I would say neither, but I can only speculate because “freedom” is just a word, a concept. I think of it as something that happens to a brain that is too curious, too experimental, too questioning and doubting to be content, yet too lacking in content to amount to anything.
Sorry, I’m not following - are you being dismissive about your idea of freedom? (reacting to your projection?)
1 Like
Isn’t it both? Why shouldn’t the brain be free to function optimally? And if it’s not, to find the reasons why it’s not. When we become aware that the observer/observed duality is our conditioned way to see the world…and that it’s false, the responsibility is to ‘fix’ it. But there is no ‘fixer’. That’s why the “discontent” arising from the awareness that nothing can be ‘done’ is so necessary?
2 Likes
The discontent burns through the illusory ‘curtain’ of the projected personal reality?
To take it a bit deeper, any desire for the ‘curtain’ to dissolve, disappear is to bring in the factor of ‘time’, the future time when this dissolution would or might occur. What I shall ‘become’ when the ‘false reality’ dissolves…so thought has again moved away from ‘what is ‘ to ‘what might be’!
So is it necessary for the brain to be “occupied” with all of this?
In my reality, freedom is the end of psychological thought, though I can’t imagine such a state.
I suppose if I had ever been free, I would know what freedom is, what I’ve lost, but have I ever been free? Isn’t “I” the antithesis of freedom? Isn’t I the product of psychological thought, the way and the means by which the illusion of I is created and sustained?
If this is so, freedom is simply the absence of psychological thought. But psychological thought is so entangled with practical thought that the conditioned brain can’t distinguish between the two. Practical thought infused with psychological thought is confusion, and this confusion sustains the illusion of I, the thinker, the doer, the executor, the one who knows.
But it is all sleight of hand, a shell game, the intellect testing its ability to follow its every move, and finding its susceptibility to belief. Freedom is a brain free of content, i.e., emptiness,
We’re never taught the art of doing nothing.
The body-mind gets anxious when ‘nothing’ is happening, it’s like dead air on the radio, must be filled with something, anything! If this doesn’t happen, it wants to blank out or go to sleep. Being alertly present with nothing just isn’t in the cards for us, unless we’ve been trained to do it.
Does it matter? What’s this state of ‘being alertly present with nothing’ good for? What are the consequences of doing it or being it, what are the consequences of not doing/being it? Does it even exist, is it possible to be present with nothing?
If I am something (self), can I do nothing?
Only you can know.
If my thoughts arise with ease in a comfortable space - like a small moth flitting around in a huge, empty cathedral - there is no yearning for peace.
If my life is a like a rush hour traffic jam - nothing but urgent thoughts and emotions, bumper to bumper, then the yearning for space just adds to the noise.
Realising that our tight, urgent experience is not truth, can be a blessing. It can be like discovering that we can breath a sigh of relief wherever we find ourself.
We cannot help but learn - if we have seen that our reality is a conditioned experience, we cannot unsee it.
1 Like
If that’s what we experience, what’s not true about it?
Maybe not. (I don’t know.) But even if we can’t unsee it, we can ignore it, hide from it, repress it.
I think I need to start a new religion whose path leads to negative enlightenment. Who’s in?
If I think thunder is caused by Thor dragging his hammer over his helmet; and you think its due to an electrical explosion in the clouds - at least one of us must be wrong.
And both of us might think that our conditioned mental images/explanations are an accurate expression of real things “out there” - which is also highly improbable.
Firstly, this needs a marketing team.
Aha, I see. For me, the only-est thing that I take to be truly true (or as close as it gets) is my experience. Everything else is speculation.
That you are having an experience you mean? Not that the experience is necessarily a true representation of anything other than “what it feels like to be me”?
Oui! There is experiencing, stuff arises in the body-mind.
This is the conclusion you’ve drawn because you’re not able to do it. But no one can “do” it because it is the antithesis of doing. It happens or it doesn’t.
Can an image, a mirage, an illusion, do anything? “I” is psychological thought, the creation and recreation of an imagined self. This compulsive, reactive doing can’t cease and desist until/unless acute awareness of it exposes its incoherence.
Maybe. Maybe not. The jury is out.
1 Like
Yes, I’m speculating.
According to K, for those caught in the realm of thought what he names as love or intelligence has no meaning at all likewise for those through whom intelligence operates what he refers to as the “nameless” has no meaning either, but in intelligence operating through the brain there is neither experience (no recording, no memory) nor experiencer( no “mine”, no “I”) so, I´d say that your statement :
is wrong if you are applying it to the realm of thought where there is perception through the senses and then stuff arising in the brain due to memory, the experiencer-experience thing, but not perception of the whole, of what is going on in the brain which is functioning mechanically, reacting rather than acting and knowing through memory, stored knowledge, associations, etc… The word “experiencing” applies to intelligence or direct perception, it flows, what appears disappears as it appears without leaving impression or trace on the brain, no need, whereas in the realm of thought, as you say, all is based on experience, “my experience”, including what is true and what´s not which doesn´t seem to be reliable except, perhaps and not always, for “me”.
There is not training for that, simple, ordinary alertness is the foundation for the insight and the turn around to take place, and just to look at what is being pointed out what is required.
1 Like
There is the ‘ordinary’ experience where I am separate psychologically from the object of the experience. That experience is reacted to and stored as memory in the brain?
Then there is another ‘kind’ of experience where I am ‘included’ in the experiencing, there is no psychological ‘me’ reacting to what is being seen, heard, etc. And no recording of what is taking place?