The Questioning Mind

You seem to come back to people being dependent on K quite a lot. Is that right? To be honest, I have no idea why you do that. It doesn’t mean a lot to me but maybe I’m missing something. K seemed to be able to explore and discover the new as if for the first time, over and over again. That in itself may prompt us to question, reflect, observe, and perhaps even do the same thing in our own lives.

Perhaps it doesn’t try, it simply does. Thought retrieves elements from memory (knowledge) and fashions them into something new. The new thing, when first created, is not in the field of the known. Afterwards it is. Thought is a process which draws upon the known to create something beyond the known.

It comes to the same thing: how shall we live? Without the answer, without the knowledge, without the certainty, without the demonstrable proof, what shall we do? So the lack of an answer to our original question leads us to another question. This new question already has an answer: the evidence of what we do and how we live is all around us. Can we look at this without moving away to what we shall or should or might do? The future is determined by the actuality of the present.

From the old it forms an image of the new. From the limited it forms an image of the unlimited. This is still a movement of limitation. But why is the old and the limited even there in the first place? In other words, the old hurts of the past and the sense of being psychologically limited, hemmed in, trapped. From these old burdens of my past comes an image of a better future. So I am never living totally in the present - that’s the danger. Yet, psychologically, it feels like all the danger is in the past and in the future. As I am now, living in the present, I am caught between images of the worthless and the worthwhile. This is thought’s picture of the present. But without any image of the worthwhile, what does it mean to feel or to be worthless?

There’s nowhere we can possibly live but in the present. Even if we’re obsessed with nostalgia, the obsession takes place in the present moment.

What I think you’re saying (translated to nobody-ese): We don’t pay attention to things as they are, we pay attention to the thoughts and images and feelings that things conjure up in us. And in doing this we run the risk of ‘missing the forest for the trees’ i.e. not seeing what’s actually right there in front of us.

Without the notion of ‘worthwhile’ the notion of ‘worthless’ does not compute.

Attachment and fear are intrinsic to the human condition, a “fixed truth” until or unless the human brain changes radically.

But unless you are “able to explore and discover the new as if for the first time”, you don’t know whether K actually did. He stands as an example of what-should-be because you are what-should-not-be, i.e., conditioned, limited, etc.

I understand that K’s approach was to explore, discover and understand constantly. If there is a “fixed truth” about attachment and fear, we have to discover it every day.

Can any of us ever explore and discover the new as if for the first time? I would say that there are noments when we are open and very attentive when this actually happens. For example, do you ever look at a friend and see her/him as if for the first time?

So perhaps the old is never there at all. It is instead a shadow created by our desire for the new. Our psychological prison walls are therefore built from the desire to escape into a unknown future. This desire for the future is what causes the entire past to crystallize as memory. It is not the past which has to be understood and resolved but our innate sense of desire for something away from the present moment.

So why do we do this?

Now we have this new question. It is a question to which neither of us have any answer because our minds are questioning a behaviour that is actual, factual, which is the fact that our thoughts and feelings interpose themselves in the space between our bodies and the rest of the world. So we never see the world directly; we see only a reflection of it through the mirror of experience and desire. And we are asking why we prefer to gaze at a reflection of the world and not look at the world itself.

Why did the brain “prefer” to create a ‘center’ with the space of isolation around it? Can that center dissolve? What keeps it in place?

Probably the brain has no say in it. It is merely subject to the influences of its conditioning. A child would never ask, ‘Can the centre of me dissolve?’ And by the time we are adults, looking at life from the perspective of the ‘me’ is established as the proper way to live. So why are we raising this question now? Where is the question coming from?

When it’s heard that there is an ‘undiscovered country’ , that , what one has taken as reality may not be reality at all…that a space has been created around a “center” called ‘me’ that isolates the mind from the world…the question arises, is it possible to break free from such a situation, for that limitation to end?
It’s not known.

Perhaps it is not time that has to be understood, rather our innate sense of desire for something other than what-is (what-seems-to-be). Our tolerance for experiencing reality (unmediated, unflinching) seems quite low. Why?

Yes, that’s definitely a biggie, worth having a good look at.

The “fixed truth” of attachment and fear is present constantly. We don’t “discover” this every day any more than we discover our own breath.

Yes, it happens, but rarely, because we’re too caught up with our content.

So are you saying you already know everything about fear and attachment? Or that it’s impossible for us to really understand these things?

Ok, so we actually agree on this. I suppose the question is if it’s possible for these rare moments to be more common in our lives.

No, that’s another trick of thought. It will consider the dissolution of the self if there is a reward to it. The so-called undiscovered country is just another reflection.

Because in reality we don’t exist. We have psychological existence as long as there is a reflection back from and of the world. Otherwise, there is only the world. I am the world. There is not me and the world with a space between the two.