For me psychological freedom where the knowledge of past or the worry about the future shall not interfere in the present and one lives completely in the present.
Awareness, awareness of awareness. Love, of people, nature, beauty. Sensation, feeling, emotion, intuition without interpretation. Emptiness.
???
Aha, makes sense: psychological freedom = absence of psychological time. But it’s largely theory for me, psychological time is present in most of my waking hours. How about you?
Isn’t your knowledge of the past and your worry about the future; aren’t they part of the present? Isn’t your wishing them not to interfere in the present, a source of conflict?
In other words, words.
Awareness is all we have. And since thought won’t quit, it has to be rational, or at least, questionable. When you pile words, concepts, images, experience on top of awareness, all you have is the contents of consciousness; there is no “Emptiness”.
You really think-feel that that to which love, beauty, nature, emptiness point is nothing but words? That sounds pretty forlorn. And here I thought I was the king of negation! Well it seems to me you’ve got yourself painted into a pretty airtight corner, maybe windowless too? Am I mistaken?
The phrase, “psychological time” means nothing to me when I am psychology: the freedom to be I, to be my psychology, to make myself up as I go. I am the way I think and respond and decide. As far as I know, this is the only way to survive - if not thrive and prosper - in this society.
I am a product of this society that has forgotten its origins. I can’t see my social environment for what it is - I can only adapt to it and live with my adaptation, like it or not. I can’t argue with the forces that move me to make my decisions, my choices…I can only live with the consequences.
I have escaped the horrible by embracing the questionable; I have fled from actuality into the arms of my reality, where words, concepts, and images, rule. I can distort actuality as I choose to or I’m compelled to. I am what I decide, for better or for worse.
I think this is true of all of us who think we know.
As well as those who think we don’t?
Opposite ‘corners’?
I include myself in “all of us who think we know”.
I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t as lost and desperate as all seekers are.
Where else is there to be?
Tik Toc?
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Anywhere your seeker sneakers take you.
No ‘coming along nicely’ category?
“coming along nicely”, like everything else we presume to know, is a comforting/disturbing illusion. You can’t have one without the other.
All we can do is put awareness ahead of everything we believe in, i.e., presume to know.
But isn’t that just another ‘presuming to know?’ Perhaps all we can do is nothing. Or anything, everything. (Are they different?) For me this is where reason starts to show its seams.
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If I could do nothing, I would, but I can’t stop thinking, which makes I the problem, the solution to which (I presume) is my demotion to the pronoun I am.
What do you do when all you can do is think, no matter how productive or interesting or entertaining your thinking is?
Thought is all I know because I am it, and if I could think coherently I wouldn’t be thinking constantly, thereby creating and sustaining the illusion of the thinker, and all the rest.
For me this is where reason starts to show its seams.
Where, specifically. Show us a seam or two.
Reason says doing nothing is the opposite of doing something. I’m suggesting they might not be opposites, but different sides of the same coin, the same thing seen from different perspectives. Something is nothing, nothing is something. Reason runs into a paradox like that and only knows one way to deal with it: fix it, resolve the illogic. But ‘fixing it’ kills it. Sometimes you gotta let yer idjit flag fly! Who knows, it might break the stronghold of thought?
You’re overthinking it. To do nothing is to quit what I’m doing constantly, which is thinking compulsively and incoherently.
Have you never experienced the time where you were just experiencing the present time without bothering about past or future? May be just for few minutes…
And yet you speak (write) very coherently about your incoherence. Odd, right?