Practical Krishnamurti?

Kinfonet Discussion
41

If you take the example K gives of a child or one’s wife, or a tree or a bird - all he is saying is that if you observe the child or wife or tree or bird through the filter of condemnation, then you are not observing the child or wife or tree or bird. Similarly if you observe the child or wife or tree or bird through the filter of identification, then you are not observing the child or wife or tree or bird.

Isn’t this so? Has it never happened for you that you have just communed with someone or something without projecting your wants and needs, or judgements and dislikes, onto them?

42

Yes. It has been suggested that you follow your thoughts and feelings whenever you can. Not once or twice but whenever you can. This excercise may or may not bring about a deeper understanding of what K is trying to get across. I would also recommend this, speaking from my own experiences…this is the ‘getting wet’ part.

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Here be dragons!!!

(More later, I need a break from my jnanic contemplations, but couldn’t ignore Yeti and Nessie!)

44

Yes, so you ‘do’ while knowing there is ultimately no doer or doing. It’s like choosing to take a path while knowing there is ultimately no path. Use the raft, let it go.

45

They are dragons of our making only… Oi Rick, I do wish you could be serious and simple for a change.

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I get why you might wish for more seriousness. But what’s not simple about my posts?

47

A lot of people have been free for as long as the effect of the psychedelic lasted, but they could only return to the prison of what little they’ve learned about the self and awareness.

48

Yes, awareness is really all we’ve got before/until the edifice of knowledge collapses.

49

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“Truth is a pathless land! Take the ferry!”

50

Your words are simple, but your approach is not.

51

Please elaborate…

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It’s all there on the thread. I seem to do nothing but elaborate.

Not that it makes any difference.

53

I’m not sure this question about ‘self’ has much to do with the simple awareness that K is talking about in the extracts I shared; but isn’t this question the same point I thought you were making previously about intentionality? It certainly sounds like it.

You are essentially saying the same thing now about ‘self’ that I thought you were previously saying about intentionality (obviously these notions are linked).

You are saying that ‘self’ - which is thought, memory - is all that there is.

Before it was intentionality; now it is self, memory, thought.

So apparently you assume that thought and memory (‘self’) is all there is, and this constitutes your objection to there being choiceless awareness (because such awareness is supposed to be free from ‘self’, free from thought, as you understand it).

But then the same question we asked previously about intentionality applies here too:

Can there be an awareness of this fact (if it is a fact) - the fact being that thought and memory or ‘self’, is all there is - just as a fact?

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“Being fully conscious of one’s whole process of thinking, and being able to go beyond that process, is awareness.”

Krishnamurti
Excerpt from “Choiceless Awareness”

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55

Again self free State is not some mysterious, exotic state. When we are fully attentive(especially in something which interests us much), we are already in that state, time just flies( no time) , things just happen, just the observation is taking place. The self comes later when attention is gone to claim ownership of the experience.

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56

Maybe I haven’t been following carefully enough - but this :

Choiceless awareness sometimes arises, when staring at the fire after a hot chocolate for example - these moments are probably essential - but they happen for everyone, not just for buddhists or students of K - what more has our (intellectual) understanding brought us?
Are we now able to be choicelessly aware when listening to some enemy? When my boss is berating me?

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Can we be aware of what we consider to be facts? And can our facts soften, can their seams begin to show, their dependency on thought-memory, feeling, bias, conditioning, groupthink?

58

I think this is the point Douglas. Choiceless awareness is for everybody, not just a chosen few. I don’t think an intellectual understanding of it can lead anywhere: it is something to be done, to be experimented with, to be tested out in daily life - when taking a walk, when sitting in the car, when tidying up the room, when sitting at a cafe or under a tree. Maybe this is more difficult to experiment with in a conflict situation (with a boss, with a supposed “enemy”, with a difficult relative), but there is no intrinsic reason why one can’t be choicelessly aware in that situation too.

There is no right or wrong place to experiment with it, nothing to accumulate as knowledge, no “expertise” to be gained or something to accomplish, no winning or losing, no argument to be had. Yesterday’s awareness is already over, a memory at best.

So one cannot say - “well I tried that and it didn’t work for me”, or “I’ve learned all there is to know about being aware”, or “one can’t be aware for this or that ideological reason” - one can only be aware, or be unaware, this very second. That’s the beauty of it.

Maybe there are depths or degrees of this awareness where there is a complete absence of ego, a complete emptying of conditioning, total attention, insight.

Or maybe there is just the ordinary awareness of one’s face in the mirror, an ache in one’s back, a mood that still lingers from yesterday, the incessant verbal monologue taking place in the mind, the view of the sky and the street from one’s window. There is no right or wrong when it comes to what is. What is simply is, right?

This thread is about the practical things we can actually do with our lives. Experimenting with being aware, and catching ourselves being unaware; experimenting with looking at trees, plants, birds and animals, at people, at our own daily reactions, is something we can actually do - and so has nothing to do with intellectual accomplishment. As the good teacher said,

Nobody need tell you how to look. You just look.

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Speaking personally, yes. Sometimes. Rarely in the heat of the moment. More often after some time gap during which … wait for it … wait for it … the mud has settled.

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Why not? This is the whole point of being alive (of not being a zombie!) isn’t it?

And if what one considers to be a fact turns out not to be a fact, that is something one can only discover for oneself through awareness, correct?

So all this - what you mention (“thought-memory, feeling, bias, conditioning, groupthink”) - can be looked at just as it is, can’t it?

And if one feels one cannot look at it impartially, because one is protecting oneself for some reason, then just this self-protective defensiveness can be looked at, felt, sensed in the body, etc.

The only limits to our awareness - as far as I can see - is the limits that we bring to it through our thinking. And yet we can be aware of that thinking too, no?