And its indefatigability.
Is this a true statement?
Or is it not rather true to say that wherever thinking is taking place, memory (in some form or other) must be active?
There may be an activity other than memory at work when we meet the world - such as perception, awareness, attention. But thinking always involves memory.
So rather than âthinkingâ, it seems to be more true to say that in a state of pure attention memory has no place (except as a purely functional reaction for physical survival).
Thinking is a state of attention. One is attending to what is here without any interference of memory. At the moment, your words are here. So we are doing it right now. I am reading your words, attending to them, and we are moving from there.
There is no such thing as memory in thinking. Memory is active when one is inattentive, unthinking, unfeeling, acting automatically or habitually, when one is afraid or lazy. Then memory reacts, which is activity without action. Thinking is action in relationship, action of the highest order. Nothing else works or matters or has any significance.
And then one finds that there is actually no such thing as memory in relationship with another. Relationship is unthinkable where there is memory; and memory is unnecessary where there is relationship, except to reminisce. It is a marvellous revelation, one so strong and enduring that it is impossible to return from and go back to an old, conditioned way of living. The brain is empty, refreshed, fully alive and able to communicate with tremendous energy because there is no entity as the âmeâ inhabiting the brain.
Our thinking together has found this out.
We now have a choice: relationship or memory; thinking or thought; freedom or conditioning; love or sorrow. So there is no choice, is there? Choice means intelligent decision making. Choice means that which is of the highest quality. Look in the dictionary if you doubt my words.
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We have spent long enough now on this and the body needs to rest from it. Perhaps in the New Year we can come back to something else, look at things from a different angle. It would also be good if some of us could meet together in person and test the truth of what has been said in our own physical interactions, which has much more meaning.
I am back at Brockwood for the annual Summer Gathering; maybe we shall meet then.
Wolverhampton, 7th December 2024
Previously you had said that thinking does involve memory, but in the last few posts you are doubling down on the view that thinking has no memory.
It is difficult to dialogue or discuss these matters if two people simply hold to their assertions without giving clear reasons for doing so. I have given you reasons for why I think it is reasonable to say that thinking and thought, thinking and memory, are interrelated activities taking place in the soft tissue of the brain.
But you have not given any clear reason to explain your peculiar view that thinking has no memory. You mentioned being attentive. But attention, as I understand it, is not primarily a movement of thinking. One can be attentive to a movement of thinking, just as there can be attention to sound, to a visual perception of a cloud or a tree. But attention is one thing, and thinking is another.
Clearly you are giving the word âthinkingâ your own niche definition, making it more or less synonymous with the state of attention. But, for me at least, this takes something away from the full meaning of attention, while also giving license to a rather irrational, muddy way thinking that doesnât seem (to me at least) logical or evidence based.
I follow this, but we have been discussing âthinkingâ, not relationship, love or emptiness etc (which are a bit of a sidetrack from the OP).
Darling, you keep using this phrase: âAs I understand it.â Understanding is either complete or non-existent. There is no âIâ about it. Attention, love, relationship, thinking, life, the universe, Donald Trump - you name it, baby - is not something any single one of us is ever going to understand completely. So the effort is over from the start.
I am tired. Do you understand that? Can we stop now?
In our minds, familiarity is confused for truth.
With the understanding that truth has an implicit authority.
We are saying that our thoughts and beliefs have so much power because we feel they are true.
So does âunconditioningâ depend on seeing clearly that our thoughts at least are not true?
And if we fail to see that, we are condemned to fight others in order to impose the truth upon them (be they fools, children, the elderly, the confused or poets)
If we are under the authority of âwhat is rightâ - we deny what is, or we fail to think together?
Ok, I guess this explains why there has not been much in the way of understanding on this thread!
Obviously the word âunderstandâ can be used in ordinary English as a polite rejoinder in a sentence. It depends on its context. Understanding in the way you use it here means insight, and we have not been discussing - as far as I understand it! - insight.
There are two different points being made here, arenât there Douglas?
The one point has to do with the way we habitually take our thoughts (and feelings) to be the âtruthâ of the way things are.
