Musings

“Waiting” here is a figure of speech. It is a waiting without an object (“without hope”, “without love”, “without thought”, etc).

E.g., for Meister Eckhart receptivity (or “waiting”) involves “detachment” - in German, Gelassenheit (translated as “letting-be” or “letting-go”) - which is very similar to the “letting-go” in the Mahamudra and Dzogchen traditions.

The “wrong thing” is whatever is projected by thought, by desire, by the self. So this waiting that Eliot is talking about is a waiting without expectation, without hope, without the projection of one’s longing or imagination.

To put this in ‘K vocabulary’,

Is it possible for the mind, for the self, not to project, not to desire, not to experience? … is it possible for the mind to be quite still, in a state of non-recognition, or non-experiencing? (The First and Last Freedom)

Or, as Eliot says at the end of his poem (in Little Gidding):

“A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)”

It’s a good way of putting it because if one can apprehend how one’s content flounders within the context of the imponderable…

Yes. I think you said previously that if we could be aware of all that we truly do not know, and relate to what we do know (our knowledge) from the space of this vast unknowing, it would be a truly “mind-blowing” situation for the brain.

Yes, but I edited it.

In the sixties, everyone it seems, was having their minds blown. At first, it was a mind-blowing thing to hear. Then it became so common it meant nothing. Or should I say, at first it meant suddenly having Nothing, but over time it lost its meaning?

I think this is partly because European and American society didn’t really have a context for processing what not-knowingness or emptiness (or no-thingness) is. Maybe the existentialists did up to a point, but that was a largely aesthetic and philosophic movement, and it died out quite quickly. At least for the earlier Christian mystics there was a certain shock-value to “letting-go” of their images of ‘God’, because without images and ideas, what is God actually? It meant the ending of their previous beliefs in ‘God’. So they called it a ‘dark night of the soul’ - a psychological shock.

In India and Asia there has always been a feeling that belief and ideas are limited, so there is a certain flexibility in the East with regards to emptiness and ineffability. K and Bohm discussed this a little in their Ending of Time discussions:

K: Vedanta means the end of knowledge. And being a Westerner, I say it means nothing to me. Because from the Greeks and all that, the culture in which I have lived has emphasised knowledge. But when you talk to some Eastern minds, they acknowledge in their religious life that a time must come when knowledge must end; the mind must be free of knowledge. But it is only a conceptual, a theoretical understanding. And to a Westerner, it means absolutely nothing.

DB: I think that there has been a Western tradition which is similar, but not as common. For example, in the Middle Ages there was a book called The Cloud of Unknowing which is on that line, although it is not the main line of Western thought.

K: Not the main line. So what shall I do? … I see the beauty of the earth, I see the beauty of a building, of a person, of nature. I see all that, but when you say thought is limited, I don’t feel it. It is just a lot of words which you have said to me. Intellectually I understand. But I have no feeling for it. There is no perfume in it. How will you show me—not show me; how will you help me—not help—aid me, to have this feeling that thought itself is brittle, it is such a small affair? So that it is in my blood. You understand? When once it is in my blood, I have got it.

This the way K feels about thought: that it is “brittle”, a “small thing”. What can bring about that “feeling” in me? Can he communicate that or is that a feeling that we have to discover for ourselves? For me it goes back to the moment of seeing the light on the hills. A moment of direct awareness. So with thought, its arising and its fading.

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And when that is forgotten, forget and then just “pick it up again”.

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And our experience of existence has more to do with the arising and passing of thought than the actuality that thought is reacting to. So when K says thought is “brittle” and “a small thing”, he describes the world we live in.

Yes that’s how I see it and he’s asking Bohm what can he ‘do’ to have someone see that, “feel it in their blood”


What is the relationship between consciousness and being?


Is one more fundamental than the other?

Do they give rise to each other?

Are both manifestations (forms, aspects) of something more fundamental?

Challenge: Don’t turn to an authority to explore this, outward (Krishnamurti, Buddha) or inward (self).

My gut feeling is being precedes (is more fundamental than) consciousness. I can imagine an existent without consciousness, but not a consciousness that doesn’t exist. But I can also imagine I’m wrong! We think of being as binary: X exists or does not exist. But QM has taught us that, at the fundamental level (of scale anyway), X can be seen to neither exist nor exist, or to exist and not-exist. If existence is not an absolute but a relative term, it might change my sense that it is the ‘lowest’ fundamental.

Just noticed I failed at my own challenge by touting QM as a quasi-authority. Oops!

You also used gut feeling & imagination, is that allowed?

I hear that when we say “Quantum says”, we really mean : “somebody trying to translate the math for journalists says”

Good luck! I’m still trying to understand the question.

Yeah, great question: Are ‘gut feeling’ and ‘imagination’ inner authorities? Let’s say they are. What would it mean for an exploration to drop them, not to go with gut/intuition, not to imagine/speculate? What are you left with for tools to explore?

I hear that when we say “Quantum says”, we really mean : “somebody trying to translate the math for journalists says”

I know enough about QM to know that I know very little about QM. But in pretty much all I’ve read, superposition seems universally held. The jump to equating QM superposition with existence/non-existence superposition is a bit of a leap of faith, ja?

I’m still trying to understand the question.

When you get there, please weigh in, I’d like to know what you think.

As usual, it likely depends on what one means by these words. But if we are generous and take the words in their ordinary sense, the question is:

what is the relationship between bare existence (if there is such a thing) and mind (or sentience of some kind)?

We know through empirical observation and inference that the brain can exist even though sentience (or awareness) is reduced almost to nothing: because this is what happens to us every night when we enter slow-wave deep sleep.

