If you always knew it you wouldn’t have pursued it to begin with. More likely you realized after a while that it wasn’t for you. Now you’re “free”.
It wasn’t and isn’t wasted. We humans here have the only brains that know, have seen, how enormous the universe we live in is,…nothing else living here on Earth knows that. The “immensity”, JK has called it. The brain has been hobbled, stunted, by the self image. It’s for each of us interested , to break free of that and realize that “immensity” for ourselves. For the human brain to be set free…
I, “am looking at myself”
Reading from one of Rupert Spira’s books, helped “me” to put this in words:
If I am looking at myself, then I am conscious, and I exist.
I appear as a subjective “someone”, and as the world in which “I appear”.
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I came up with the phrase: All is all within all.
The consciousness that is conscious of consciousness, is the same as the awareness of what it is conscious “of”. or, we can simply say: Conscious-being-existence.
The “only way out of the loop”, is to clearly see, that the true nature of the knower, need not be known. For, whatever is “known”, can never be apart from “that which knows it”…!
There is no place, “to place(put): me”.
It’s not about detachment, but unknowing: not assuming you know reality. Isn’t it our everyday experience, that what is real, need not be believed? There are too many examples to list. Ultimately we must face being-alive “head on”.
Who’s mind is “retaining the status quo”…?
I wrote this poem yesterday, and I feel it fits here:
One piece of the puzzle,
Constantly-illusional,
And trying to be the whole picture…
...precious chap…!
“The birdsong in the spring sunshine as I walked through the churchyard was sublimely subjective and was not a loop. And there it is.”
As You were aware of what consciousness perceived, You saw that it all was the same as You. And there it is, too…!
I wonder if it might be any help to consider that thought/thinking began - in evolutionary terms - as a tool, as an extension of the senses?
There is a sense in which it is part of the way sensation works that we are given to experience the thing touched (or tasted or seen, etc) as separate from the thing doing the touching (or tasting or seeing): the sensation of burning includes the information that the fire is separate from my finger.
For the brain it was important to be able to distinguish the fact that a thought about an edible fruit is distinct and separate from the thinking about it - because otherwise it could be tricked into thinking that merely by thinking about edible fruit, there would actually be an actually edible fruit right before us (which would be a hallucination).
So the brain distinguished between the brain as a centre of perception, and the tool of thought it used to remember or anticipate a perceivable object (like edible fruit).
This is a relatively benign and practical distinction of a centre (as a particular brain) distinct from the tool of thought being employed (as merely an extension of the senses).
But then, over time, the activity of thinking itself became too powerful, too creative, and made this practical or pragmatic centre into something more important, more “conscious”, and invested it with all kinds of (thought-created) qualities and identities. This was the birth of the thinker.
Thereafter, the brain could no longer distinguish the thinker from the thought - and so just by thinking about the thinker, the thinker appears (which is a kind of hallucination we all now suffer from).
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Do you want to know that? By knowing that can it end your sufferings Pilgrim?
Well - I guess the obvious answer was that intelligence wasn’t in operation “at the beginning”!
If we accept that hominids developed from apes, and that thought began in earlier animals (even chickens have REM, I don’t know if you’ve ever kept chickens!), then it is clear that thinking has developed over a long stretch of physical evolution (coinciding with the development of the brain - the growth of the new-cortex in particular being critical).
However, Krishnamurti seems to suggest that this development of thought only became problematic in the life of human beings. I think it is useful to think about it in terms of an over-developed sense - or like a computer that has gone beyond what its original programme intended - to create problems it was not originally intended to resolve.
Thinking is obviously a tool involving memory. It is a more portable extension of what in most animals remains mostly instinct. Salmon have a “memory” of where they were spawned. Birds “remember” where to migrate to during the cold season. At the most instinctual level, animal memory is governed by hormonal laws: the law of procreation, the law of how to suckle a teat, or the law of how to lay an egg, etc.
Human memory is a more flexible, culturally adaptable form of animal memory (which many animals actually have as well, but which humans have perfected). As such, memory is obviously a useful tool of human flourishing: it is an extension of the senses - and can be used to create technology, which is a further extension of our senses. Thinking is humankind’s super power in that sense (and is co-extensive with the enlargement of certain areas in the brain).
All this happened slowly, naturally, over time - so probably the brain didn’t even notice the moment when thought became detached from its purely tool-like purposes, and made the merely functional centre (i.e., of the senses, of thought: aka the brain) the psychological centre of all existence (aka the thinker, the ego, the self).
So intelligence (in K’s sense of that word) is perhaps a potential of the brain that was not required during the earlier evolution of culture and technology, but that is now necessary to address the imbalances created by thinking itself.
Ha!
Well - as you know, that’s the question. There may be an epistemic problem for us if we answer it too dogmatically either way.
