This sounds to me James as this is thought’s worry about totality and completeness. I am trying to share what I see. The brain can break out of its identification with the ‘me’. Then it is free to look into what it actually is. What it actually may be. K used the words ‘the world’ but the words are not important. Only the insight that shatters the wall it had built around itself.
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Yes the brain realized the possibility that it was not the image that it had of itself. That it was something quite different. The brain needs “total security” as you recall K said. Obviously identification with the physical body and an image of ones self constructed from past experience and memory could never ‘totally’ provide that security; the body will die and the brain will perish.
The self becomes a problem when it becomes important. If one realizes that one’s ego or self is not important what happens? The problem doesn’t dominate thought.
It is only when we give importance and priority to the ego that conflicts arise inwardly and there for outwardly .
Yes. And part of that wall includes the content we call ‘suffering’. Have you ended your suffering?
Has the insight that “you are the world” ended suffering? What other answer could there be but ‘we shall see’?
‘We shall see’ is not an answer to suffering - it is the continuation of suffering.
Do you feel that you have had an insight that you are the world? If you are the world, then the suffering of the people in Ukraine, the suffering of the wives and mothers who have lost their husbands and sons, the suffering of children who have lost parents and siblings - all this is your suffering. Do you feel that way?
I think that It will be wise to not say what I’m feeling right now.
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We are misunderstanding each other.
All that is being suggested is that there may be more to this saying of K’s - ‘we are the world’ - than has been fully exposed in this discussion. Our consciousness is not our own, it is human consciousness - so the whole stream of human experience, including suffering, is there in ‘our’ brain. To have an insight into this stream of suffering - which brings, or is itself, compassion (according to K) - is part of what ‘I am the world’ means.
At least, that’s how I understand it. I meant no offence.
When you say “Yes”, do you mean, " Yes, that’s what K said", or “Yes, I know this is true because it happened to me”?
I can’t remember now to what I said ‘yes’? The context, I think, was what it means to have some kind of insight into the way the brain habitually identifies itself with thought - that if there can be a rupture in this process of identification, there may come a moment of what we might call ‘awakening’ (or bodhicitta, as the Buddhists call it).
This isn’t as impossible as it sounds. It can and does happen that such a rupture can occur, and the brain can be free for a time - to some extent at least - of its self-image, it’s personal blockages of thought, etc. I would call this a partial insight, and yes ‘I have had’ such experiences (as have many other people I have met).
The question I was discussing with DanMcD, however, was concerned with the deeper roots of this process of self, which are not merely on the surface of the mind, but involve layers of content that are probably not touched by any momentary rupture or mere partial insight.
The suffering that K talked about (usually in the penultimate talk of his when he gave a series of 6, 7 or 8 talks - before discussing death and the religious mind) is an aspect of the thought process which requires a deeper, broader, more comprehensive insight to resolve - or what I was calling (after K) a total insight.
You might recall a televised discussion that K had with Shainberg and Bohm (‘Life is Sacred’), in which they explored a distinction between the superficial waves of image-making on the surface of the river of consciousness, and a universal sorrow much deeper (than the superficial self-image). This universal content of suffering requires a more fundamental insight - according to K - so that true compassion can be.
Such a total insight, as I understand it, is not a momentary rupture of the self-image (which many people can and have experienced), but something totally transformative - resulting in a life of compassion, sacredness. This would also be the full meaning of the expression ‘I am the world’.
I am not claiming to have had this insight - I merely wanted to draw attention to the full meaning of what it might mean to empty the contents of consciousness (one of the contents being sorrow), so that we don’t reduce our enquiry into the cessation of self to merely short-term experiences of rupture.
Apologies that this has taken so long to explain - and you probably will not be satisfied with what has been said. But it is the best I can do at this time of night.
You need to look into this kind of statement for your own good. It strikes me as pretty vile.
No offense.
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Am I missing something here? There is nothing vile or offensive about asking if there might be something we are not seeing.
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Is it understood that when the self casts images of another, those images are only of oneself, not of the other at all; that when one is looking at another psychologically, one is blind to the other, to reality, and to oneself?
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What’s “vile” about it?
I’m not sure that I can see anything ‘vile’ in what has been written here? You will have to explain.
What is potentially vile, however - and I’m sure you are not really doing this - is to assert one’s partial insights as if they were total insights.
Anyone can have a partial insight - and K was generally scathing of people who dressed up their partial insights as dramatic tales of ‘enlightenment’. It is an innocent enough mistake as far as it goes (almost everyone in ‘spiritual’ circles does this in moments of enthusiasm), but some people take the next step and set-up shop with their experiences.