But the knowledge of this bare existence belongs always to a presently sentient (or aware) mind.

The same is true of our knowledge of cosmology and evolution. We know empirically that there was a time when the matter that makes up our brains (and so our capacity for thought) was once the energy and matter making up the matter of stars (which, as far as we know, wholly lack sentience).

However, again, the only knowledge we can ever have of this is what we are presently aware of, in which sentience exists alongside (or as a part of) cosmology.

So I’m not sure that mind and existence as such can ever be separated cleanly.

I guess the test would be whether there is some form of awareness that is able to co-exist with slow-wave deep sleep - (or perhaps even with the disintegration of the brain!)

I can imagine an existent independent of mind. A diamond 100 miles below the surface of the earth. But if this existed, it would not be a ‘diamond 100 miles below the surface’ because diamond, 100 miles, below, surface – these are all mind-created conceptual constructs. (If a tree falls in the woods … )

But it’s hard to imagine a mind independent of existence. By definition, if there’s a mind, that mind exists.

So I agree that a mind (probably) cannot exist independently from existence, in fact it’s an oxymoron! But the verdict is still out for me as to whether there can be an existent independent of mind.

Mind (whatever that is) so far has, in this thread, been paired with sentience and awareness - which is what we and what we imagine other animals (and plants?) are capable of. Basically, we are always starting from our gut feelings and imagination, and speculating from there. Where can this lead?
Some people define mind as the stuff involved in data processing, which is one way of saying that being is mind. The action of being, being a reaction to what is. Rocks being as they are thanks to gravity, erosion, strong nuclear forces etc etc…

If I understand superposition correctly, its a math equation, that we noobs have interpreted as best we can.

Without dependance on conditioning the only way to understand the world is through the wordless moments of Aha!

Don’t we have to begin with the kinds of minds that we already call ‘minds’? Any other kind of mind is already a speculation.

I don’t know if you saw a recent thread about the distinction between sentience and computational “intelligence”?

To feel happy or sad, longing or suffering, it is necessary to possess a nervous system and physical organs that have evolved for the purposes of reproduction and physical survival.

Emotion is chemistry; happiness and sadness involve different combinations of chemical hormones in the brain. Pain is part of what the nervous system has evolved to detect damage (which is why all animals can feel it), while sexual desire is the consequence of an organism possessing gonads. All of this is necessary for the kind of sentience we already know.

But artificially intelligent ‘IQ’ (or computational intelligence) is simply the power of a mechanical device to compute units of data - an activity that can and does exist entirely independently of any physical nervous system that might be threatened with destruction or enticed with the opportunity to reproduce.

A computer is algorithmic - an algorithm being a set of instructions that define for any computational device what and how it should “count” (that is, all algorithms are simply ways of counting). It does this mechanically. But a computer algorithm is ultimately the creation of some human mind - it is not a ‘mind’ itself.

A robot in a car factory drills X number of rivets into a piece of metal because it is programmed to do so by a sentient human agent. A Tibetan monk might count beads all day, but he does this because he believes that this counting will bring some personal benefit to him (or to others).

There may be some kind of ‘mind-like’ quality belonging to rocks and crystals (I personally believe there is), but unless we are absolutely sure about such ‘minds’, we should probably stick to the minds we already know - right? - and these minds clearly involve the capacity to feel pain or pleasure, happiness and suffering. Something that cannot be said for my MacBook Pro.

But of course, as you go on to admit, the very “imagining” means that the diamond is no longer truly independent. So the issue is foggy.

Existence and the mind that thinks about it form a corollary that is difficult to break.

That is, existence without a mind is a mind-made idea. If such a thing truly existed there would, necessarily, be no mind to affirm it; and therefore it can never be affirmed, even if it were true! (just as the mind in slow-wave deep sleep is not aware that it is in slow-wave deep sleep - or else it would be awake).

Like a warm August evening in San Francisco.

Existence and the mind that thinks about it form a corollary that is difficult to break.

Yes. It neither makes sense to speak of a mind without existence nor existence without a mind. Not that ‘making sense’ is the final arbiter of truth!

That is, existence without a mind is a mind-made idea.

How about the map/territory metaphor, does it add anything to our understanding if we look at a map as the mind and the territory as existence? A map can exist independently of any territory, a map of the Middle Earth for example. And territory can exist independently of any map, that of an undiscovered planet for example. (It’s a stretch, I know; go with it! :wink: )

I see what you are saying with the analogy of a fictitious map (on the one hand) and a real but not-yet mapped territory (on the other). But I’m not entirely sure where you want to go with this?

If I put my philosophical hat on (this is a speculative thread after all!), then the reason why I might accept the existence of a not-yet mapped territory (like, for instance, the ‘universe’ that exists beyond our ‘observable universe’) is because I can yet posit the existence of a universal mind in which the unobserved universe still exists (even though there is no human or animal mind there to observe it).

Or if one were a panpsychist one might be able to say something similar, because everything, every quark and lepton can be posited as having some quasi-mind-like property that maintains the existence of a thing even though no human or animal mind ever observes it.

But existence with no mind at all (whether of the universal or pan-psychic varieties) has no coherent meaning, it seems to me. The words can be said, but they have no ultimate sense, for the reasons already given (i.e. such a notion can be proposed, but only by proposing it with a mind; and without any possibility of even theoretically affirming it, because this can only be done with a mind).

Similarly, what is the meaning of mind with no existence? What would it have for content? Even regardless of content, what would such a mind be in itself? A purely empty or non-existent mind is equally unthinkable.

So mind and existence seem to be kindred spirits.