The Quiet Brain

If you have read through the comments people have already posted on this thread, then you will know that this is not the ‘quietness’ being discussed.

Forced quietness (as in traditional authoritarian forms of meditation) is not what is being called ‘quietness’ here. Neither is the suppression of the mind through the repeated assertions of dogmatic belief.

So control, effort, suppression, violence are not what K seems to have meant by a quiet brain.

I wake up and begin to think about money matters. Worry and fear about the future. That disturbance brings an awareness and ‘conflicting’ thoughts arise to quell the disturbance. “Things aren’t so bad, could be worse, stop worrying, stop feeling sorry for yourself “.etc etc

Isn’t that the ‘conflict’ we know and in different degrees have accustomed ourselves to? K says the key to an ordered (quiet?) mind is when the “observer is the observed” or in the situation I mentioned, the ‘thinker is the thought’. The imaginary thinker is the worrier, the one frightened…isn’t that duality in the brain the root of our conflict?

When we wake up, it’s always braining.

Does the brain need an opportunity to be quiescent, or is it quiescent because it has purged its psychological content?

Do you find wishing comforting? Isn’t it the essence of conflict…the desire for what is to be something else?

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Yes I would say wishing is the movement of the observer. It causes conflict with what is.

Krishnamurti discusses the quiet mind, but I would say in extremely small amounts. If you have listened to an entire series he usually brings it in at the end right before suggesting the other, the realization of whatever, when the self is not. Whenever he discusses the silent mind he discusses it in the subject of meditation and the discipline religions have suggested to attain this.

I will tell you that I have certainly seen what this idea of the silent mind leaves in its wake. For me it causes conflict. It causes confusion as it responds to what is. Look and see if you do that too.

The emptiness of the brain is surely relevant, although I wouldn’t want to stipulate from the outset the total emptiness of all content as the grounds for a quiet mind - that may lead us into impossibilities (i.e. the ideal of being completely empty).

What I do feel I can say at this stage is that the brain does need to be somewhat empty for quiescence to be there. That somewhat may be the clue to something more (if you see what I mean), but I don’t want to run ahead of where I am.

Joe, what are you wanting to say? Are you warning us of the dangers of discussing the topic of a quiet brain? Are you telling us that we shouldn’t be talking about this topic because of your own experiences of other people who are not here?

While silence and meditation may be relevant to this topic, they have not come up so far. And there may be a value in approaching the topic of a quiet brain without any particular agenda - just to look at it for itself, without judging it or calling it dangerous.

You have posted on Kinfonet about 4 times in total, right? Most of your posts have been on this thread in fact. Some of the others posting here have posted over a thousand posts already, on all kinds of topics, but they may never have posted on this particular topic. Speaking for myself, I don’t recall posting about this topic before, and I have posted nearly a thousand times already. So please. If your intention is to warn people on this thread of the danger of talking about what is involved in the brain being quiet, then consider your warnings received. We will try to tread ever so carefully. This may not satisfy you, but it is the best that I can do.

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As the topic of meditation has come up, I am reminded of a nice Zen story I heard recently.

In a small, simple, out of the way monastery, with trees all around it, a well respected abbot was sitting in silence with a group of monks. After some considerable time had passed, one of the novice monks decided to speak up, and said to the abbot:

“Master, what have you been thinking about all the time we have been sitting together?”

The abbot opened his eyes slowly and listened to the novice without any sign of emotion, replying:

“I have been thinking about that thing which is unthinkable”.

At this the novice became curious, and was moved to ask a further question:

“But Master, how are you able to think about something that is unthinkable?”

Without emotion the abbot replied once more:

“By not thinking about it at all.”

:slightly_smiling_face:

I have - everyday really. My question to you is : why try to control movement - whether it be physical or mental? What presupposition is giving rise to this effort?

If this is of concern, then I reckon that it might be helpful to inquire into 2 questions : Are we hoping for an ending of movement - and if so why? And : what is thought? ie. what is its source, its function?

My favourite zen story on this topic is the one where the master asks his student what they’re doing. The student says he’s sitting in meditation in order to become a Buddha. At which point the master picks up a tile and starts rubbing it - when asked why, he says he’s polishing it in order to make a mirror.

nb. Back in the day, this was the correct way to make mirrors.

Douglas, what do you feel about the statement acting through not acting (which can also be phrased as the action of non-action)?

Does it resonate with you?

WuWei comes to mind. The idea of effortless action.
The body and mind is caught up in profit and loss. Our identification with this center brings about action arising from motive. We are so easily swept away by our goals.

