As for love, I like the understanding that love is seeing-feeling of shared being.
I.e. love is not grounded in liking or duty or commitment or romance. To love is to realize the interconnection between things, pratityasamutpada more or less.
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If I define “spiritual maturity” as “seeing things as they really are?”, it’s because I know my seeing is distorted by my assumptions and beliefs; that I cannot see things as they really are. So it’s just idealizing, speculating that if I lost all my assumptions and beliefs I would see things as they really are.
The mind, the conditioned brain cannot free “itself from its conditioned state” because it can only do what it is conditioned to do. But it can be increasingly aware of what it is doing, so acutely aware of how limited and dangerous its conditioned response is, that it stops completely, and is effectively dead until/unless it resumes operating, but as a radically transformed brain.
So, essentially: To define ‘spiritual maturity’ as ‘seeing things as they really are’ is a form of psychological becoming. It imagines a state different from my current state, a state in which all sorts of truths are available to me. Did I understand you correctly?
How would you define spiritual maturity, what does it mean to you? Ditto for love.
Once we all agree on what spiritual maturity and love are (in this discussion), we can ponder the question of whether love is a good litmus test for spiritual maturity. Hint: I don’t know that it is, equanimity might be better.
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‘Immaturity’ in the case here is desiring a result, wanting change, seeking to
‘become’ etc.
If that is true, then ‘maturity’ is the realization of the falseness of all that.
AND that ‘all that’ is conditioned behavior.
Spiritual maturity is seeing and being with what-is?
Direct perception of the ‘conditioned state’ free of judgement, condemnation, like / dislike as well as no comparison of ‘what is’ with anything?
‘Spiritual maturity’ is just watching ‘what is’?
Watching the show, as someone or other put it.
Watching and engaging with what-is? Just watching seems like going to a party and sitting in the corner alone watching people interact and dance.
That judgement or questioning of what ‘might’ be ‘better’ IS the conditioning. Seeing that is the being free of it? Judgement here implies a less than total understanding of our conditioning?
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I want to be the ‘interacting’ one and the ‘dancer’ and if that turns out to not be satisfactory, then I want to be “riding above the noise infinitely “.
Which brings up ‘desire’?
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I wouldn’t say “all sorts of truths are available to me” because the truth about “me” is that it isn’t actual but imagined. Seeing things as they actually are (it seems to me) is possible only when seeing is choiceless and free from bias, belief, fear, and desire.
How would you define spiritual maturity, what does it mean to you? Ditto for love.
The phrase “spiritual maturity” could mean anything one could imagine, so I’d rather not use it. As for love, I know nothing but what K said about it, that like intelligence and compassion, love is beyond the brain, and until/unless the conditioned brain is free of its conditioning, it can’t commune with intelligence, compassion, and love.
Once we all agree on what spiritual maturity and love are (in this discussion), we can ponder the question of whether love is a good litmus test for spiritual maturity.
I would drop “spiritual maturity” and “love” and talk about what we know our brains are actually doing instead of things we try to imagine.
I don’t know that it is, equanimity might be better.
I agree.
Unsurprised am I! You (Krishnamurti too) usually take a bottom-up empirical approach to inquiry. You start with observable facts and work your way up from there. I sometimes take that route, but am also very fond of top-down, going from high-level concepts down to the nitty gritty.
Yes, giving ‘sitting in the corner watching’ an emotional valence is conditioning at work. As is the seeing of it, the recognition of pattern.
Is desire our prime mover? Does desire make the world go 'round?
It moves us to follow and it opens us to influence? It is necessary for the practical and seemingly ‘deadening’ for the psychological when it is the desire to ‘become’? In the sense that the mind caught in ‘becoming’ is limited to a particular direction? A particular goal?
Is desire like fire? A huge benefit (life-saving) in one form, holocaustal in another.
We can see in our history that it has been…and is.
If desire offers huge benefits along with huge harms, it makes more sense to learn to control it rather than trying to get rid of it, oui?
If one can see desire for what it is, is it a problem, or just something human that happens? Think of desire as farting. The system needs the relief, so let it be and it’s over and done with. It may be rude and offensive, but everyone does it, so unless one is seriously flatulent, it’s forgiven and forgotten. If you think of it as a bad thing that has to be suppressed or abolished, incoherent thought is the problem, not gas.
But what do I know? The conditioned brain can only speculate as to whether the brain free of its self-imposed limitation will have desires or not.
Awakening is extremely, existentially dangerous to the awakener, a kind of death.
(Says the sleeper.)
The potential harm caused by passing gas seems infinitesimal compared to the potential harm of being driven by desire, right?