This leads to all kinds of misunderstanding and abuse: to the division between those who ‘know’ and those who don’t ‘know’, to guru-dom, pretending to have an understanding of absolute truth when one hasn’t actually perceived the whole, pretending to have ended the self when one hasn’t dissolved the self at its very roots; to spiritual pride essentially (the very worst form of egotism).
As the poet T.S. Eliot wrote,
The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.
So too with our partial insights.
Insights & humility,
- "P1: We need to understand this. What is full insight? Is it an experience?
K: No, I doubt if it is an experience. It is not an experience.”
…
“K: You cannot lay down laws about it. You cannot say, “It is experience”; it is not.”
K: The Future Is Now, Ch. 1, 7 Nov. 1985, 1st Discussion with Buddhists, Varanasi
Someone who has never had an insight would naturally just ask what an insight is, or what a full insight is… without concluding that it is an experience, etc… right?
-
“Humility is unaware of the division of the superior and the inferior, of the master and the pupil. As long as there is a division between the master and the pupil, between reality and yourself, understanding is not possible. In the understanding of truth, there is no master or pupil, neither the advanced nor the lowly.”
K: Commentaries on Living, Series I, Ch. 6, ‘Pupil and master’ -
“Whether the master exists or not is so trivial. It is important to the exploiter, to the secret schools and societies; but to the man who is seeking truth, which brings supreme happiness, surely this question is utterly irrelevant. The rich man and the coolie are as important as the master and the pupil. Whether the masters exist or do not exist, whether there are the distinctions of Initiates, pupils and so on, is not important, but what is important is to understand yourself. Without self-knowledge, your thought, that which you reason out, has no basis. Without first knowing yourself, how can you know what is true? Illusion is inevitable without self-knowledge. It is childish to be told and to accept that you are this or that.”
K: Commentaries on Living, Series I, Ch. 6, ‘Pupil and master’
The one who forms an image of another has never had an insight (whatever kind of insight it is), let alone the capacity to dialogue with another in true humility. It is within the nature of conversation between two human beings to just have a curiosity to explore, to discover whether or not there is truth in the content of a post, truth in the nature of a question that is posed. The violence, vileness, is an expression of arrogance, which chooses to decide/judge even what is spirituality, who is or who is not someone one can talk with… yes, just talk with… over the content of a post, all with a view to understand oneself, and so discover truth for oneself… right?
(One is quite delighted that when one was copying out all the talks, discussions, etc. from the CD that one purchased from the UK so many years ago into one single quite large rtf document (yes, an rtf at that time, prior to moving all of them into a single large docx), one began noticing interesting parts of these talks, etc., and began copying and pasting them into separate files, all the while allowing these words to work their magic within one - and so compiling an incredible file of many excerpts.)
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Is being critical of WHO says whatever, while assuming to know where they are at in their personal inquiry, simply a vehicle for the self to hide the fact that it has not understood and ended its own disorder?
All the while never addressing where any inquiry may lead - rather constantly usurping the inquiry by bringing personal petty judgements and remarks into it?
Step number one in any forum: End the sniping and personal comments. The only self anyone is responsible for destructing is oneself.
And K never - in all his many years of speaking - attacked anyone.
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You know, it is perhaps revealing who gets the most outraged by having their statements of certitude questioned.
For some people, merely to question these stated assertions - whether it be a claim to have undergone the mutation that K said, at the end of his life, no-one else had had; or to ask from another whether it makes sense to preach about the evils of the self when that person has not actually negated the self - is sufficient to be called ‘vile’, ‘arrogant’, ‘violent’, a ‘bully’.
One finds oneself accused of making images of others, when it may be that those doing the accusing are projecting their own content of images while refusing to own up to it.
By simply refusing to accede to dogmatism, by pointing out problematic implications in what someone has written, or by frankly requesting further explanation, one becomes (apparently) a devil to those with more ‘secret gnosis’.
My question is: why can’t everyone on this forum get off their damned pedestals and start from the ground, the floor, where we each of us are? Self-centredness is not going to dissolve through moralistic hectoring, Delphic pronouncements, or contemptuous put-downs of anyone who questions our authority. A true dialogue about the self begins where we are, not where we ‘should be’. But if people continually insist on claiming that they have already negated the self, or are mere telephones for universal truth, where is the enquiry in that?
I am particularly surprised to find this kind of thing on a K forum, seeing as he was so ruthless (without being personal) in this regard himself? K rejected all claims to spiritual authority, no matter who said it. - Is that vile?
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I don’t know what “total insight” is - what are we expecting? There is knowledge, belief, deduction analysis, conclusions etc and there is the unexpected insight, which in my mind points to a totality in that it reveals the source of the question, not just where the question leads.
What if “where we are” is on our pedestal? And unconscious of it? To be shown this, with merciless kindness might be a good way to learn about what makes us tick.