Love?

The below dialogue no. 7 between K and David Bohm from ending of time explores this

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From what I feel, directly experiencing that there is no psychological division or separation is something that happens. K is like a catalyst. In listening to him we realise that thought is not life, perhaps also does not represent life, thought movement as psychological time or becoming stops and there is direct experience of undivided state. Till now we have used thought as a tool to meet life, but in listening to K we realise thought does not meet life but causes separation. Movement of me as thought as thinker as separation stops and in direct experience we see the real nature of life, not as separation. It’s like two soldiers fighting each other. If they have insight they are brothers they will no longer kill each other. The insight into non-division ends movement of division.
How does this insight come about? May be a flag like K questions psychological separation or division. In inquiring and dropping thought at some point of inquiry direct experience happens. Direct experience is direct, not K’s words but K has triggered the inquiry

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Listening in the ‘darkness’ of division to a voice saying “there is no division”!

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And may that voice be a comfort, if ever we come to stand on a precipice between freedom and knowing.

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This is a mixed metaphor and it’s confusing.

To stand on a precipice is to look down at the ground (or water) below, and to stand between two things (freedom and knowing) is to be at or near the midpoint of the two extremes.

I didn’t know that we were midway between them, nor that we were aligned horizontally - hopefully I’ll do better next time.

This seems most important: the “flash” of insight, the light of which reveals that we live in a darkness that sees the world as divided. How does insight come about? Awareness of how we are, how we live, etc? As long as the mind perceives the world as divided, the fear of ‘death’ is a constant.

I say love like pleasure is very brief. It doesn’t last all day. Pain, physical pain lasts.
That is the ugliness of life.

If the brain knew how to quit its disorderly operation it would have done so by now.

I don’t know how insight comes about. K’s point as I hear it is that the mind has for thousands of years accepted the “darkness of division” as the only reality. The ‘self’ is the creator of this darkness, ‘insight’ are flashes of ‘light’ into the situation but not enough to dispel the self, the ‘center’, the darkness of division…the “fact”, he says, is that “there is no division”!

The ‘self’ is the creator of this darkness

The self is an illusion created and sustained by the conditioned brain. It can’t do anything, just as the illusions of I, me, mine, can’t do anything. The conditioned brain operates as if these illusions are actualities without awareness of doing this. It can, however, believe it is doing this (as we K-aficianados do), but belief is the ground of the conditioned brain so it is doing nothing new or radically different from what it has always done.

As we (the conditioned brain) know, it’s not enough to believe we know what we’re doing - we need to see it actually happening, and we can’t because the conditioned brain is a closed system (darkness) that gets occasional glimpses of what it is doing that remind it (us) of what it (we) are.

So until there is sustained light, choiceless awareness, there is no freedom, no end of the conditioning that keeps the brain in the dark, and there is nothing the benighted brain can do but get to know the darkness it is.

The person living from insight and the person not living from insight (aka enlightened/unenlightened) are both constructs (of the mind).
We who live in darkness can move to the light at any moment.
Nothing holds us in darkness, except than we keep turning towards the darkness (ie. selfish blindness)…

The division between darkness and light (ie. fear and love) has been created by thought. I constantly create and maintain the wall between insight and selfishness. And thus I live in this state of wanting not to live in this state.
What am I to do if I see that this is what I do?

Based on the B &K video discussion above from about 30 minutes in.

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What am I to do if I see the snake in the road in front of me is actually a rope? If I am un-neurotic I will probably lose my fear of the rope and move on unencumbered. If I am neurotic, I will probably remain afraid and encumbered. We are all driven to varying extents by neurosis (incoherent thought), right?

I think a more accurate snake metaphor for what is being said is :

What am I to do if I see that all that I can do is react to snakes (because I am so afraid of snakes that I see them everywhere I look)?

Or if we want a love metaphor : What am I to do if I see that my main motivation is fear? that my driving force is desire?

At least ‘listen’ to someone who says: “There are no snakes”?

“What am I to do?” as in “How can I stop being a snakeaphobe or fear/desire-centric?”

According to JK and DB, we haven’t been able to ‘do’ anything about ‘it’ for many thousands of years! ‘Division’ has been the unquestioned ‘creation’ of the ‘self’, as a ‘center’, the ‘me and the mine’. The K message, the ‘voice in the wilderness’ is that it is not true, there is “no division”.

Given what we believe is the case, this is our belief.

Nothing holds us in darkness, except than we keep turning towards the darkness (ie. selfish blindness)…

You’re mixing metaphors again.

Metaphorically speaking, one can’t turn away from darkness to the light unless you’re talking about turning on a switch.

The benighted brain chooses what to do, and can’t choose to quit choosing because that’s all it knows…it can’t do what it cannot do. But if the benighted brain is flooded with light, who’s to say who done it?

Sorry - maybe its not clear that I’m transcribing (with some notes & highlights for extra clarity) from the K & DB video above

Also the expression “turn towards/away from the light” is well known - rather than the litterary criticism of “mixing metaphors” an accusation of using worn out metaphors might be more effective and accurate.

Wanting to stop being what I am, is just the usual process of running away from snakes again.

What am I to do? as in “what am I to do when I see that this is all I ever do?” (ie. this is the process of being me)

PS. In the spirit of litterary criticism, lemme say : Ophidiophobia :palm_down_hand: :microphone: (thats a mikedrop emoji to u bro!) - but maybe Snakeophobia is actually better.