You’ve got lots of company Rick.
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Yes. I never saw the explanation this way. Thanks.
Being aware of the brain’s conditioning is being aware of and interested in the brain’s identification with its content and its reactions to awareness.
Yes, but what exactly is this awareness? We run into difficulty when we try to observe this continuous stream of consciousness. Our tools of investigation invariably carry our conditioning with it & we start going round & round in circles.
What’s difficult about being aware of what’s on your mind every moment. This becomes obvious when you sit down to “meditate”, attend to the breath, but thought carries on regardless of how determined you are to be quiet, silent, nothing but sensation. Thought just keeps popping up and rambling on… the so-called monkey mind.
And even if thought stopped and the brain was silent, you wouldn’t know without thought verifying it by breaking the silence. To put it simply, the brain is so identified with thought that it can’t stop thinking without ceasing to exist as the thinker, I, me, mine.
Rick this radical revolution may not be that we are a suffering & ignorant entity this moment & next moment so called enlightened -whatever that is. K said giving an interview to East West journal once & said:
"Sir, you can’t do this overnight. This needs years of observation’.!!!
Elsewhere he said acting is like sitting down. The actual moment you find yourself seated in not the moment you started the action to sit. But he said you are acting all the time. Completion of the action actually takes chronologically some time.
That is, we observe over some years but this observation is actually out of time because this moment’s observation is not carried to the next moment’s observation. However it is after years of observation you will get up & move away.
However I don’t think this is to say that insight is piece by piece & put together at a later point to get the whole. Then it wouldn’t be insight but fabrication put together by thought.
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Wait, do you consider this type of thing to be meditation? Or have I misunderstood the post?
I am drawn to the radical nature of worldviews like Advaita and Krishnamurti. But I always struggle with the very thing that draws me: their radicalness. I don’t trust it. The extremes are where the wackos live, like me!
Thanks for the quote, Kule. It’s nice to hear Krishnamurti tone down his messages, bring them towards the level where ‘normal’ humans live. This is a favorite of mine:
Questioner: I find it impossible to be aware all the time.
Krishnamurti: Don’t be aware all the time! Just be aware in little bits. Please, there is no being aware all the time, that is a dreadful idea!
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Well, I didn’t actually suggest anything. It’s simply that @DanMcD said that ‘ALL we are (mind, body, feelings) is conditioned’, so I was interested in inquiring together whether there could be something/anything in ‘what we are’ that is not conditioned. That’s why I asked the question.
From the MaTriX screenplay:
CYPHER: You know, I know that this steak doesn’t exist. I know when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, do you know what I’ve realized? Ignorance is bliss.
No. That’s why the word is in scare quotes.
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Yes, the self-brain only knows by accumulating knowledge, but a silent brain knows in every moment without the need for prior (accumulated) knowledge, nor the need for a self that accumulates such knowledge in the form of self-conditioning. For such a silent brain does not need to know, it simply knows from moment to moment without accumulation.
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As I understand Krishnamurti, a brain is silent when it has emptied its psychological content, but retains its practical content. The problem is not the retention of practical knowledge, but the presence of psychological content because it has no factual basis.
a silent brain does not need to know, it simply knows from moment to moment without accumulation.
The brain needs to know a lot of things to survive, and as long as that practical knowledge arises only when necessary, it is compatible with silence. Psychological content, however, is always incompatible with silence because it is baseless and has nothing to “stand” on but the constant noise it creates, which prevents silence.
Well, actually the actual quote is this (in bold):
EWJ: Do you believe in rebirth?
K: First of all, I don’t believe in anything. Secondly, what is it that is going to be reborn? Say I have been suffering for ten years and I die. Now will I in my next life go on from where I left off? Is there individuality at all? Is there the ego—my ego, your ego, a spiritual essence, the atman? The highest principle?
EWJ: Perhaps it’s just a process.
K: What is that? It’s a process of thought. There is nothing sacred about thought, nor about the things that thought has created in the churches of the world. They worship it but it’s not sacred. There is something absolutely sacred but you can’t pick it up casually, you can’t just believe. Do you understand? Men have searched for this in different ways and never found it, they have given their lives to it. It can’t be found in an afternoon conversation or reading a book, or going to some fanciful meditation. If you don’t find it what’s the point of all this? One has to work on this for years to find out. It isn’t just a game that you play. But people haven’t the time so they worship the one who has something. Or they kill him. Both are the same— whether they worship or kill, both are exactly the same.
You can read the full interview here (in PDF format) or here (in high resolution JPG format).
Brain, mind and thought/ thinking are not mere variants, they have different functions and have different dimensions, also belonging to different approaches of what we understand as living creatures, namely, human beings. When Krishnamurti said the human brain is very old he referred to what science knows about the changes that have taken place in the human brain in order to accommodate human experience along time passing. But actually there is very little that we know about how the brain works in its totality, scientists say maybe 10% is relatively well known. As to thought its function is to analyze whatever experiences the human being comes across, it checks details and uses rationality, that’s why Krishnamurti decided at some point to say thought is fragmented, even contradictory, but saying so may mislead people as we often find it here. As to the mind of course it’s the doorway to ‘a different way of living’ when we care for it.
My message is to Dan, you can see in the upper right corner. He did the suggesting.
I know the quote well, think about it quite often. 
My fault, I didn’t notice and thought it was for me.
My apologies for not being attentive 
May I ask why ‘saying so’ might be misleading, and if so, what kind of misleading according to you?
What you’re saying is misleading because “mind” (according to K and Bomb) is beyond the brain, and it gets confusing when someone here uses “mind” to mean thought.
Inquiry, how on earth can you understand from what I wrote that thought and mind were the same when I said exactly the opposite? If you want to comment on every post people write here please pay attention to what is said, don’t distort it so carelessly as you did here.