If it’s a potential of the brain, then is it - like the brain - materially limited and subject to the limitations of the other senses? And if it is not so limited, then in what sense can it be said to be a part of the brain? - It would seem then to be something “outside of the brain” (what late 70s and 80s K called “the mind”). But if we accept this notion - of a universal mind - then how do we avoid getting caught in the trap of our own projections about it (as others have done with brahman or God, etc), which are created from inside our own brain?
All we know from K (and other serious religious people) is that the brain needs to be quiet for intelligence to function.
Well - as voyager says above - it’s probably because
I think this is probably true for most of us, including (and perhaps especially!) those of us who have become somewhat aware of the importance of having a quiet brain - so it stands to reason that this is not a universally popular notion. In a sense, almost everything that society is concerned with - achievement, pleasure, money, power, friendship, popularity, etc - is opposed to this quietness of the brain.
But, on the other hand - perhaps due to the popularity of mindfulness and yoga in recent years - there is a vague awareness of the importance of a quiet brain that is more widespread than perhaps it was 20 years ago. It is likely a shallow awareness, but it exists.
Of course, the challenge of actually having a truly quiet brain increases the closer one comes to what it requires: the complete cessation of thought and time. So it’s not exactly a straightforward pastime! - But the tentative beginnings of it, as voyager also mentions, may just be in the simple choiceless awareness we can have of everyday life, and in those occasional “intervals” when the usual stream of cognitive associations is temporarily disrupted (or is in abeyance), and bird-song breaks in…
Along with being quiet, the mind needs to be alert. These don’t always go together! Your mind can quiet down into a zombie-like sleepiness. Having a quiet and alert, engaged, present mind, that’s the trick!
Right. We have to remember the context of K’s writings, quietness implies attention, but not a “conscious” attention: it implies a state of attention without a centre - a state of attention in which thought is absent. It is not a torpid lassitude or dullness, as you say - it is a highly energetic state, but which has the quality of stillness.
In Buddhism (and other traditions) they like to split up these qualities into alertness (vipassana) and tranquility (samatha), and they believe there are different ways of addressing the cultivation of these qualities. - But K denies all that. He doesn’t fragment it. It is of a whole - and comes when the brain is physically and psychologically quiet (i.e., when there is order in the mind, in relationship, etc, and thought has its right place).
In all the Eastern/non-dual traditions I’ve come across, ‘attention’ is a given. When Tilopa says “No past, future, present, analysis, effort … simply rest” it implies: “simply rest in awareness, presence, attention.” I’ve asked Buddhists about a resting that is a kind of hypnagogic calm … turns out this is a BIG no-no! Without the alertness, meditation is seen as not only worthless, but harmful, promotes slothfulness. I understand the rationale for this view, but I don’t share it. For me, there is something powerful and profound in the void-like emptiness of hypnagogic calm, worthy of exploration.
You?
It is difficult to know precisely what you mean by this, because the phenomenology of meditative and experiential states is notoriously difficult to pin down.
Buddhism - as I’m sure you are aware - is an umbrella term for a wide diversity of different beliefs and activities that often stand in stark contradiction with each other. Tilopa himself - whose biography is almost entirely mythical - was an 11th century tantric yogi (or mahasiddha) from India, whose approach would inform the Vajrayāna practices of some Tibetan schools of Buddhism (particularly the Kagyu). But his approach - or what we know of it - is quite different from other schools of classical Buddhism, such as the Theravada.
In Theravada they talk about a state of nirodha-samapatti, which has different meanings for different Theravadins. For some it is a state of complete void, or unconsciousness (like dreamless sleep), or even like being psychologically brain-dead (with the body nevertheless still active in sending blood to the brain) - while for others it is a state beyond comprehension and is a synonym for nirvana. To come to this state they prescribe a rigid series of explicit meditation states (Sanskrit: dhyanas) in which there is a gradual diminishment of intellectual and affective contents, in some instances followed a further series of immaterial meditative states: infinite space, infinite mind, infinite nothingness, and then a state beyond either mind or non-mind. - But these are highly speculative states, and not amenable to simple characterisation.
In tension with these dhyana meditations was the mindfulness (or vipassana) form of meditation that emphasised alertness, conscious awareness, etc.
In the later Dzogchen or Mahamudra traditions, the notion of emptiness (or nirodha-samapatti) was assimilated equally from the intellectual tradition of Nagarjuna’s school (called the Madhyamaka) as from the more meditative schools (called the Yogacara), which had begun to use a more “non-dualistic” language to describe the nature of the mind. Nevertheless, they shared - for the most part - the same Theravada idea that any highest meditation states can only be approached through a combination of concentration (samatha) and alert insightfulness (vipassana). In Chan Buddhism (and later, Zen) there was a reaction to this, as we know, giving rise to the sudden (or “subitist”) school of immediate realisation (which also plays a role in Dzogchen).
