Must the brain be aware of the mechanics of its conditioning, or is it enough to be aware of the effects of its conditioning? The machinery is just the witchcraft - its effect is what matters.
When the streaming brain knows it is practicing witchcraft, it stops.
Yes, now can we put it this way?
At some point the thought/brain realizes that it is chasing fantasies that are nowhere to be found except in its imagination. So the thought/brain naturally collapses and stops its mindless pursuit. So all the previous noise now becomes silence, leaving space for awareness to arise.
On the other handā¦
You cannot heal a diseased tree by cutting off the diseased branches (the effect) without first knowing the cause of that disease (the mechanics) and eliminating it. Otherwise the emerging branches will become diseased again.
So if the brain/thought is only aware of the effect of its conditioning, that will not only not end its conditioning but will re-nourish it. On the other hand, what awareness does is to bring conditioning (including the most hidden ones) to the surface and uncover them, not the effect.
So to be aware only of the effect and to think that this will eradicate the cause that created it is to continue moving in the field of conditioning (and therefore re-nourishing it).
I certainly feel that a sensitivity and responsibility towards the effects ie.harm - can be powerful.
But my first reaction to the question was one of : how are they different?
They seem like the same thing, its just that the inner confusion of separation and selfishness is expressed in action - either towards itself or in the world.
This experience of selfish fear as the the ultimate dictator of truth is suffering - but we can also say leads to suffering - because we speak in terms of cause and effect we can say that the mechanics of suffering results in suffering.
But we can also say that fear and desire is itself suffering.
Yes, but the cause is not the mechanism, the tool utilized, but the intent of the utilizer, the brain choosing to operate this way.
what awareness does is to bring conditioning (including the most hidden ones) to the surface and uncover them, not the effect.
Yes, but examining the machine and understanding how it works wonāt stop it from operating. It stops when its power source is cut off, and its power source is the brainās intention to empower the machine.
what awareness does is to bring conditioning (including the most hidden ones) to the surface and uncover them, not the effect.
The hidden cause of the brainās conditioning is the brainās intention to be a believer/achiever instead of being in communion with intelligence.
We can say a lot of things about suffering but we canāt see what is causing it because it is the effect of the brainās disorderly operation. We are victims of a brain disorder that we canāt find the power source of until the brain realizes it is providing the power to perpetuate its disorderly operation.
To put it as simply as possible, I am disorder because I donāt know what I actually is, so if self-knowledge is not my primary concern, I may never know what I actually is, and never know anything but disorder.
Iām still confused.
Arenāt I the power source? I mean self-concern is the motivating dynamic.
And isnāt this effort for the delusion of psychological gain the disorder?
In other words I am the disorder and the motivation,
Maybe this is what you are saying.
Maybe Iām just confused about the idea that there is some mysterious complicated hidden source/cause of harm that is hidden from us.
Yes, I am the disorder and the motivation, but the mechanism of disorder was designed and powered by the intention to operate this way thousands of years ago by our predecessors, and we have inherited it because itās ānormalā, and weāre punished or banished for not conforming to it.
I have some knowledge of how an internal combustion engine operates, but I canāt always find out the cause of itās occasional malfunction because my knowledge is insufficient. But if the problem is that it runs continuously when it doesnāt need to, all I have to do is turn it off, pull the plug.
If the brainās disorder is caused by its continuous streaming of its content, the brain needs to be aware of what purpose this serves, and if it finds out its purpose is to sustain disorderly operation, it can stop energizing psychological thought.
The subject of conditioning is one of the subjects that reveals the whole tragedy of the reception of Krishnamurtiās teachings.
Thinking is the understanding of the relationship to reality in the abstractions of the external sensations that a person has when he comes into contact with things. Thinking is also based on the fact of the ability to remember. And the ability to remember is revealed in the fact that not only the objects, things (ice) with which one can come into contact are remembered, but also the corresponding sensations (freezing), as well as the sounds that belong to the corresponding sensations.
For example: you are in contact with water. Then there is a sensation. This sensation is your awareness of being in contact with water, namely wetness. In the next step you give this sensation a name and call it wetness. Now when you come into contact with water again, there is the expectation of this sensation. Therefore, the sensation of wetness is linked to the element of water through experience. This connection is now shown in consciousness in the inversion that wetness is understood as a property of water. One says: water is wet. And wherever you find water, you see wetness. When it rains, the street is wet for you, etc. .
In the things that they see coming towards them, they immediately see the sensations coming towards them that are to be expected according to their experience. This is the situation to which thinking is therefore always exposed. Since these expected sensations are not in direct contact, but are seen as material, external properties, thinking is concerned with influencing the external properties of things according to desires and needs in order to come into actual contact with the sensations that one would like to have. And this is the fundamental conflict that is inherent in the movement of thinking.
