There are occasions when thought doesn’t intrude and silence reigns for a moment, and the unusual experience of direct perception is recorded. But this isn’t “you” looking without the movement of the mind", but the movement of actuality imprinting itself on the brain - not you doing something out of the ordinary. It’s a moment of you doing nothing, not reacting or deciding, for a change.
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James, what you have said applies to me very well as have spent years reading almost all K’s boks and understanding and discussing at intellectual level. Let me personally thank you very much for this thread of yours that has opened my eyes and has bern of immense help. Now my problem is - as I understand what is basically required is a passion to find out - " who/ what am i - a passion for self knoweldege". Awarness K talks about requires passion that is missing. What wil lead to that passion?
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Apologies for not replying. I have been away from the site for a couple of weeks.
I appreciate your question - which I understand to be what will lead to the passion of (total) awareness? - although my immediate answer is ‘I honestly don’t know’.
I don’t think ordinary awareness requires any particular passion or energy beyond what is normal. Everyone has the capacity to be aware. But the quality of awareness that K called attention (which I take to mean a full or total awareness) can only come into being when the mind (or brain) is relatively free from psychological thought (i.e. from the observer, the sense of ‘me’ separate from ‘you’, etc).
When there is this freedom from thought and memory, then the brain has a lot more energy and passion. So, in general we could say that any emptying of the mind of psychological thought and memory makes space for energy to move more freely, without friction. When there is this free movement of energy, that is passion.
K also talked about the importance of remaining with one’s suffering, and said that by remaining with (or meeting) one’s suffering - i.e. without any separation of the observer from the observed (“you are sorrow, you are not different from that sorrow”) - passion is born, the passion of compassion.
The implication is that by remaining with our suffering (without separating ourselves from it as a separate observer) the suffering is naturally emptied, and this makes space for the passion of compassion. Compassion means “passion for all”.
I just realised that my reply to you may have missed an important aspect of your question. The passion you are talking about is
So you are asking, what will create the passion for self-knowledge, for self-awareness (learning about oneself)?
I am not an authority in these matters, but K often spoke about the very difficulties and troubles of one’s life actually driving us to know ourselves, to find out why we suffer, why we are confused and lost.
The problem is that we usually create an outlet for our troubles, a series of escapes, distractions. Probably it is only when we can face ourselves as we are without distraction that we can accept or see the fact that we are confused and lost. And only when we see our confusion (or suffering) directly is there energy, response (rather than merely reaction), and so passion.
By remaining with ourselves as we are - and not as we want to be - we retrieve the energy we otherwise lose in distraction and escape.
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Did read you post earlier but due to ill health ( cold,coght,fever),could not reply. Sorry for same.
Comming to the question of interest/ passion, have often observed things outside like flower, tree etc without any label/ thought etc interfering, where there is only observation, neither observer, nor observed. But when the awarness is turned inwords, say for example when one is lost in thought ( very often it happens) and when one becomes suddenly aware, one sees thinking stops immediately and there is only observation with no centre/ observer. But this attention to what is going on internally lasts only few seconds, and mind goes back to its ways of constant chattering. This way energy gained during awarness/ attention as pointed out by you, gets lost. ( One is aware as you pointed out elsewhere in this thread that K said trying to be choicelessly aware/ in attention all the time is absurd and also not possible.)
Have observed that when one is interested in anything particular, ( this must be same with everyone) complete attention takes place ( like a child lost in a new toy) without any effort. So effortless attention comes when one is deeply interested. Why this interest/ passion is missing. Will suffering will bring it as you seems to have indicated?
Now coming to suffering and attention, when one is in deep sorrow, with eye full of tears, lump in throat etc.,when there is attention to this state of sorrow, i find that even though physical reaction like tears etc does not cease immediately but gradually ( unlike when thought ceases when in state of attention), i start laughing and smiling. One asks - is this normal, is this what K meant by fun in attention or am I going mad.
Still wonder what lead K to have such passion that he spent years teaching, moving around the world even at very old age.
Fully see as you pointed out there is gain of energy during choiceless awarness/attention, that mey lead to passion, but what happens is when mind goes back to chattering, gained energy is lost and one is back to square one.
so is it possible that during state of choiceless awarness / attention, one may come upon something completely unknown/ new that may trigger a passion to find out what is self knoweldege , what is meant actually by K when he said " when I is not other is" ?
As I understand it we already have sufficient energy; the problem is that the energy we do have is wasted through conflict, disorder, etc. So it is the inefficiency of our psychological life that wastes the energy we need for transformation.
And to seek harmony and order - or to seek for more, extra energy, that will bring this harmony - only creates a future ideal that then separates us from what we presently are; which also wastes energy. So the opposite, the ‘what should be’, is a waste of energy too.
Any form of comparison - between the energy we have when we are ‘choicelessly’ aware and the energy we have when our minds are cluttered up - is also a waste of energy.
So our approach needs to be wholly negative: i.e. not to move away from what we presently are, our present disorder, inefficiency and confusion, etc; and not to create or nourish an ideal of what we should be, or compare our present state of mind with a better one.
‘Positive’ action is a waste of energy. We need to live with ourselves as we are, and not seek to act (positively) upon it. As I understand it, this is true choicelessness, or what the ancient Chinese called wu wei (“non-action”).
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Understand you fully James. Thanks. And thanks also for starting this thread that helped in clarity of K’s teaching.
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When reaction just remains with itself, holds itself to account, questioning, examining, it has changed from knee-jerk reaction to mindful response. It has changed from knowing what to do to knowing what not to do.