For Krishnamurti - who constantly stressed that there must be order in relationship and in the mind before meditation has any meaning - the state of emptiness only becomes relevant once consciousness has been emptied of its contents - when the brain is empty of its past psychological conditioning. Then, he says, there is emptiness, space, silence - which is synonymous with the awakening of intelligence and love - and this is the beginning of a real “unconscious” meditation into truth (although, by “unconscious” he didn’t mean being “knocked-out” - as he explained to David Bohm in a dialogue from 1983 - rather it is state of complete attention):
JK: When we use the word meditation it is generally understood there is always a meditator meditating. Meditation is really an unconscious process, it is not a conscious process.
DB: How are you able to say that meditation takes place then if it is unconscious?
JK: It is taking place when the brain is quiet…
DB: Still it is not just being knocked out, or if a person is unconscious he is knocked out too, but you don’t mean that.
JK: Of course not, good lord!
DB: Or under anaesthetic or…
JK: No, let’s put it that way: conscious meditation, conscious activity to control thought, to free oneself from conditioning, is not freedom…Would you say attention, in attention there is no centre as the ‘me’?
Thanks, James! That helped fill in some blanks for me, especially about the nine jhanas.
True! For me, meditation can sometimes give way to what I’ve been calling a hypnagogic state, in which I’m not awake (in the normal sense of the word), not asleep, not dreaming, not daydreaming, thoughts are largely absent, feelings and sensations too. It’s kind of like falling asleep while remaining conscious. At times it feels like what my Buddhist friends say it is: useless trancey slothfulness. At other times it feels like the realest thing ever, as if I’m in touch with the source of existence, right at ground zero.
Does that resonate with you?
Yes - if I were a Theravada Buddhist I might diagnose this as somewhere on the spectrum of the first four (rupa) dhyanas. If I were a Chan Buddhist I would say ‘drop your experience, it’s over - don’t make a big deal about it.’
But as a non-Buddhist I would just say: it sounds interesting. I have some sense of what you mean from my own limited experiences of meditation. Relatively empty but lucid trance-like states have sometimes happened to me too (in meditation).
However - and maybe you didn’t mean to give an exact description when you said this - I would personally question whether you had actually arrived at “the source of existence, right at ground zero”; because that would imply a number of things which most likely entail a radical psychological transformation (in K’s language: the cessation of thought and time, the emptying of consciousness of its content, etc) that is pretty rare in human beings.
In my non-professional opinion, there’s no harm in experimenting with sitting physically still and watching what happens - so long as one doesn’t get too attached to the experiences that occur. But, for me, the real test of any inner (non-accumulative) learning remains in the field of my relationships, and the way I respond there. And whatever I have experienced in meditation, I know that in my relationships there is still a large measure of immaturity! - Finding quiet and order there is my biggest concern.
Totally right you are to question this! I meant it sometimes feels like this, not that it IS this. I’m not sure I would recognize the ground of existence if it bit me in the derriere!
Why do you feel that the litmus test of real learning is in the field of your relationships?
For better or worse some people don’t have it in them to compromise.
Could you explain a little more what you mean by this? I’m not sure that I catch your meaning. Are you perhaps suggesting that we “flow” with the way our consciousness - which is society - moves? Like a tree that bends with the breeze?
Because sometimes one has to stand against the tide of that movement - right? The rules may be immoral rules, and one must break them.
Don’t you feel this way too? - I know for myself that there are times when I’m on my own - on holiday or on a retreat for instance - when I feel rejuvenated and alone. And there is a learning there which is essential and healing.
But the real challenges are in my relationships with friends and family: all my buttons are pressed there, all my issues from childhood, of fear and hurt and attachment rear their ugly heads; there is the question of what it means to love, and what it means to let go.
If the learning I do when I am (physically) by myself is compartmentalised away from the learning that I neglect to do in my relationships with other people (and with society at large), then it cannot be completely honest, real, holistic - no?
So, for me at least, how I respond in relationship is still the litmus test of whatever I have discovered inwardly - even though this is an often a rather deflating thing to admit!
Is this what you mean by compromise? - If it is, then maybe the word “compromise” is under-selling what you are really saying: which is choiceless awareness right? - admitting a fact and not resisting what one is at that moment.
I’m still not completely clear here about what you mean (I’m reflecting on what it means to “flow” with consciousness).
As far as I understand it, that is what choiceless awareness is all about. - If I am irritated or hurt, or I feel an impulse of desire or a wave of sadness, I don’t judge it, but move with it without any choice (which is different from acting out of irritation or hurt, etc).
But in the wider consciousness of the world, of society, there often are occasions where one needs to take a stand, to be non-cooperative. For example, nationalism is a wave that sweeps up unthinking people, and part of sensitivity is to be aware of its danger, and remove oneself. The same might be true of the expression in the workplace of sexism or racism or bullying. It is part of sensitivity to be non-compliant with certain expressions of unconsciousness or ignorance, even if this costs us a job or a friendship.
Moral judgments - if they are not simply the regurgitation of one’s prejudices or conditioning - might simply be the response of our sensitivity to what is actually happening in the world. If I perceive that killing animals for sport or for food is unnecessary and cruel, I will not support it. This is a response of sensitivity to what is actually happening in society, even though it may look like a “moral judgment”.