Yes. The brain is looking for security. That’s a mistake psychologically. Like stagnant eddies on a flowing river. There is no ‘security’ there and none needed. What is ‘needed’ is emptiness, flowing, the stopping of thought". Is that is where the true ‘security’ lies, in being 'nothing (not-a-thing)? Patterns of thinking are a false ‘security’ and an abomination, the hallmark of the ‘self’?
If they’re your authority. They’re just patterns.
Yes and ‘mine’ are different than yours…but the brain is basically the same. My patterns of thinking, feeling, form the ‘self’, right? Are they necessary? Can we live without these patterns? We are going to die and when the brain dies they all go up in smoke anyway; your ‘individuality,’ my ‘individuality’… K’s question as I hear it is, can this ‘patterning’ by thought end now while we are still alive? Somewhere in ‘time’ , he says, we have already died and all of this ‘me’ has already disappeared , so can this patterning / authority dissolve now while we are still alive? While the brain is still alive?
Yes, this is the question, but can the pattern-obsessed mind do anything more than observe and acknowledge its conditioned behavior? You’re saying it can repudiate patterns, but I don’t see how.
I don’t think I used that word “repudiate”. Seeing is all it seems that can be done. (The seeing is the doing?) I guess the patterns acquired give a kind of false security to the brain, knowledge about things, whether true or false. We actually don’t know what is going to happen in the next moment, psychologically though , do we? And that can be unsettling when the forces all around us are saying you ‘should’ know? But I don’t. So we carry this burden with us from the past , me with mine, you, perhaps, with yours and through them we attempt a kind of relationship but we are always divided from one another to some degree. This is important to realize I think, isn’t it?.
Could you give an example or two of the kind of patterns you’re referring to?
I got a few : logic and math - 2 that are really helpful but only used ocassionally as they require effort. Memory, habit, and emotion (aka availability heuristics, representiveness heuristics, affect heuristics)
Important, indeed! This knowledge/memory of the past that we carry with us is the ‘me’ that divides from ‘you’, right? It’s actually a kind of ‘certainty’ isn’t it? I know from experience that you always act like ‘such and such’. And this knowledge of you prevents me seeing you as you are now, and it also creates friction in ‘you’ because I’m already ‘armed’ against you…I’m already in a defensive posture. Hope I’m explaining correctly, but I observed this a lot in my own relationships. There’s people who I feel uncomfortable with. It’s obviously the past/memory/knowledge that’s responsible for this feeling. If I meet them ‘naked’ then who knows what might happen? But I’m frightened to be ‘naked’ and vulnerable.
I think this is the way it is…but there also is some truth in our judgements about the people around us isn’t there? They act from their acquired ‘patterns’ of behavior, thinking, feeling, etc (aka the ‘self’) People who we find nasty, generous, happy, greedy, fearful, ‘self-concious’, confident, bullying, etc. tend to stay that way…that’s how I understand this ‘patterning’, the brain gets ‘stuck’ or settled in certain ways of reacting to the world. The patterns form the 'personality of ‘me’. And it’s this ‘me’ that has to be ‘seen’. That’s what “Just do it!” means: Be aware of the total working of ‘me’ at every moment…not ‘me’ watching ‘me’ which is only more conflict, the duality of the observer separate from the observed.
If someone is a psychopath for example, it might be rational self-protection to approach them with that in mind. A criminal or a psychopath might pose a physical danger to the organism, so it makes sense to hold on to that image. It’s the psychological danger…the fear of being hurt psychologically… that makes us wary in many relationships…and that causes us to maintain images which prevent true relationship.