At first I took this to mean that it’s futile to work at becoming “a Buddha”, but when you inform the reader that polishing a tile was the “correct” way to make a mirror at that time, should the reader take this to mean that the ambitious student is being encouraged by the master to persist in his effort?

Every day I have watched the mental movement without trying to control it. It continues, unabated.

Can I, psychological thought, know I am not “trying to control it”? How much of what psychological thought says or indicates can be honest?

I am psychological thought, and every move I make is to keep the momentum, the movement of I, me, mine, going. If I become enamored of the idea of ceasing to be, transforming into something that isn’t denying or distorting anything, how likely am I to succeed in this endeavor?

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And when we succeed at our endevours, what have we gained? This is what the zen master is showing his student. Succeeding (or failing) at our endeavour is our habitual modus operandi - meditation is not that.

I know what is said about meditation by those who supposedly know, but actual meditation is beyond me, so I can’t say anything about it that isn’t belief or speculation.

Yes, effortless action. Though I am particularly interested here in the non-action aspect of it.

Action is continuous, constant. Commuting to work, working, eating food, preparing food, talking and thinking, reacting to others, relating to others, reading the news and thinking “Oh my god, we humans are so stupid, so violent, so callous”, escaping from that into entertainment, Netflix, doing some kind of religious ritual, etc.

So where does non-action break into this? Non-action is perhaps the most intelligent action the brain is capable of in this crazy world - a still point to the turning world.

But it can’t be pre-meditated, it can’t happen because I want it to happen. It’s like a breeze that blows out at sea - one must have the sails hoisted to receive it. The hoisting of the sails is to lead a fairly decent, reasonably intelligent daily life. To be sensitive and value sensitivity.

Isn’t another aspect of this the perception of beauty?

The mind or brain has to be quiet to be able to appreciate the beauty that exists in the world. Without moments of quiet we would never see or feel the beauty of nature, music, art?

What is non-action? Absence of movement? Physical and mental silence and immobilty? And what magic does it hold?

I am surprised because it seems purely dualistic, like a preference for up instead of down, higher instead of lower, material instead of spiritual - and I have difficulty not only separating the concepts, let alone seeing how one can be more interesting than the other.

Whereas the idea of choicelessness, or freedom from motive, seems to transcend all the problems we have with up/down, stillness/movement and other relative subject/object preoccupations.

What about the ecstasy found in communion and belief? The shaman & tribe and their ritual and sense of union? The christian in church struck by the love of their kin and God? The raver and their drugs dancing all night with a loving universe?

Maybe. Of course, physical immobility is always relative. I am not speaking in absolute terms. Similarly with the movement of the brain - I am not speaking of the complete absence of the movement of thought at the periphery of the mind (or brain). It’s more of an essence thing, a qualitative thing.

Can there be an essential stillness, or a quality of stillness - both physically and psychologically - in which the mind is not doing anything in particular, has no motive, no pressure, no preference, no direction?

This has to be a spontaneous and free action of non-action for it to have any “magic” of course.

I don’t see it like that. If anything it is a moment of stepping outside duality. It’s not a matter of placing oneself in opposition to movement - of “higher” and “lower”, “spiritual” or “material”, etc - all of that is still part of the movement of action and reaction.

If the word “choicelessness” communicates this better for you, then by all means use that word instead. It’s merely that, for me at least, “non-action” communicates something of essence, it conveys something of the quality of stillness or quietness that I am interested in looking at in this particular thread.

Obviously I do not claim to be an expert on these things, so I don’t feel able to say anything definitive on either the mind or the brain, outside of the empirically observable facts. But I am open to the possibility that there may be a part of the brain, or a dimension of the brain, that is (or can be) - relatively speaking - quiescent.

I am open to this possibility because we accept that the brain is in some sort of quiescent state every night when we are in deep or slow-wave sleep.

The relative quiescence of the brain when awake would not mean that the activities of the rest of the brain cease - it’s activities would obviously continue (at the periphery at least) for the vital functions necessary for ordinary daily life to be maintained.

Thought would still act on the periphery, because that is what the brain has evolved for. But it probably requires a certain stillness or quiescence (what I was calling non-action) of the centre (the centre being the psychological movement of thought, the psychological centre of the ‘me’), which takes place in the actual physical brain.

It seems logical to me that such a state of quiescence in the brain when awake may then make possible a contact with the ‘mind outside of the brain’ (if such a thing exists, if indeed we can accept such a thing).

I take it that this ‘mind’, not being physically limited in the same way that the brain is, would be essentially quiet, by which I mean silent. That would be the true silence of the mind.

Stating all this of course doesn’t make it so, but it seems very reasonable to me. I would be very surprised if a preoccupied and over-active brain could ever make contact with a ‘mind outside of the brain’.