Doesn’t the possibility arise of choice less awareness of oneself only when there is the realization that there is actually no one in charge? That the self’s (my) feeling of being permanent, existing, overseeing, etc, is an illusion created by thought?
I’m in charge of planning and plotting and proceeding with confidence, knowing that things rarely go as smoothly or satisfactorily as I hope. Nevertheless, I have to plan and plot and proceed because that’s what it takes to survive. I make educated/ignorant guesses, take calculated/miscalculated risks, and proceed with what confidence I can muster. And this is not a problem as long as I can take time out, literally, by being completely here now.
Yes there is plotting and planning going on all the time, that is thought’s function. It is the ‘I’ as the plotter or planner that is the illusion?
Yes, but it’s necessary if one is to survive. Ramana Maharshi, for instance, was in ecstasy constantly, and had to be fed and clothed and attended to because he had no concern for the future. Krishnamurti, however, felt it was his purpose to survive and communicate his understanding to everyone who would listen, so he was no less concerned with planning and getting things done than we are, but he was not bound by the belief that self is actual because he knew the illusion of self is the illusion of time.
Self seems fundamental when there’s no awakening to the fact that time is practical - not actual - and there is no such realization until psychological thought “dies”.
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It is indeed difficult to be practical or functional when in a constant state of ecstasy. Maybe ecstasy should be known as a possibility but used moderately as a respite from the self, unless one has a team of people tending to the body.
As I understand it, ecstasy is not a technique, not something that can be “used”, but the default mode of consciousness when the brain disabused of its conditioning.
Ecstasy would be the end all and be all of being human because it is the end of time, complete liberation from the need to be or to do anything other than what actually is unfolding. But because this mode of consciousness is not practical or sustainable, it occurs whenever the brain needs relief and release from the rigors of practicality; a reminder of what is fundamental.
Are we not a bit guilty of climbing, at most, half way up the hill and mistaking our guesstimates of whats on the other side, for actual facts?
My guesstimate is that even one second of ecstasy leaves a perfume on experience thereafter.
Maybe the universe is already tending to itself? Maybe the universe includes the body?
@DeNiro if you want to further this inquiry together, maybe you should tell us why ecstasy or lack of self might be so debilitating? Oups - reading further up I suppose we associate ecstasy with a story about Ramana Maharshi in some debilitating posture?
There is awareness in observing without observer. Observer is our thought. Lotus sitting and letting go, when thought raise, seeing it , no adding any thought more. We can do it in our activity daily. However, To see the beauty in it, we must have “let it go” mind every moments.
In the case of falling into any of these traps, it’s just a hypothetical thought. We deal with it every day, please understand its meaning, it is the invention of thought, to create a distance between the self and the ideal, the core of this distance is the psychological sense of time.
Use examples from everyday life. Hope they help you
When I was in college, I read K’s books. I can only use my limited self to understand it. Reading is not only an activity in life, but also other trifles, just like study. So I think most people must start with a psychological sense of self motion, which has rational, irrational responses of all kinds, all in this category.
For those of us ordinary people, to understand K’s language correctly, I think the most needed is: to make existence into the freedom of being itself. It’s a freedom we can find entirely in ourselves, not having to be anything we’re not.
For example, when anger starts, we can’t be fully aware of those unconscious parts at first, but the mind must start to control it, and that’s when I say, let’s control it, and then I find myself being the controlling part, and a feeling of joy.
Each such process increases the sensitivity of the mind, which requires us to make a great deal of observation of our own daily life, just to see it for itself, to give freedom to this divided self, until the mind does not care whether it happens or not, and can understand its existence in every moment of its appearance, as if it were a mechanical construction.
This is not an intellectual activity, because all I can see is myself. In my opinion, no matter any person’s thought activity is not personal, but a kind of sharing, just like K said, your change is the change of the whole human.
So the key is that our own daily life, our existence in the mental image of time, doesn’t become something it’s not, feeling, reacting to feeling and so on, we just have to figure out what’s going on in the moment, fully figure it out.
Then we understand that what other people say about us is equal to what I say about myself, that his language is a part of me, and then there is a real connection.
Then you go back to K’s book, you will find that it lives in your life, you can continue to read yourself, your response to K’s words also need to pay attention to, it will be inadvertently recorded by the brain, especially in the subconscious control of the observation behavior.
Due to the translation software, some words may be misexpressed, please forgive me.
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Sounds like a bad habit, a rule. Wouldn’t a mind discerning enough to know when/if to let go, make more sense than a mind that is compulsively, mindlessly, letting things go?
Existence is what it is, but we can only come to terms with it because we cannot be the masters of existence…we can only be humble participants in an incomprehensible natural system…or continue to be the particularly horrible species we are.
So the key is that our own daily life, our existence in the mental image of time, doesn’t become something it’s not, feeling, reacting to feeling and so on, we just have to figure out what’s going on in the moment, fully figure it out.
And this is impossible when there is greater incentive to remain confused and determined to “fully figure it out”. Go figure.
Thank you for pointing that out, we call these activities of the self all right, existence is not completely free, we always escape from it, in fact escape is just one of the activities of the self, so we can live with the fact that whether it wants to escape now, or whether it has a greater motive, you can observe with K’s understanding, whether you see it or not, Just live with the fact that this is a shared, self-active activity that we all have, an active movement based on mental time, that we are deeply connected to, so my movement is your movement, and so is it for others.
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