The consensus view is the down-to-earth view that kicks into operation when we go about our daily grind of a life. This view puts the observed world outside and separated from the observer who must deal with stuff on the front burners (navigating the physical body through space and relating the observer with other people in the family, at the workplace, and elsewhere in the public space. On the back-burners are other matters (tax returns, health/house/car insurance, bank/credit card/mortgage statements, etc…).
I wouldn’t say that it is radical. I would say that it is not practical. It’s not the state of mind of one who has any use to anyone including himself, in this world.
Krishnamurti lived an abnormal life. The only chore he ever had to do was going to the bathroom and taking a shower. I copied that lifestyle as closely as I could (for ten years now) just to find out if that sacred benediction could come upon me when “all space seems to disappear”, the self is not, and the observer becomes the observed.
Spacing out is not hard to do. Spacing out without effort is something else. Most people, even the fortunate ones who can pull in two hundred thousand dollars or more a year have to slog like dogs just to afford a month-long vacation in the Bahamas to space out. There is no telling if one could even wind down and destress to a point where the mind is in any shape or form to meet that “otherness”.
Yes if for whatever reason I suddenly find I have fallen out of a plane I am in, without a parachute, when I ordinarily consider it important to remain in that plane, I have to reconstitute that scenario immediately or face what it has provided protection from.
Does any of this really prevent seeing the fact here, or is this simply a description of what maintaining a space is? Am I aware while being this space, that it is, or is there a state of immersion, of forgetfulness, until I momentarily recall it again once prompted in some fashion?
What fact? That the observer is the observed? Researchers have been examining this since David Bohm. His time spent with Krishnamurti was not to seek the “otherness”. His motive was for resolving experimental anomalies besetting quantum mechanics and to develop his concepts of modern physics to deal with them.
A consciousness-only ontology is already out there to explain the relationship between the scientific observer and the object of observation. A paradigm shift could usher in a new ho-hum consensus worldview fusing the observer with the observed. It may not be the radical transformation that Krishnamurti readers expect.
Let’s start from the observer is not the observed. Is that an observable fact in the sense it can be shown to be demonstrably so by science? My sense of it, is that ordinarily human beings do not operate or profess a specific conscious belief in being separate, but they do exhibit behaviour in line with such a belief, whether conscious or unconscious. Where the sense of separation matters most is in the field of the psychological, and where that is at its most problematic is in the phenomenon of genocide, which is where this belief in the reality of separation is at its most dangerous. Now why have I not put everything it takes into discerning whether the sense of myself as separate from another is actually true, and if there is no real evidence to support such a claim, what there is in operation sustaining this as a false belief? Why do I not want to know the truth about myself once and for all? If I can put effort into making money I can do this surely.
It is an observable fact that can be shown to be demonstrably so by the cat pouncing on the birds in my garden. The squirrel leaps from branch to branch, and from tree to tree, chasing another squirrel. Doesn’t that show you that non-human animals also see the fact that the observer is not the observed, and the sense of separation you question and decry is critical to their ability to survive?
Genocide is something else. The human psyche – both of the individual and the group - is a complicated mess. When Cain killed Abel in the biblical story, there was more at play than a sense of physical separation.
And human culture is filled with love stories – both real and imagined – of undying affection between observers and their observed.
Is violence not just where things about the self breach the surface in a way that is transparent, but that what makes for this is there all along, but there has been a putting up with it?
You don’t have to be the squirrel to check that out. Neither did Galileo have to jump off the Tower of Pisa to check out the effects of gravity. He dropped a ball instead. You can do it the scientific way by observing the observed.
“Putting up with it” implies the existence of the self, namely you (observer) who is separate from violence (the observed). This makes you the bad guy if you don’t get rid of violence. In a way, Krishnamurti had made humanity the bad guy who needs to shape up (transform). He put a monkey on our backs.
Is the “jewel” that K says that he found and could not be told to another that which he expressed as “the observer is the observed”?
There is the ‘separate’ observer as regards the body and the senses. The one seeing, hearing, chasing, killing, eating, mating with the other, etc. But that there is an ‘observer’ , separate as we feel ourselves to be, is not true. If true that the observer is the observed, that would be a profound insight.
If it is so that the observer is the observed and the thinker is the thought etc, what is the ‘factor’ that thought adds to its activity that gives the feeling of ‘me’ as thinker, observer, experiencer. Can it be seen? Can it be described? Can thought be aware of how it does this?
Isn’t that the point? The established (conditioned) network will operate as it has been until something happens to change it. What will change it that will make it give way? Isn’t it that it becomes aware somehow of its creation of the thinker, observer, the ‘me’,etc, how it automatically does that… and a question then arises about the value of doing it? Especially in the face of someone (K) proclaiming that what it is doing is divisive and destructive?
The problem isn’t the default mode network…it’s necessary. But when it doesn’t give way to the whole neural network, it doesn’t realize its place, its relationship with other modes of consciousness.
I think sorrow can make the mind to change the connections in its own neural network to some extent. Such as to avoid chattering, anxiety, and other sorts of distress happening in daily life.
As I said, it’s necessary. The thinker, me, is illusion, as is time, but to get things done one must operate as if these illusions are reality. When there’s nothing that must be done, there’s no need for the illusion of the do-er.
I say this, not from experience, but from what neuroscience has discovered. Under certain circumstances, other modes of consciousness operate when there is greater communication between different neural networks.
Keep in mind that the default mode network is not in itself “divisive and destructive” when it operates as need requires. The problem is that it operates constantly rather than on demand.
