Is the brain the source of life, of awareness that it can produce awareness as the source of life with thought?
To make things simpler and clearer in a conversation, we have a resource called “questioning” (which means questioning not only the other person, but also oneself). In any case, everyone is free not to accept another proposal to think together on any subject.
I feel you may be giving the inquiring mind of thinking a goal like becoming, or arriving eventually in the state of love intelligence and wisdom? Learning is life and life is the source of awareness, and real change, not thought that invents all kinds of programs as paths that lead nowhere in life.
I am surely wrong, but I get the feeling that you are trying to deny what Krishnamurti said in the quotes I posted above… i.e.: that it is impossible for the brain to free itself from conditioning.
Am I wrong?
You are wrong to believe it or deny it? Are you not? Is your mind free of conditioning?
Are you mixing up the mind, the psyche the intellect or self consciousness with the brain? Is an innocent baby not conditioned eventually and potty trained? Are we talking about those kinds of things?
Why do you believe in altruistic questioning as if all questioning is sincere and innocent or it is all right to question anyone with bad intentions or the intention to accumulate wisdom? A challenge is often only an interest in a debate but not a real inquiry. No one is a mind reader. We can guess we can speculate and we can challenge from dissonance, but only we know the source of our questions is sincere or not? .
What does asking about a feeling, a perception about another that could obviously be wrong or not, have to do with believing or denying?
No, I am simply asking (since we are in a forum where we are discussing Krishnamurti’s teaching), why if Krishnamurti said (1) that the brain is conditioned, but (2) that this brain can be deconditioned, many people here seem to deny the possibility of such deconditioning.
So why does that child as an adult, when traveling to foreign Western countries as a tourist, urinate on the street instead of in a toilet?
Anyway, a child, just like you and me as adults, is totally free to accept that conditioning or deny it. Nobody conditions us. They will try of course, but we are free to deny it and accept the consequences. Or do you, as an adult, follow to the letter everything that they tried to condition you when you were a child?
I think it’s pretty clear that I’m talking about this kind of things.
What about you?
Why do we need to protect ourselves in any conversation and why do we try to justify that protection afterwards? What are we really protecting ourselves from?
The most destructive, divisive and dangerous ‘conditioning’ that we all have received is that of believing ourselves to be separate ‘individuals’. And that belief must be protected against threat to its image. K said “you don’t exist”, “You are nothing, (not-a-thing)”…was he exaggerating or stating, according to his view, a fact? Going beyond one’s conditioning, for me, means somehow going beyond this reflexive thought/feeling that ‘I exist’….and at the same time, understanding what ‘I am’ means.
What do you understand by “you don’t exist, you are nothing”, if I may ask?
That thought /feeling has created an entity out of accumulated experiences and memory of an individual called danmcd. A thinker and an experiencer called danmcd with likes and dislikes etc. A danmcd who has pleasures and sufferings and fears and doubts…The same thought/feeling reflex that each of us has entrenched in the brain…what K has dubbed ‘me and mine’. That is to me our most unfortunate condition.
Please don’t take it personally, we are investigating… is what you are saying here a judgment of the self, and in any case what relation do those words have with what Krishnamurti has just told me about “you are nothing”, “you do not exist”?
Yes, the ‘self’ was a wrong move. Thought can see that now considering the bloody past that has transpired. But thinking can’t remove the ‘reflex’ that ‘I exist’ (self)….its removal, dissolution will take something from either outside the ‘system’ or from a deeper part of the brain, if there is such an unconditioned part.
Only a naive human being calls another human being a nobody. No I see no necessity for the human brain to be totally unconditioned in the extreme way many might mean it to inquire or learn the art of Inquiry. . I also do not think in general children are given a choice to accept the most insane national and religious conditioning of their parents and societies. The horrible addictions, and childish nonsense burrows deep into the subconscious once they have taken root in the Psyche portion of the brain. Addictions to beliefs are extremely difficult to remove without awareness. I think some social conditioning is necessary. I also feel that psychological self defense from bullies in any society is absolutely necessary.
That defense can be insightful and intelligent, and not intentionally violent Whether anyone sees any of this for themselves or not is not meant as a belief, These are only one human beings opinions. This belief about being a nobody in a world of insane human predators, and not defending yourselves is an extremely nasty belief the insane predators want you/us.me to propagate to the naive masses.Don’t you see that? If you believe K. you have not inquired into everything he has said and pointed out and you only accepted a few things out of context to believe in. like most everyone does in their gospels and bibles? Ponder on these things for yourselves this is not a debate.
K put it this way: “Freedom is born with the perception that freedom is essential”.
Thought can understand, see, the danger of the self with its opinions, its bravado, its beliefs, its fear, its unspeakable violence etc but it can not dissolve it…that freedom ‘from the known’, can only come with the energy of the “perception” that it MUST be dissolved; that its dissolution is “essential “.
That may be so, but before we look at what you say, let me ask something that I think might be important in this enquiry…
Would you say that the self in most of us, having heard Krishnamurti’s teaching on conditioning, the futility of thought to definitively solve existential problems, that it is nothing, and that it ultimately does not exist, locks itself even deeper into the prison of thought trying to convince itself that it is impossible to get out of it, using K’s words (verbatim) to justify that impossibility (or deny its possibility)?
But thinking cannot eliminate the “reflection” that “I exist” (self).
Yes, and yet we can try to think together and see if it is possible to go beyond that.
Only an ignorant human being can call another human being naïve for saying that we are nothing but imagination, without a deep understanding of what this means.
Krishnamurti said in the quotes you posted, But we are saying that this conditioning can be examined, can be observed and there can be total freedom from that conditioning.
The reader could take this to mean that the conditioned brain can, by examining itself, free itself, or that examination (by intelligence beyond the brain) frees the brain from its conditioning.
Not ‘reflection’ but a ‘reflex’ like what happens when the knee is tapped with a hammer: the leg jerks. There is no control over it, it happens.The reflex here is, that when thought moves it projects a ‘thinker’…and that is the ‘entity’ that doesn’t exist. Thought is real, it is material, it is a ‘response of the past’, it exists…the thinker doesn’t, the ‘observer’ doesn’t etc. Thought has invented the duality: ‘I am thinking’, ‘I am observing’, ‘I am experiencing’ but it’s just thinking, observing, experiencing…
Yes, and then what comes next from that?