Do I truly care about you? Yes. Do I care about me too? Yes. Do our conversations here ‘matter’ to me? Yes, for many reasons, some more and some less me-centered.
I don’t see my self as an enemy. A bit of a monster, perhaps, but a creative and kind and life-loving monster I have great affection for.
The ‘self-image’ has certainly shown its ‘monstrous’ side as far back as history has been recorded. And it would be strange if it saw itself as the “enemy”. Room for improvement always, but not the enemy…Seeing the totality of the prison of the self is not possible by the self. It can’t grasp itself or understand itself, only awareness can do that and that is not under the control of self / thought.
Plenty of selfs who embrace non-duality see ego-self as the enemy. Krishnamurti talks about time as the enemy, and psychological time and self are pretty much the same thing.
I use ‘awareness’ to mean pure detection with no interpretation of what it detects. If there is something that is able to grasp the self fully(ish), I’d call it intelligence. Whatcha think?
It’s not evil - it’s desperate.
I’m great - at worst a lovable scamp - its all the bad people that are the problem.
I don’t think there is a thing called “self” that we know anything about… and I don’t think we know what “only awareness can do”. What we know is who we think we are from moment to moment, who we think another may be, what we think we know, and (if we’re honest) we know we’re making it all up as we go along because all we are is thoughts and emotions we try to make sense of.
Are there degrees of care and degrees of self-centredness? Or, I am self-centred. Full stop. It is not that I care or truly care. While I am one degree self-centred, care for another human being is impossible. That’s the truth. There is a logic to it which can and has been laid out a thousand times. So either we care for one another one hundred percent, the full three hundred and sixty degrees of the compass, or it is stupid to say, ‘I care for you.’ That’s mere pacification. And I want to know what it will take to make me and you and anyone else care totally, fully, wholly. Otherwise, I would rather drop the word altogether.
Now, we have no answer to this question, not a single one. Therefore, the energy of thought cannot be applied to it. This question demands altogether another form of energy. I am self-centred; I am the result of a thousand years of psychological programming. You are all this too - there are not different programmes for different individuals. And we are asking ourselves: what shall we do?
This question has enormous heat. We know this because we shy away from it; we deflect its intensity with a dozen other side issues. It makes us extremely uncomfortable. This disturbance is now our actual relationship with another human being. Thought wants to dampen this fire in the mind, make everything cool again. But there is a point - a critical moment or crisis point - where thought cannot do a thing about it. Then there is only the living fire of the mind. It has burnt away all thought and all thoughts of the self, because in this fire the entire psychological content of consciousness has been consumed. The programme has destroyed itself without any help from a fictitious programmer.
Bad is in the eye of the be-badder?
Drop the word bad if it confuses you - try this : “Its not my self thats the problem”
PS. This is something that one would hope no one is actually saying - but unfortunately a whole load of people do say this kind of stuff.
I don’t know how to respond to your last posting. I can’t find a way in, there’s too much of a disconnect between how I see things and how you seem to. One thing I do agree with: The question of whether we truly care about each other is an important one worth looking at.
I’d say the self is not a problem, rather our attachment to it. Perhaps a healthy self is a self we are not so earnestly attached to?
Good. That’s good. Any response must be from conditioning, from the programme called ‘me’. These kinds of responses - verbal agreement, verbal disagreement, emotional reaction, sense of pleasure or displeasure - seem to be separate from the programme, seem to be proof that there is part of me who is capable of perceiving and controlling or changing the programme. But this part of me whom I feel is the central essence, the real me, is also a fragment of the programme.
There is no ‘seem to’ - either it is so or it is not so. There is only the programme, which is the two thousand years or more of social and intellectual conditioning. There is no ‘you’ outside of that. The only disconnect is when one says, ‘I am separate from that.’ Then you’ll have another two thousand years ahead of you in which to solve all the misery of the past. So either you see the fact that you are conditioned or you see a reaction to the fact. Any reaction is still the conditioning in play. Can the mind look at a fact about itself without any reaction? Then there is a wholly different form of perception, which has nothing to do with you or me. This perception is in the question. But when we break off from the question into a lot of answers, that’s where we disconnect from the truth.
This is not one question out of a possible dozen other questions. This is really the only question for one human being to put to oneself and to another. I really don’t know why we put any other kind of question.
That might be true, it might be false. It is theory, it is not fact.
But let’s say for the sake of argument that everything ‘I’ am is the programme. And let’s say that I see this, am sure it is true, know it. So what? I’m a thoroughly conditioned being. What then?
(Fwiw my view is not far from this. I believe conditioning determines who we are to a huge extent, though I think there is some ‘wiggle room’ for what might be called free will.)
Is “free will” our possibility to ‘do’ absolutely nothing?
Then drop it. Stick only to the fact. When conditioning is a fact and not just a theory or an idea, it is no longer separate from the observation of the fact. But while it remains a theory, there also remains the observer asking, ‘What next?’ The observer is looking for a definite future, which is what every theory offers.
The moment we go out into society, the fact of our conditioning is there for all to see in every single reaction we have to one another. We don’t need to make any theory of it. But our sense of free will is so strong, that it always seems like only the other people are reacting wrongly; our own reactions are perfectly sane and justified.
So, are you conditioned? Other people say, ‘Yes,’ and you make a theory out of it. Therefore, you haven’t really put the question.
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Deeply.
No, it’s just a theory, you said.
The theory is that there is “no ‘you’ outside of conditioning.”
Then what on earth do you think is conditioned? Are you saying that although you are deeply conditioned, it is not total conditioning? Don’t you even suspect that the part of you which says, ‘I am not totally conditioned,’ is also a conditioned response? That’s exactly what keeps the whole charade going. Without this belief in an inner core with its own integrity and freedom, there is no conditioning.
Therefore, are you conditioned? Until you have exposed either the truth or the falseness of this core belief, you cannot offer any answer to the question.
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