Thought is time. Thought is born of experience and knowledge, which are inseparable from time and the past. Time is the psychological enemy of man. Our action is based on knowledge and therefore time, so man is always a slave to the past. Thought is ever limited and so we live in constant conflict and struggle. There is no psychological evolution. When man becomes aware of the movement of his own thoughts, he will see the division between the thinker and thought, the observer and the observed, the experiencer and the experience. He will discover that this division is an illusion. Then only is there pure observation which is insight without any shadow of the past or of time. This timeless insight brings about a deep, radical mutation in the mind
This man is aware of the movement of his thoughts, so why doesn’t he see “the division between the thinker and thought, the observer and the observed, the experiencer and the experience”?
“He will discover that this division is an illusion…This timeless insight brings about a deep, radical mutation in the mind”
Nice to know, but knowing it’s now or never doesn’t stop time from barrelling along.
It may be that this man’s awareness is not as acute as awareness needs to be; that his awareness is dulled and dimmed by incessant thought.
When Krishnamurti said “Thought is time” he didn’t mean objective-scientific thought and time, rather subjective-psychological thought and time (the process of deriving self identity from the past as conditioning). He often leaves the ‘psychological’ out and simply says ‘thought’ or ‘time,’ which may in turn lead to misunderstanding, since psychological and scientific thought and time are very different. I’ll use p-thought and p-time to avoid this.
What he is saying here is that p-thought resides in the field of p-time. It arises from our experiences and knowledge and conditioning and sense of self, i.e. all fruit of the past. Indeed p-thought is inseparable from p-time, p-thought is p-time, p-time is p-thought.
He saw this as hugely dangerous: P-time is the psychological enemy of man. Why? P-thought/time keeps us stuck in the past, limit our ability to fathom and live fully in the present moment, i.e. reality. It creates and maintains the illusion of a fixed self. It prevents us from being wholly free.
Is there an ‘antidote’ to p-thought/time? There is: choiceless awareness of the present moment. There is no ‘p-‘ in true choiceless awareness.
‘Psychological’ and ‘subjective’ may in some contexts be synonymous, but they are basically different in meaning. ‘Awareness’ is psychological but if we use ‘choiceless awareness’ we understand it is not subjective, it means without the interference of any sort of conditioning.
Krishnamurti distinguished between ‘choiceful’ and choiceless awareness. Both kinds of awareness take note of phenomena that arise in consciousness. The difference: Choiceful awareness is driven by the self and is psychological-subjective, choiceless awareness is not driven by the self and is not psychological-subjective.
Alright, Rick, I think it is clear enough to put it like that. Awareness is understood as a psychological phenomenon, the thing is it is a vast enigmatic world.
I did fair amount of online research searching for an answer to the question of whether Krishnamurti says awareness itself is untainted by psychological time. But I failed. Like many of his views, there is ambiguity around what he meant by awareness.
Krishnamurti expands his view of psychological time by asserting that our actions are based on p-knowledge and p-time, making us in effect slaves to our p-past. (The ‘p-’ prefix is annoying, but I am going to keep using it to avoid confusion between the objective and psychological realms.) Using the term ‘slave’ is intentionally alarmist I think, a Krishnamurtian wake-up call!
P-thought is limited, that is quite easy to see intellectually, perhaps a bit harder to feel. In a nutshell, anything guided by the p-past is limited, not fully free. How does he get from p-thought being limited to living in conflict and struggle? The ‘p-’ is the key here I think. Whenever we depend on psychological forces, self-ego-I is involved, is in the driver’s seat, and the self can only exist in separation from the other, hence: conflict, struggle, disharmony, division.
What did he mean by the somewhat enigmatic statement: There is no psychological evolution. I need to think upon this, will share my interpretation later today.
A brain free of self would have no driver because it is operating holistically. The brain we’re familiar with is of (at least) two minds battling for primacy; an ongoing inner argument.
What did he [K] mean by the somewhat enigmatic statement: There is no psychological evolution.
The illusion of self is founded on conclusions drawn in the past that, if not negated by insight, persist and prevail in the present and future. Evolution is the process of adaptation through mutation. So unless the past is seen for what it is, there is no mutation (through partial insight), and therefore no evolution.
Constant modification might seem like psychological evolution, but it’s only superficial - it isn’t self-knowledge.
The brain we’re familiar with is of (at least) two minds battling for primacy; an ongoing inner argument.
There is the theory of the polyphonic self: The I is composed of a choir of internal voices sometimes harmonizing, sometimes vying for the spotlight. This resonates with my experience, but like all theories it only goes so far, better taken as an illuminating story than truth.
… unless the past is seen for what it is, there is no mutation (through partial insight), and therefore no evolution.
Perhaps there are mutations that happen without seeing the past for what it is, fluke mutations that just happen to happen, and the seeing of what-is follows? But waiting for those would be like waiting for a fairy prince or princess to gallup up and rescue you.
Within this passage Krishnamurti homes in on our thought-felt division between the observer (the thinker, the experiencer) and the observed (thought, experienced). Another way of saying this is the division between the subject-I and the object-it.
When p-thought is used, when we remember, judge, prefer, project, when the I-self is driving the vehicle (the body-mind), this subject/object I/it division almost always exists. (There may be exceptions in which the person is so deeply absorbed in p-thought that there is little or no division?) It may be very subtle, the barely conscious (or even unconscious) sense of being the entity to which something is happening: sight, sound, emotion, idea, qualia. It may be loud: ME! ME! MEEEEEEEE!!! But the division is always-ish there when p-thought is present.
Isn’t all thought, practical and psychological, dualistic?
Isn’t what distinguishes psychological thought from practical thought the belief that I (the thinker) is the protagonist in the story thought (the process) is conceiving and revising constantly? Isn’t this the illusory separation between thinker and thought?
Thought can imagine itself to be whatever it can believe because it can’t see anything but its own mechanical movement, and as long as believing is part of the movement, it can believe anything.
But as soon as thought understands what believing is and how it corrupts the thought process, it can be wary enough to never be bound by belief.
Well anytime there is a felt division into thinker and thought, dualism is at work. This feeling may be very subtle (unconscious even) or very gross (obvious). The question for me is: What about thinking where there is no feeling of thinker/thought division? This is like flow, utter immersion, no room or processing power left to feel or sense or posit a division, just the act of thinking. Is it valid to understand that kind of thinking to be non-dualistic?
With this passage the Thought teaching comes to a close. It consists of three assertions:
By being aware of the division (observer/observed) you will discover that it is an illusion.
What follows is pure observation without any division, p-time, subject/object, self/other.
The insight from this pure observation causes a radical mutation in the brain-mind.
These describe a chain of causality. Awareness of the observer/observed division leads to the understanding that this division is illusory. This in turn leads to observing purely without p-time/self. And this leads to insight that will radically change your brain.
Though I’ve had hints of 1 and 2 (maybe 3 also?) all I can really do is speculate about them. And I’d rather not. Maybe others here can speak of 1-3 from direct experience?