Since in thinking the relationship to reality is understood in these abstractions (properties, abilities) that are reified by sensations, i.e. in the inversion in which sensations are understood as a material outflow of objects, thinking is completely absorbed in probing and influencing things and aligning actions accordingly.
The idea that we humans are conditioned is based on external observation of the resulting behavior. Behaviors in relation to things were abstracted in retrospect based on formal similarities and their recurrence was diagnosed. And the abstraction of this observation itself was abstracted into a material thing that is supposed to underlie this recurrence: conditioning. In the terms of thinking the question then arises as to how to deal with it. Now the crazy thing about it all is that until you solve the problem of conditioning, you blame some mental entity, be it the brain, the ego, the self, the center, for doing things that force the continuity of the whole and keep on intending it, and keep trying to make it impossible for you to let go of it.
Long ago it was established psychologically that death is ābadā and life is āgoodā. Separating them (which arenāt actually separate) was the possibility of the new brain with the help of a concept of āfutureā. As children we watched adults mourn the loss of others. We saw the rituals , the elaborate burials, the markers, the tombs etc. we learned that so called ādeathā was bad and to avoid it at all costsā¦as if it were the plague! The division (though there never was one) was created and everyone around us supported it. The brain was āconditionedā to accept division as a reality even though it was not an actuality. This ārealityā is what the brain harbors to this day.
I donāt know if we can know why the human brain took the wrong turn, and it may not matter why if the error can be corrected by awareness of what the brain is doing.
Can we define what we think / feel the āerrorā isā¦
how the brain went āwrongā that has resulted in so much conflict and bloodshed? It might be helpful to be clear about what we think about that.
Is the brain to āblameā or not? Is something else creating the conflict? Can it end if weāre not clear about what is going on?
what we call disorder here in K land is the silliness of effort towards transforming sorrow into its goal.
Or if that doesnāt ring a bell, maybe its simpler to say that the effort to transform fear into happiness is an ongoing delusion/error.
In other words this ongoing delusion of the image of the self that will one day transform into a happy self due to its efforts is actually an important feature of the survival psychology - Though as K listeners we are saying that it may also be an avoidable bug, or at least potentailly harmful.
Is āsorrowā then the error? Why sorrow? Why isnāt there mostly joy? Because of the physical hardship weāve had to endure?
Was there an error made or a misstep taken because the evolved brain had the freedom to do so? If so what was the misstepā¦can we pinpoint it?
Some apes do kill each other in certain circumstances, is our killing of each other possibly just an inherited trait?
Maybe you are speaking in shorthand, I agree that there is an error in our experience of sorrow.
Iām pointing at the actual mistake, untruth, total upsidedownism in sorrow - like throwing wood into a fire in order to cool it down.
If there are 2 monkeys and only enough food for 1, depending on motivation, violence may be a rational, useful move.
The error is if the unhappy monkey thinks that its acts of unhappiness will solve its problem of unhappiness.
We donāt see the error because we feel that fulfillment of desire aka pleasure solves the issue - but in fact it has merely reinforced the movement of unhappiness.
In K speak we say : Thought, used to transform the central entity - the sufferer - into its antithesis the non-sufferer, is disorder ie. a mistake
Acts that arise to mitigate unhappiness are unhappiness? Escape?
The brain reacts to unpleasant sensations, not by āstaying withā them but by replacing or substituting them with pleasant sensations? This is an error because this puts the brain in conflict with itself, postponing any solution?
My guess is that as the human brainās capacity for language developed, we became more dependent on language until all we could do was communicate, talk, to ourselves and each other.
Is the brain to āblameā or not?
Looking for a suspect, a culprit, is distraction from awareness of what the brain is actually doing.
Is something else creating the conflict? Can it end if weāre not clear about what is going on?
Apparently the cause of the brainās confusion and conflict is psychological thought, and when self-knowledge matters more than personal identity, there is increased awareness of how the self is constantly recreated and perpetuatedā¦
Yes, itās the ultimate self-improvement.
Everything Krishnamurti said pointed to the fact that doing nothing is the end of doing the same old thing in the newest, most compelling way.
I think the simplest way to put it is : feeling unhappy about my state of unhappyness is in no way a movement away from unhappiness - quite the contrary
An observation hiding in plain sight, and true of every feeling, happy or sad, better or worse. The conditioned brain is self-reinforcing with every feeling, regardless of the price it pays for its insistence on knowing, its resistance to the unknown.
The implication is that the conditioned brain is not interested in authentic emotions, feelings that are nuanced, unfamiliar, less identifiable than the feelings expected and depended on to support the brainās image of itself, its false identity, which is threatened by what it has little or no familiarity with.
We all have the same brain basically, like the liver and the pancreasā¦but the brain gets āfilledā with various things, ideas, beliefs, experiences etc. Their permanence (stickiness) seems to be the source of divisions between us: ie. you like this Jesus fella, someone else likes Lenny Bruce. Brainās got to see that thereās no security in any of it but will it?