This is why I said at the start of my post
History is fascinating, and is also useful in understanding different cultures. But when it comes to one’s personal history I don’t personally see the value of living there, that’s all.
The psychological past exists only in memory; or in present habits and reactions that have come into being through past experience, which are also memory.
But the actual present moment, the moment of actual perception, actual living, is not part of memory.
Yes, but unless that actual present moment is directly perceived, it is “made sense of” by a theory or a story. If I was honest enough to know I don’t know what just happened (because I’m inattentive), I wouldn’t pretend/presume to know what happened.
The actuality of existence is passing me by because I’m too dull, deluded, and distracted to face facts in the moment, and too willing to do as most people do: pretend/presume to know what happened.
This is the whole point Inquiry.
We live much of our life in the past, in memory. And the past can never contact the actual lived present.
Our theories are part of memory, including our theories of the present. So they are worthless (psychologically speaking).
Every thought has its root in memory, so it can never know the new, the present.
I find this fact is very interesting.
Yes, because it means now is always new, and I (memory), being always old, can only see what makes the new old.
What is psychological appropriation?
Do you mean cultural appropriation? I’ve never heard of psychological appropriation before.
To appropriate something is to make something one’s own.
Cultural appropriation is usually considered controversial, because it involves making one’s own something that has been made by someone else for a specific context - and this context may be missing when one appropriates it without awareness.
In this sense, appropriation can be thought of as stealing something from another without acknowledging that one is doing so. Or taking something without due sensitivity.
More broadly, the appropriation of knowledge implies integrating into one’s prior assumptions a new set of assumptions, or new knowledge.
But I don’t know what any of this has to do with psychological appropriation.
Maybe it would help to express it slightly differently:
The new is the new.
But if what is looking is the past, memory, then it is the old projecting itself into the present and so failing to perceive the new.
This is why thought, being an adaptation of the old, of memory, can never be in direct contact with the new - the new being the actual present.
Thought is always from the past.
This is why the question arises: is there a different way of perceiving, living, acting, other than thought?
Because otherwise there can never be direct contact with the present, with the now.
Seems onto me that the actuality of existence is always 100% there, couldn’t be otherwise. If you walk around in a dull deluded daze, your actuality is a exactly that: dull deluded daze. Sounds like you are bemoaning the absence of a different actuality where you are more attentive-awake?
Hans Michael Krohnen
September 15, 1943 – December 19, 2023
Inner Landscape
You have to climb the mountain
which is you yourself:
leave behind the habitations,
the civilized arrangements of home and road.
Invade the hidden untamed wilderness
which has been there in silence
from the beginning of time,
closer at hand than perhaps the hand itself,
Waiting patiently, beyond and without time,
for time to run out;
or for the unexpected, unsought onslaught
of that innermost force:
The light which shone on the very first day,
and is shining still
on the mountain-range, yet unexplored,
which is you yourself.
Michael Krohnen
Ojai, California
September 2017
“If you depend on circumstances to make you satisfied with life then you will create misery and chaos, for then you are a plaything of environment, and it is only when circumstances are transcended through understanding that there is order and clarity. To be constantly aware of the process of acquisitiveness, of addiction, of distraction, brings freedom from them and so there is a true and simple life.” JK, Ojai, California 8th Public Talk 2nd July, 1944.
Quantum truth is extremely complicated, you need heavy training to really get the math.
Spiritual truth is extremely simple, you need heavy un-training to get it.
Is the degree of complication (a thought-based phenomenon) a litmus test for spiritual truth? If things are getting more and more confusing and complex, is it a sign something is awry?
???
Quantum theory, not truth.
Science - which is our current best approximation to reality - is not truth.
And yes, scientific theory is as complicated as its area of study. Biology and chemistry can be as complicated as physics.
And, as science involves thinking, which is fragmentary, there is a necessary complication which is added by virtue of the fact of our thinking. This is inevitable.
What is ‘spiritual’? The nature of consciousness and thought may not be straightforward. The inquiry into the observer and the observed, or the nature of method-less meditation, or into the difference between awareness, concentration and attention (and insight), etc - may not be straightforward. There may be natural difficulties posed when we inquire into these things.
But if ‘spiritual’ means to act, perceive, live, from awareness, attention, love and insight - rather than from thought and thinking - then yes, it is radically simple by definition. There is no complicating factor added by self-interest or one’s psychological conditioning. - But who is in such a state of simplicity?
Very, very, very few.
The bare-bones truth of quantum mechanics might be very simple. In fact, I suspect it is! Our representing and modeling this truth is what’s extremely complicated. The same may hold for the spiritual, the distilled truth of it simple, the representation of it complicated. Which begs the question: Is the arduous and time-consuming process of churning through the representation of the spiritual required for awakening (liberation, enlightenment, intelligence, freedom, whatever). Or can we skip right to the good stuff and avoid the traffic jam?
For all we know, there may be none. We don’t really know if anyone’s brain was free of or untouched by psychological conditioning because our brains are bound and limited by our psychological content.
All we know is our own confusion and conflict and how, sometimes, this confusion and conflict is diminished by a partial insight that reveals how bound and limited the brain was before the insight.
So, with this knowledge that the brain can be somewhat relieved of confusion and conflict by partial insight, why, we surmise, can it not be totally relieved by total insight
And furthermore, why can’t we assume that there might be human brains that have never accumulated psychological content, or have negated psychological content through total insight?
Eh, this is pure speculation isn’t it Rick?
There are currently multiple explanations or theories competing to understand quantum mechanics, and all of them imply challenges to the current scientific model of the universe. It is not just that the models are complicated, but the implications for our general scientific picture of the universe are also complex.
The pilot wave model (my own preferred theory) is simple enough to understand at the level of one’s visual imagination. But:
firstly, the visual image is not the actual fact that is pointed to. The visual image of the particle-wave holism is not the actual complexity of the mathematics that it represents. And:
secondly, even if one accepts the theory on its own merits, it opens up as many questions as it answers (which is what lead Bohm to further formulate his pilot wave theory as an implicate order theory, and then even reformulate this as a super-implicate order or ‘ontological’ theory).
If we take a metaphysical theory of emptiness or cosmic monism literally, then reality in its essence may indeed be radically simple. But having such a theory does not make it a fact. The word, the concept, is not the actual thing.
At the level of theory? For sure! All one needs is total insight into consciousness which empties consciousness of its thought-created content. Voila!
But at the level of fact, does one have such insight?
Probably not.
I think there is benefit in distilling the theory down to its simplest essence. But as we all know, theory only goes so far. Realization needs theory and experience, both are indispensible. A reasonably intelligent person could probably fathom (intellectually) the core views of Krishnamurti in an hour. Experiencing these views in real life would probably take a bit longer. 
Yes. I think the simplest essence of Krishnamurti’s teaching is - as @Drax said a while back now - attention. To be in a state of attention. To find out the nature of what it is to be fully aware, attentive. Not to get diverted into theory, which is simply an expression of thought (which, being everlastingly limited, is not the instrument with which to discover fundamental reality).
He often spoke about the supreme importance of meditation, right? Which would you say is more fundamental, meditation or attention?
I would say that they imply each other. Meditation without attention has no meaning. While attention which does not involve an element of meditation or the beginnings of meditation is not what I understand to be attention.
For me, awareness and attention are the first step to discovering true meditation (if such a thing exists).
Would you say that attention and meditation are dual aspects of an underlying … ground? Or that attention and meditation afford us access to the ground? I feel the onset of a potential tangent, please feel free to halt it before it snowballs!