The other point is about âtruthâ itself, and what our relationship to it is or ought to be.
Maybe we can bring both points together by saying that whatever thought thinks âtruthâ is, it is not the absolute truth (by virtue if it being thought that thinks it). This is because a thought about something is never the thing itself.
But this is not to say that in the area where thought has its place there can be no accurate assessment of true and false facts (such as whether the earth is a sphere or flat, etc). Relative âtruthsâ (facts) have their place here.
Do you see the difference?
I am tired so I stop, which is observing, putting it into words - thinking - from which comes understanding, insight and action all together. There is nothing fancy about it, nothing sophisticated, nothing complicated; and nothing ever separates one from the other. Where there is thinking there is always insight.
Sorry I am tired, but there it is, the fact. Hopefully, there will be a next time, maybe not. It doesnât matter. Au revoir.
I am sorry that you feel too tired to explain yourself more clearly, but I donât think it is controversial to point out that calling something a fact does not make it a fact.
Having previously equated thinking with attention, you are now equating thinking with insight (having previously connected thinking with emptiness and love).
Short of making these words valueless, I wonder what is gained from making the words âinsightâ and âthinkingâ (or attention and thinking) synonymous? To most people - including K as far as I know - these words point to quite different actualities.
It seems as though you simply want to assert this as a dogma without giving clear reasons for doing so? - giving as your âreasonsâ the claim that you are speaking from insight/emptiness/love. This doesnât make a dialogue very straightforward.
You are pointing at the differences between our beliefs about what is true, and what actually is true.
Also at the differences between beliefs that can be demonstrated to be so, those that cannot, and those that seem to be in contradiction with what can be demonstrated.
Also at the difference between the description and what might actually exist independant of the description.
What I would like to look at is the bit about our relationship with truth. Is this not what is driving us?
Truth is an authority, both what we believe to be true, and as a concept : we feel that truth should be an authority - but we only have access to what we think is true (yes, no?)
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Listening from insight, emptiness and love makes it very easy. So that is what matters; it is not about who is speaking. The speaker and the listener are one; they are thinking together. Then the dialogue never ends and weâll never get tired of it.
You have not yet begun to think. You are allowing thought to do all the work. But really you havenât a clue what is going on and neither have I. Then we are free to think. I canât keep making clear if you keep making it muddy.
This is why I feel the question involves being clear what we mean by the word âtruthâ.
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There are factual statements that can be correct or incorrect - such as âthe earth is a sphereâ. Some factual statements are easier to verify than others, but once verified they become true or false in ordinary language. I donât think there is anything inherently authoritarian about verifying statements of fact, but obviously they can be controversial when put before the general public (e.g. climate science).
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There is also a more fundamental meaning to the word âtruthâ, as for instance when we are discussing the nature of reality, existence, or what it sometimes called âabsolute truthâ. This is very difficult to verify, and may be impossible to verify in an objective, publicly acceptable way. Maybe truth in this sense can only be discovered through first person insight (by first person I donât mean by an individual ego).
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Then, thirdly, there is our psychological relationship to either of these ways of using the word âtruthâ. Factual statements can be used to bolster oneâs ego at the expense of another. And, in the case of âabsolute truthâ (or whatever word one likes to use) one can be mistaken that one has actually discovered absolute truth, and deceive oneself and others about it. Furthermore, in either case, one must recognise that the word is not the thing: by which I mean that any thinking about truth (whether factual truths or any absolute truth) is never the actuality itself. We human beings tend to forget this.
What aspect do you feel is worth emphasising in all this?
Perhaps. I think any âsalvationâ possible for humanity will more likely come from insight and love than from thinking. I also feel that itâs part of the nature of our thinking to deceive itself into believing it has insight and love when it does not.
What about insight into thinking? That would change the nature of thinking, wouldnât it? Seeing that our thinking is deceiving itself with beliefs and theories, it would bring to a stop the process of believing. Not believing a thing in the psychological field, does that stop our thinking or does it make it perform a different action? This is really the nub of it.
