What do we mean by insight?

Kinfonet Discussion
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That seems too easy an explanation to me there is something more going on besides language without me being able to pinpoint it exactly.

Thus my mind occasionally makes leaps that surprise even myself but also those present. And this takes place both in my mother tongue and in English. And it is usually understood immediately without any explanation.

In one of the dialogues last week, there was a very extroverted accademic participant named Jack and suddenly i responded: 'But Jack your name is half the answer ! They glared at me for an answer ’ you’re being hijacked, you’re hijacked being '. A great laugh and he thanked me for the reply.

I’ve no idea where that came from.

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I may be wrong, but I think Wim is from Belgium. His mother tongue is probably Flemish or French. Please correct me if I’m wrong Wim.

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Hi Sean

I was born and raised in the Netherlands and because of boundless love :heart_eyes: I have been living in Belgium for 26 years. I feel like a world citizen rather than a Belgian or Dutchman and that is not easy in the current state of affairs.

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66

As with all words, the word ‘consciousness’ is context-dependent. Consciousness can be understood as a synonym for awareness. But this is not the way that Krishnamurti uses the word, because he has a more focussed interest in liberating consciousness of its thought-created contents.

So I understand ‘consciousness’ to be the whole psychological world that thought has created; the multitude of ways in which thought touches every aspect of our lives and relationships:

our images of each other in relationship, our images about ourselves, our memories, our psychological conditioning, our unconscious or subconscious motives and fears, our self-pity, our pride, our anger, our desires, our impulses, our psychologically conditioned reactions, our sufferings, our stored-up experiences of joy and sorrow, our moods, our jealousies, our hurts, our frustrations, our temperament, our character, the way we look at the world through images and memory, our creative imagination, our dreams.

All of this is consciousness as I understand it.

When we are conscious of things, of people, we are conscious from this whole background movement of conditioning - so ordinary conscious awareness, conscious perception, is part of our consciousness too.

Awareness, perception, and attention may not be limited in the way that our consciousness is limited; but so long as we live, move, and have our being in consciousness, our awareness and attention must necessarily be limited by the contents of consciousness - which is essentially rooted in thought and memory.

The song of birds, if it is listened to through the filter of consciousness, is part of consciousness too. But it doesn’t have to be. If one can, for a few seconds, listen or see or be attentive without the background of images, worries and memories, then such perception is not part of consciousness. It only becomes part of consciousness once thought takes over the percept and plays with it in imagination, or continues it in memory.

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Perhaps then this may just be part of your natural personality.

Nevertheless, even if it is the natural way of thinking or acting for you, I still feel it is in everyone’s interest, and well within your own capacity, to communicate a subtle point as simply and clearly as you feel able to.

It means waiting until the whole thought, the whole notion - of what you want to say - is clear in your own mind. And then finding the simplest and clearest way of expressing it to others.

We all fail at doing this - I know I do. It is supremely difficult to be simple and efficient in communication. And it is difficult to be simple and clear in our thinking or feeling. But it is part of our responsibility in communication to be as simple and efficient as we can be, wouldn’t you agree?

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For ourselves as much as for the other.

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I agree, but at the same time seeing that there is a difference between acting/dialoguing on this forum and personal dialogue, but perhaps I should acknowledge that this forum is not for me.

Maybe it is because there is too much time between reading and responding.

The feeling that’s not something for me is present at Zoom meetings.

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I understand your feeling about this.

This is clearly the limitation of this kind of dialogue. There is often a significant time-lag between responses, and so the thread of conversation is often lost. Sometimes one feels too tired to read a long paragraph. Words and meanings cannot be quickly and easily clarified (as they can in face-to-face dialogue), so misunderstandings happen all the time.

But all forms of communication have their limits. The language we use is a limit. In a telephone conversation one cannot see the other person. In a zoom conversation there may be technical malfunction, the time may run out before an understanding has been reached, and there’s the fact that we all live in different time-zones which has an effect. Even in real life face-to-face conversations we are limited by our moods, our energy levels, by whether we have spent the day working, dealing with relatives, etc.

So no conditions are ever truly optimal for conversation. It’s what we make of it that matters.

Yes. One of the positive aspects of participating on a forum like this is that it gives one the opportunity of finding out what one is thinking through the challenge of writing it out for other people. But just as clarity in expression is not easy, being clear in our thinking is not easy. This is the challenge we all face here.

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Yes. I think this is so. The contents of consciousness are many and varied. There is also the possibility that consciousness is not individual, but shared (this is another matter). But all the contents of consciousness are put together by thought and memory, which are necessarily limited. So the fruits of consciousness must also be limited.

Consciousness (as it is presently) cannot reach outside itself and touch the skies - though probably perception and attention can.