Wakeful ego?

That what ‘I’ am is not material, not matter, nothing.

The ego is a ‘thing’, Thought is a ‘thing’.

Could a thought or an ego be considered a mental, rather than material, thing?

I don’t know , I just took K and DB’s word for it. It was a surprising statement but somehow made sense and I have no knowledge of such things.

I suppose technically that it has to do with the synapses , cells in the brain. Energy?

Aha, thanks.

I tend to look at it in subject/object terms:

I am not an object, I am a subject. I cannot be seen, because I am the seer. And so on.

Extending this viewpoint towards what you wrote:

I am not-a-thing, I am that which awares things.

Make any sense to you?

It does. I was just reading a Voyager post about relationships and seeing myself and others as ego or selfs, if that is our situation, then all relationships are interactions by a sort of false ‘material’ structure. It doesn’t really exist. There are attractions and repulsions but no real relationship because the parties involved are not ‘real’. The ego/self is the result of the past. If all that is so and what we actually are is “nothing” then it is in that nothingness that our relationship to each other is. As has been said , I think by Peter, we can accommodate, and compromise …even co-operate.

Dan,

“You know the word ‘thing’ comes from Latin res, which is ‘thought’… And thing is the movement of thought…”
K, Saanen, 3rd Question & Answer Meeting, 25th July 1980
“Thing is the movement of thought… So, when there is not a thing – you understand? – it means the movement of thought has come to an end.”
K, Saanen, 7th Public Talk, 20th July 1980

I have posted something to that effect at: how the word thought means thing

Of course, thought is a also a material process. Even scientists agree on that point. Thinking is a material process. E=mc². Anyone who studies science in school - physics - learns that fact. The energy of thought is equivalent to the movement of matter.

Any “I” is material, matter. The movement of thought (thinking) is a material process. Even thinking together is a material process.

Cool, I see that … We are nothingness, we dwell in nothingness, out actions are nothingness.

It seems to me that awareness is different. That it is not ‘material ‘. It imbues living ‘things’, surrounds them but is a ‘finer’ energy. When he says we are “nothing “, is that what ‘we’ are, awareness. That is what Terrance Stamp in his memoir said K. said to him, that “what you are is awareness”.

Dan,

Because we human beings have not created nature, obviously, nature itself is not a product of thought. When one removes thought from the equation, all that remains is awareness: observing, listening, touching. So, has one removed thought from one’s life? Because when one does, then and only then can one say that one is ‘nothing’, right?

Hi Charley,
I don’t really care about that aspect. Let others handle / judge / determine that.

Interesting! :slight_smile:

I’ve had the “Aha, I’m awareness!” epiphany a good number of times … but it never seems to stick. :wink: A day or two later it’s “Yep, I’m still awareness.” Then “I’m awareness, right?” Then “Awareness, me, oh reeeeeeeeeeally?” Then I reach for the remote and turn on the tv.

I think Drax had a good answer to this:

Dan:
‘Problem’ as it appears to me is that you can ‘start’ to be aware but it soon fades. Then ‘you’ pick it up again and it fades again…K said something like you start but you break off in the middle, you don’t go all the way. As I recall.

Drax:
So let it fade. But as K says the moment you are aware that it is fading/faded means again you are aware.
And that’s how it goes.
Once we get a hang of this, awareness becomes deeper and more abiding .
It’s like you are falling asleep. Can’t avoid that. But the moment you realise that you are falling asleep means you are awake again.

Drax reminded me that awareness isn’t ‘mine’.

Yes, that’s helpful, thanks Dan and Drax! :slight_smile:

But you are material. An illusion is a creation of thought which (as Krishnamurti said) is a material process. When you watch a movie you’re watching an illusion, be it a rapid succession of still photographs or pixels that you attribute meaning to. Likewise, the illusion of self.

With your illusions, you’re the center of the universe. Without your illusions, you are nothing but what-is.

Be aware of the one that is having the epiphany. Be aware of the one who is losing the epiphany. Be aware of the one who lost the epiphany…

Been thinking more about the notion of nurturing an ego into a kinder, gentler, more intelligent form of itself.

I definitely think it’s possible, many people (egos) mature into decent and intelligent human beings. But, the ego has been in development for millions of years, and it’s extraordinarily effective at accomplishing its mission: to safeguard its power, dominion, and well being. Any attempt to tinker with the ego’s reflexes and mechanisms is going to be met with almost insurmountable resistance by the ego. Sneaky resistance too, hard to spot, hitting below the belt.

Isn’t the problem as you pose it here , that ‘you’ are separate from that which you want to reform? Is that the case or is this just thought thinking about becoming ‘better’? Not technically but becoming a better human?

Yes, I’m looking at it from a subject/object point of view, the subject I is thinking about how it might change the object I. On the neurological level, the brain probably assigns the function of subject to a certain cluster of neurons, and these neurons observe and act on the brain as subject. The human brain is perfectly capable of doing this kind of meta self-observation. Important to remember of course is that the results of the observation are both limited and skewed by the conditioning of the brain that is observing.

So the K point about the subject is the object (observer is the observed) is being dismissed. That’s fine but why here are you doing that?
I suspect that I don’t know what you’re talking about unless it’s just self-improvement.

Fair question, brother. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from Krishnamurti, it’s not to take the word of anyone. To me this applies to Krishnamurti, other non-dual traditions, and of course myself. I keep digging, unearth a lot of dirt and perhaps a few gems, the process is never-ending.

2 Likes