Letâs go back for a moment to what Hermann said. He said: So thought reacts to the word âthinking.â Pointing to the reaction and watching it together is thinking. So, first, you are watching the reaction from your perspective and I am watching the reaction from my perspective, which are both partial views. But when we put it into words, very carefully, accurately, is there then a perspective? Our separate perspectives are both influenced by thought. And when we put it into words it brings to light immediately our separation. Can we now look directly at the separation caused by this way of thinking and end it immediately at that point where it separates? Because we are interested now only in looking together at what is happening and not sticking fast to our limited perspective from thought, the gap between us has then already gone. That gap was always and will always be conceptual. And the looking at it together, the putting it into words, - thinking not from a perspective, - may be all that love really is.
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I donât know. Thinking may be employed by a person with insight in order to communicate something about the nature of that insight. Maybe the thinking done by the brain of a person with insight is more objective than usual; or perhaps thinking occupies the brain of a person with insight less than usual. But the thinking is still thinking.
What is thinking? This is the question the thread makes central (imo).
If thinking depends on memory, then it cannot result in love, insight, emptiness or âsalvationâ for mankind.
You have been proposing a thinking which does not depend on memory, and I have been attempting to clarify what is meant by this statement.
Because it has not been made clear what is meant, I will clarify it for myself.
Thinking as thinking inevitably depends upon memory. If one had no memory, one couldnât think. And this thinking takes place in the soft tissue of the brain (it is neurochemical).
But thinking as a tool of communication from insight is merely a tool of communication from insight, and the insight doesnât depend on memory.
So while thinking as thinking still depends on memory (or else there would be no thinking at all, no words, no verbal communication whatsoever), a thinking arising as a mere tool of communication from insight is directed by insight, and insight does not depend on memory.
This means that it is insight, not thinking, that is capable of transformation; which then can use thinking as a tool of communication to communicate something about the nature of that insight.
This is how I understand what is being said.
Thinking as thinking is always from a perspective, because it is conditioned by knowledge and memory. But insight has no direction, no perspective - which may be the thing you are wanting to point to.
We need to be in the same place at the same time in order to find out together the answer to this question. Two of us, ten of us, a hundred of us; it doesnât matter. Otherwise, we are forever caught in thought. Thinking is a shared activity; it is not something that can be done alone or from a distance. One canât make love from a distance.
One can say, âI love you,â from a safe distance, but we have to be face-to-face if we really want to find out what it means. And thinking is love.
It is really quite impossible to be able to think without first being in a place where we can literally hold hands, look into one anotherâs eyes and find out the secret together.
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Rather than respond to the issues that have been raised about the nature of thought and thinking (and their relationship to memory) you would rather talk about holding hands and looking into each others eyes? I have no interest in holding hands or looking into peopleâs eyes. The OP makes dogmatic claims about âthinkingâ which have not been investigated or explained, and yet I feel you are repeating the same dogmatic claims without taking into consideration the criticisms that have been made.
I am also very skeptical of people who glibly speak about love, insight and emptiness. Letâs just agree to disagree.
Of course! That is what K does. Why should you be any different? The only issue here is relationship and your fear of it, your strange, unfathomable fear of all those other people who are just as lost and afraid as you are. K has no answer for that; it comes from your own heart and brain thinking in tandem, so that all the feelings and the thoughts are revealed and resolved. That wonât happen when the words that come out of our observation of the world remain in the abstract.
Thatâs a waste of time when there is no-one here who will either agree or disagree with you. You came in on your own and you will leave on your own. So you have wasted your time if you are hoping that someone here will explain things for you and collaborate with you on achieving a false sense of clarity or psychological security. Love is divine insecurity. You could have been thinking about all this for yourself from the beginning. I hope you donât blame me for your own failed motives when you wonât even tell us what it is that you are looking for here. If you want to understand K, stick with K, not the stupid interpreters. If you want to understand other people, good luck! And if you want to understand yourself then it is right here now in what your feelings are telling you. Only you know that, no-one else. Probably they are painful. Put them immediately into words and you have begun to think.