How so? Descartes got to the Cogito based on the assumption that we may be wrong.
Unlike the heart and the lungs which can be tested for their health and efficiency, the brain may be damaged in ways that are not obvious. ‘Me and mine’ may be a type of disorder that the ‘comforts’ of society has normalized? Psychological problems may have arisen in the brain since human’s hunter/gatherer days when all its attention and energy was focused on the tribe finding food to eat and being careful to not be eaten themselves by predators or captured or killed by rival tribes.
What’s the difference between my tribe and I, me, mine?
Being human involves more than identifying with tribal customs and beliefs. It involves understanding thought and how not understanding thought creates havoc.
Observing what is, being human seems to revolve around assumptions, theories, quotes, and ideals; perhaps it has always been this way. Instead of seeking something beyond, can there be a simple staying with the fact as it is?
Assuming you define ‘fact’ as whatever is present in awareness, the act of seeking beyond is also fact when it happens. Staying with the fact is remaining aware of whatever is present in awareness. Is this an esoteric skill you can deepen or is it simply looking within at the content and movement of consciousness?
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As I am shocked and dismayed (as usual) at your use of the word “awareness” - seeing as we are on a K based forum, and that the concept of “choiceless awareness” exists - I will try to rephrase your question :
What does it mean to “stay with the fact”? How is this magical “staying with the fact” different from “grasping and holding on to a particular set of the contents of consciousness” ?
“Non-confrontational language”
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Sorry - there is shock and dismay as usual at the use
I think it’s anti-magical, it attends to reality rather than fantasy! And has nothing to do with grasping and holding, though should these arise, they’re the fact.
The fact of what thought is doing now is no less factual than everything else that’s happening, but it is more important than everything else because it perpetuates the illusion of I, the thinker.
Thought is all about I, the thinker, until it is just thought, doing what it does.
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Perhaps the act of seeking is itself a movement away from the fact.
The movement of thought is not a fact in the sense of something actual and present. It is a representation, an abstraction, a reflection of memory and conditioning. The fact is not the content of thought but the awareness that thought is moving.
To see that thinking happens without giving it authority or reality beyond what it is (a mechanical process) is to observe the fact without distortion. The fact is not the thought itself, but the actuality of observing thought as it arises and moves.
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You think about how dreary your life is and how great it would be to be enlightened. The thought is a fact. The thought’s content (salvation!) is an image that has been generated by seeking beyond the felt dreariness of your everyday life. Likewise the feeling you have of dreariness is a fact, the dreariness is an image. The processes arising from identification as I are real, factual, the images generated are not.
We need to be careful, as calling thought a ‘fact’ risks conflating the act of thinking (which is observable and real) with the content of thought (which is often a projection, assumption, or image).
This distinction is vital because thought tends to reinforce its authority by labeling its conclusions as ‘facts’. For example, the thought ‘I am dreary’ turns into a self-reinforcing belief, whereas observing the actual process reveals: ‘I think about how dreary my life is.’ This shift allows for direct observation of the movement of thought, rather than being caught in its conclusions.
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Thinking is the fact, the process of it. This process generates what we call thoughts. Thoughts exist like waves exist: insubstantial impermanent dependent. To deny thoughts exist is silly, to call them facts is, as you say, potentially misleading.
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The movement of any mechanism than runs constantly is the background of consciousness, and what the mechanism is producing is the foreground, that which gets attention.
If consciousness is its content, being awake means living with the sound and fury of constantly streaming content without mistaking it for anything more than sound and fury?
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Yes, could we inquire whether it is possible to observe the process of thinking without being caught in its impermanent content, seeing thought as thought without assigning it the authority? What would that observation reveal about the nature of thinking and its relationship to reality?
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This touches on the question @Inquiry had about what K meant by ‘being nothing’. To watch the movement of thought without becoming the ‘thinker’ is to BE awareness itself. Awareness is not-a-thing. It seems that for this to take place, a ‘mutation’ has to happen in the brain. Since there is no ‘controller’, what could create the conditions for such a mutation to take place?
K used the word ‘attention’ to point at this ‘new form of awareness’. He also pointed out the importance of staying with it from ‘beginning to end’ and not falling out in the middle. (Or words similar to that)
Bohm’s comments about ‘proprioception’ of thinking also bear on this.
Another of K’s comments in regard to this comes to mind: “Be attentive when you are inattentive “.
I found this conversation between Krishnamurti and Bohm very revealing in this context, taken from:
page 258
K: We said the other day that the wall could be broken
down through insight - if insight does not become translated into
an idea.
DB: Yes.
K: When insight is discussed, there is the danger of our making
an abstraction of it; which means we move away from the fact, and
the abstraction becomes all important. Which means, again,
knowledge.
DB: Yes, the activity of knowledge.
K: So we are back again!
DB: I think the general difficulty is that knowledge is not just
sitting there as a form of information, but is extremely active,
meeting and shaping every moment according to past knowledge.
So even when we raise this issue, knowledge is all the time
waiting, and then acting. Our whole tradition is that knowledge is
not active but passive. But it is really active, although people don’t
generally think of it that way. They think it is just sitting there.
K: It is waiting.
DB: Waiting to act, you see. And whatever we try to do about
it, knowledge is already acting. By the time we realize that this is
the problem, it has already acted.
K: Yes. But do I realize it as a problem, or as an idea which I
must carry out? You see the difference?
DB: Knowledge automatically turns everything into an idea,
which we must carry out. That is the whole way it is built.
K: The whole way we have lived. DB: Knowledge can’t do
anything else.
K: How are we to break that, even for a second?
DB: It seems to me that if you could see, observe, be aware - if
knowledge could be aware of itself at work… The point is that
knowledge seems to work unawares, simply waiting, and then
acting, by which time it has disrupted the order of the brain.
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Not if after that reminder we go back to business as usual without taking into account what we have just done.
On the other hand, who exercises the will to update the reminder over and over again, and how long will this reminder be necessary, which in reality seems to serve no purpose?
So let me ask: does meditation depend on an act of will?
I am deeply interested in knowing what that unchangeable – and therefore inherent – nature of existence is. So could you please… ?
I’m listening