seen as false, not intellectually but actually, then what do you do? If it is only an intellectual understanding, then more knowledge will be added which just adds to fragmentation and so on. It is only the effortless ending of these thoughts that transforms.
If one is not responding to what is, but reacting to what is, one is caught in thought and cannot see what is.
You wrote ‘If I am serious about getting all the good stuff and avoiding the bad.’ is a statement about the dichotomy created by thought and is a flipping of the good to the bad to the good to the bad endlessly. When thought ends effortlessly, the dichotomies, all of them end. And one is effortlessly in the what is.
You wrote ‘If I think that this kind of thought is separate from that kind of thought, this does not mean that there really is an actual barrier between them.’ There is no separation, no barrier. Thought created by motive dies with the ending of the motive.
What I have been describing is the actuality of doing. If one only talks about this but does not actually do it, then nothing changes except for an increase in intellectual knowledge which because of its very existence is the problem in the first place.
What do we mean by : “not intellectually but actually”? Can you describe what its like to “actually” see something as false (as opposed to intellectually)? What does this event look like?