I live in the dimension of the known. I identify with what I can find the words, images, or gestures to adequately express. What I can’t adequately express is inchoate until it finds expression. This means that I know only a few things because most of my experience is beyond my ability to express with accuracy, much less communicate.
This means I must be constantly learning new things that update what I seem to know, and I can never know enough until I know enough about knowing to know nothing without feeling compelled to know something.
For all I know, there may be nothing I really know, and nothing I can count on but counting, i.e., “time”, which is just measurement. So it seems that until or unless I can do nothing without counting, without being timeless, I cannot know what knowing is without leaving this dimension to those who know better.
Because the contents of consciousness are streaming constantly, “I” exist more constantly and reliably than anything else.
There’s no way for the brain to know that I don’t actually exist until/unless the stream of consciousness stops and the brain realizes that I was just streaming thought and conditioned reactions.
As long as the stream continues, I exists, despite my insistence that I don’t.
Isn’t it the fact that I do think that I exist? And that I’d like to change this existence for perhaps a ‘better’ one? Freedom from the known, say? That ‘desire’ implies time; the time to get from where I am right now, to a future time. Becoming, that is the ‘stream’ isn’t it? What does ‘stepping out’, being free mean?
Perhaps the stream keeps chugging along, it is after all the product of zillions of years evolution and embedded to the hilt in our bodies-minds, but we stop engaging with it. We keep dreaming (in sleep), we keep streaming (awake), but we dream/stream lucidly, knowing it’s just a dream, just the stream? I.e. it can ‘happen’ right now!
Yes, it’s a fact that thought is mistaken for a thinker, a living being who is as real and omnipresent as thought is constantly streaming.
Becoming, that is the ‘stream’ isn’t it?
The conditioned brain’s stream of consciousness maintains the illusion that I exist and I am becoming what I hope to be. A crucial part of being I is undergoing constant modification.
What does ‘stepping out’, being free mean?
The stream is the sleight of hand that maintains the illusion of I and my progress. So if there is no actual I, is there anything to “step out” of the stream, or is there only the stream?
The question is whether the brain can stop streaming the contents of consciousness, and the answer seems to be that nothing changes until/unless the stream is seen for what it was because (it seems to me) as long as there’s streaming, there’s no clarity.
But as Dan says, there is no I to do or stop doing anything. There’s only awareness of what the brain is doing, and only as much awareness as the brain’s conditioning can tolerate.
And that ‘awareness’ is what we are, what we actually are. Doing, stopping, changing, judging are all part of the ‘system of thought’. That includes the body, the brain, thought, feeling, sensation, memory. It seems that unless there is a choiceless awareness of ourselves, thought projects a ‘me’ that is an illusion.
The illusory ‘me’ is a source of conflict within the system itself and in the ‘outer’ world.
Whatever engages with the stream (boards the train) ceases to engage. We can call this me-us for simplicity, or brain, or mind, or conditioning, or reflex. The point is engagement with and dependency on the stream is not inherent, it’s learned. And it’s learned very well, so well that it feels inevitable. ?
The vast majority of us homo sapiens prefer the safety and comfort of the story.
I think @macdougdoug put it that the brain is projecting this self image. With an ‘individual’ me as the center. When the collision of all these ‘stories’ happens as it is happening on a grand and grander scale the destruction could increase. It’s the danger of the.individual self that K was warning about, as I heard it.
Nothing is “engaging” with the stream. The stream is what the brain does for a false sense of security and competence. It sooths and assures itself with what it needs to hear to feel secure.
The vast majority of us homo sapiens prefer the safety and comfort of the story.
That’s why most of us get our news from people who tell us what we want to hear.
The human brain is insecure because it is too confused and conflicted to be choicelessly aware, directly perceiving actuality.
But instead of being aware of its confusion and conflict, it reacts to choiceless awareness with constant content streaming.
So the brain needs to become aware that what it considers, perceives as reality is not actually reality but as Doug put it, is a projection of the contents of its consciousness? That this seeming reality is in fact ‘substituting’ for actual reality and by placing itself as the center of this ‘subjective’ reality keeps it, the brain , from perceiving the world and itself as what it actually is?
The brain soothes and assures automatically, mechanically, not engagement but reflex. Taking this into consideration, here’s my latest version:
Perhaps the stream keeps chugging along, it is after all the product of zillions of years evolution, the deepest of body-mind reflexes, but it loses its power, ceases to matter. We keep dreaming (in sleep), we keep streaming (awake), but we dream/stream lucidly, knowing it’s just a dream, just the stream.
If you look at a tree, the tree is surely real enough. I understand that K said that the problem is that we see the tree through a filter of our past experience and knowledge of trees, so we don’t actually see the tree with clarity. Maybe that’s what you are also saying Douglas and Dan?
I would say so, very real. What it actually is, I can’t say. I think that what ‘seeing through the filter of myself’ has to do with, is the psychological distance between the image of myself and the tree. Myself as observer and the tree as being observed. K is saying as I get it is, that that is a false perception brought about by the illusion of a ‘center’ that thought has created. The center, me, doesn’t exist actually. The tree does and the body / brain does but not this psychological entity: me. It’s a very radical statement.
Kinfonet has helped me to understand that we should not complicate matters. What constitutes fundamental reality is not the issue : or we get into philosophical questions of “when a tree falls in the forest, and no one is around to hear it…etc”
As the zen master said “if you answer yes : 500 lashes for you - if you answer no : 500 lashes” which seems to be the only reasonable answer (both physicalist and idealist arguments have unresolved problems)
The only issue is my experience of the tree : moment to moment, am I a slave to the known? Is it possible for me to get caught up in conflict and resistance with relation to what I know vs what you know - or are we able to be free of expectation, of personal motivation - to see this moment (which includes both my motivations and your motivations) clearly, fully?
The feeling is still there perhaps, as a reflex, but it has little to no power, in one ear out the other! For some perhaps the feeling ceases to arise at all. (Consciously.)
Can the brain know anything if everything the brain is aware of is back-lit by its content?
For instance, when I watch film footage of a far away place to get a sense of what the place is like, the watching is informed by ceaselessly streaming content and its reactions.
Nothing is truly, wholly, completely new when the same old (though constantly modified) content is streaming constantly.
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Public Talk 2 in New Delhi, 25 November 1973
The brain, to function objectively, healthily, normally, must have complete order. We have translated order in terms of control, and therefore the brain chooses in that control a neurotic behaviour in which it finds security. There is total order when you understand the nature of pleasure and fear, an order that has never known disorder.
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Public Talk 3 Saanen, Switzerland - 14 July 1983
The brain actually, after these thousands upon thousands of years, is confused. And in that confusion it says, ‘I must be secure.’ So it then invents a new illusion. You understand? I have dropped this illusion as I find there, there is no security . Then I find another illusion and I hope to find security in that. This is what we are doing. So where do you find security ? Unless the brain is completely secure, completely certain, unconfused, it must be in a turmoil - right?
