There is no difference between thought (belief) and the “me”. The “me” is thought.
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Is there a ‘controller’, a ‘me’ that stands apart and controls what is? Or is there just what is and an image that feels apart from it? An image that is in conflict with what is when what is is not going the way ‘I’ wish it to go?
Is this the basic duality?
I look out at Nature and take in what I see and hear. I have no ‘control’ over it. But here in myself I think that I can. If I’m worrying, I want to stop worrying. If I’m frightened, I want to not be. If I’m happy, I want it to last, etc.
Was K pointing at this when he wrote: “Real change is the denial of change?”
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You are wrong…
I wouldn’t say “controller” because that suggests a conscious entity. I think it’s more accurate to say that there are beliefs, presumptions, that alter perception in the way that rose colored or dark glasses alter perception. These beliefs are so firmly established and unconscious that we’re not aware of their distorting effect, i.e., the centrality of I-me-mine consciousness.
Without this center, this lens through which we view actuality, we are actuality, which is to say, everything and nothing. So yes, this seems to be “basic duality”.
Was K pointing at this when he wrote: “Real change is the denial of change?”
I don’t know, What’s the context?
Direct perception of our surroundings is going on continuously. This is the information coming in through the sense organs. The ‘raw material’. Thought identifies and evaluates the info and in this mode acts as another of the senses. It is when thought “occupies “ the mind that perception is clouded, ‘daydreaming’ for example. That is thought in the wrong place.
An experience I had of this was walking in the woods thinking about this and that and suddenly the walking stopped and one foot was suspended in the air. That shocked me out of my ‘daydream’ and I looked down and there was a large black snake lying across the path beneath the raised motionless foot! I would have almost certainly stepped on it if the brain hadn’t reacted immediately to the visual input it had received of the perceived danger. ‘I’ was totally unaware of it.
I am not sure at all.
Yes, beliefs, convictions, certainties we are unaware of holding dear, “occupy” the mind and distort direct perception. Such falsehoods, myths, wishful/dreadful thinking, etc., are like an occupying army in a country besieged for so long that it has lost its innocence.
Dan, I may be mistaken but I seem to remember the wording differently, Something more along the lines of “Real change is no change.”
Regardless, my understanding of this statement- and I may be mistaken - is that the normal state of the human mind is one that is continuously engaged in the process of thinking, that is, problem solving, moving from here to there, plotting and scheming, righting perceived wrongs, figuring out adequate courses of action, etc. The degree to which we actively disregard the actual present in favor of an imagined future clearly demonstrates how defined we are by the activity of change.
To truly have no directive that we need follow - including the ‘denial’ of change - even for a second, might well be a miraculous occurrence, perhaps it is even that state of freedom K alludes to in his teaching. This is what I imagine a state of ‘non-change’ to be like: a carefree, lightness of being in the timeless present. Seems so extraordinarily simple, yet is so elusive. Because it would require the ending of the denial of the present and one not brought about by thought. Thought is a perpetual motion machine that cannot deny itself despite any claim it may make to the contrary. Any such attempt, as most of us here can attest to, only fosters more conflict and consequently regenerates the desire for further change as remedy.
Here is the quote from The Urgency of Change (Chapter 4):
K: Any movement from what I am strengthens what I am. So change is no movement at all. Change is the denial of change, and now only can I put this question: is there a change at all? This question can be put only when all movement of thought has come to an end, for thought must be denied for the beauty of non-change. In the total negation of all movement of thought away from what is is the ending of what is.
No change is change 
Desire for change is business as usual.
Yes, the avoidance of what is. Can thought not choose between what it approves of or disapproves of psychologically, but totally end its movement there? An observation without the distortion , assessment by thought?
An observation where there is no ‘space’/time between the observer and what is observed?
The avoidance of what I think is.
Must I judge my interpretations? Am I a slave to my ideas?
If you are asking if thought can “totally end its movement”, I don’t know.
We experience thought as constant stream of consciousness when we’re not employing it (skillfully or not), and if it did stop, who/what could say if not thought?
This question arises from reading and hearing K. He states that this non-movement is essential. This non-movement would be a decision by the thought/brain if it were to take place. There is no ‘I’ to make such a decision.
There is no ‘employer’ of thought, only the illusory thinker. The thinker has no control over the movement of thought. Its movement in the psyche may be as James put it, a lack of discernment by the brain as to its appropriate place to operate. I think it’s obvious that its almost constant movement in the psyche is a ‘misplacement’ but ‘obviousness’ it seems is not enough to have it take its proper place as a technical tool and cease its current occupation as a ‘center’ in the mind.
So the employer of thought is an illusion?
Yes. An invention of thought.
But an illusion is a mirage, a hallucination, the appearance of something that isn’t actual. It can do nothing. So who/what says the illusion is the culprit?
I don’t think there is a “culprit”, just thought moving from its technical role into the psychological where it created a self image.
Look, I feed the birds around here. The chickadees and one other have a preference for a certain seed, the black oil sunflower seeds. They take one and fly to a branch where they hammer it open, eat it and then go to the feeder to get another. It doesnt occur to them to grab them all and stash them somewhere so they have them at their disposal. Human thought has done this, for survival, “because it could”. It went over the line with the ‘me and the mine’ and there was nothing to stop it. We’re looking into this in ourselves.
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But is it thought that has done it, or is it the human that uses and abuses thought? Isn’t thought just a mechanism, a means of communicating, describing, calculating, etc.? Why do we keep saying that thought is doing this or that? It is the human with its fears and desires and ideas that is using thought to carry out its will, how ever evil or stupid it may be.
When we say guns kill people, we’re not blaming guns for doing what we designed and manufactured them to do. We use guns to do things we are ambivalent, confused, and mistaken about.
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Is there an entity, that you are calling a “human”, that has a ‘will’ and can choose how it will think and what it will think?
Is this ‘human’ another word for ‘awareness’ that is the “watcher” that K has said can look at the stream of thought but not choose any of it?