Krishnamurti spoke of choiceless awareness because our awareness is selective. We don’t know what it is to be choicelessly aware because our conditioning alters our awareness. We are less aware of what actually is than of what should/should not be. That is, the mind is conditioned to be dualistic; divided by the conflict between what actually (choicelessly) is, and how our conditioning alters awareness to conform to the dualistic reality of our experience.
The conditioned mind cannot imagine what choiceless awareness is. It can grasp the concept but it can’t be choicelessly aware without losing its identity, the result of its conditioning. To be selectively aware continuously the conditioned mind must never see its selectivity. For it to do so is to awaken to the dream/nightmare its experience has crafted.
The human mind is what it is. You need to explain what you mean by conditioning. Athletes condition their minds for top performance in competition. It’s called mental-training.
Yes I agree. The brain is also condition to believe there is an observer and observed which is another division. In fact, observer and observed are the same thing. I imagine you are already aware of this
Inquiry, I am sure can explain her own thoughts on conditioning. But here are mine: We have been conditioned to be Americans, or some other nationality and conditioned to be this or that religion member and on and on. Everything we learn is basically conditioning. Some of it, a lot of it, is very necessary. We condition ourselves to drive a car, do our job, cook a dinner, etc. We are also conditioned to see the world in a way that the majority of our society sees it. We are constantly being reinforced in this view.
Conditioning is such a much discussed and basic tenet of K’s that I am surprised that anyone who as actually read or listened to very much of what K pointed out would not have a firm understanding of what conditioning is. You don’t have to agree or disagree but you would know.
Look, conditioning is the root problem singled out as the cause of disorder. If we know and can identify the problem, the disease of disorder is cured. Have you got the cure?
The problem is not that we can’t identify the problem, but that we don’t understand it completely. For instance, we know a lot about cancer, but we don’t have the cure, the remedy; we haven’t come to the end of cancer.
Krishnamurti said the mind could understand itself, i.e., observe its conditioning so comprehensively that the whole edifice of ignorance and misunderstanding collapses, freeing the mind from its own clutches.
It sounds wonderful, and for all we know, it may have happened for some people…or many. How would we know? Only a free mind knows what freedom is. For the rest of us, it’s just a word for what we can imagine. We are more serious about what we can do with words and images than we are about what they represent.
This is easier said than done. It is difficult to see one’s own conditioning. Have you ever tried telling a Japanese friend that he or she is conditioned and that being Japanese is a divisive illusion? Even if that person is familiar with Zen, it is impossible to accept that eating miso, wasabi with tofu is a bad thing for mankind. And there is a whole host of peculiar cultural practices that you would need to condemn. You could lose a friend.
I am not sure what the term ‘selectively aware’ means. Maybe you have invented it. If the mind is making a selection then it must be aware of the larger group from which the selection is made. From the larger group you make the selection. The awareness must have originally been of the larger group.
Imagine you are at a buffet and selecting your food. You have to be aware of the whole buffet before you make a selection from it.
Thought, proceeding from a wrong concept, arrives at a wrong answer. But of course, thought has selected that wrong concept precisely because it deems it appropriate for the answer it wishes to arrive at. I see that time and again in these discussions.
Maybe but something was ‘chosen’. Some kind of ‘conditioning’ took place. So that one’s thoughts or feelings about something have found a ‘place’. What I care about comes about through my ‘conditioning’ doesn’t it?. When something I care about is threatened I may feel anger, a ‘righteous’ anger. You who do not care about what I hold ‘dear’, you care about something quite different perhaps and we clash: i.e. Trump vs. non-Trump, As long as there is ‘caring’, there is ‘attachment’ and if one is attached psychologically to anything they will ‘care’ what happens to that ‘thing’…If this is correct, maybe that is why K. shared his “secret”, (about an unconditioned mind?) that he didn’t “mind what happens”?
Yes, you are aware of the whole, but you are Selection and your function is not to behold it, but to break it up into pieces that suit your preferences, prejudices, plans, and petty ambitions. Your function is not to learn from reality, but to make it work for you.
Selection is aware of what it’s doing, but it can’t stop until the error of its raison detre is realized.
It seems to me that K cared about many things. He took trouble to care about things. But let’s widen the area and not refer just to things but to all relationship, including people. Should we not care for a our children, for example? I am asking because it seems to me to be a vital aspect of the human that s/he establishes relationships and cares for those with whom relationship is established. You seem to imply this to be a hindrance to realising some sort of “secret.”
To address your very last point, K may have said he did not care what happened, but you need to put that statement in its context and not just throw it in as if it speaks for itself. K said he did not care what happened to himself personally. That is all that is meant by it. Do you honestly believe he did not care about what happened in his relationships? Did he not care about the centers and the schools and so on? That does not align with the K I have come to know who even instructed the male pupils to cut their hair short so as not to give the school a bad reputation with the locals.
Do you care about nothing but avoiding attachment? If you successfully avoid all attachment, will you be carefree, or so full of attachment-avoidance that you might as well get attached to something more gratifying.
No, attachment is an attempt to escape. Attachment and dependency are two of the primary causes of human suffering. This seems like a good enough reason to avoid the two.