Since consciousness is in constant motion, it seems to me that the transformation must be not in the content but in the removal of the boundary. Is he boundary apparently created by identification with the content.?
For me, language appears to show more and more clearly its limitation, Bohm with his introduction of the Rheomode has made an attempt to give movement more space in language only I still do not manage to handle it skilfully.
Because
Curiosity is a form of fearlessness - awareness and fear cannot coexist - me watching myself calmly cannot find me being afraid.
The reason why I mentioned consciousness (and its contents) is because during a conversation with Renee Weber, Bohm links the phrase you mentioned with the transformation of consciousness:
A change of meaning is a change of being. If we say consciousness is its content, therefore consciousness is meaning.
The statement implies - through the use of “therefore” - that the content of consciousness has to do with its ‘meaning’. And so I extrapolated from this that a change in the content of consciousness (i.e. its meaning) is synonymous with a change to the nature of consciousness itself (its being). One could consider this a change to mean the removal of the boundary of consciousness (as you have suggested).
K used to say that when the contents of consciousness are entirely emptied (through transformation) then there is a completely different kind or dimension of consciousness. K sometimes called this new dimension ‘love’, ‘attention’, ‘Intelligence’ or ‘mind’, which is not limited as consciousness is limited, and operates from outside the brain. - This would be the change in being perhaps?
K is talking about an action to be done, not a finished state of affairs. So when he talks about there being ‘only the state of sorrow’, he is talking about a state of pure observation (i.e. without a separate observer observing). As Inquiry says,
So there is only the fact of sorrow (being ‘held’, as it were, in a space of complete, undivided attention).
Sorrow is in essence the self. It is the essence of the ‘me’. But usually we escape from the fact of it, through rationalisation, suppression, evasion, escape, etc, and so never meet it completely, non-dualistically, so that the observer is the observed.
This is what K is inviting us to do. The implication is that when there is such complete, undivided attention to the fact of sorrow, the very attention wipes it out. There is no sorrow - no ‘me’ - for a mind in a state of complete attention. As Douglas suggests,
This is how I understand it.
Everybody knows that when you’re aware of some feeling - good or bad - and look at it ( ‘look at the jewel’, as Krishnamurti suggests) the energy that caused the feeling is wiped away, but that happens for the simple fact that the object of your concern has changed, not because there was any transformation in your consciousness, that’s simply wishful thinking or giving a happy ending to an episode taking place inside you, it just isn’t so. That is, what happens is that when you ‘look at the jewel’ you totally forget about the cause that gave rise to the feeling and instead you try to understand the feeling you’re dealing with, that’s it.
@Jess in that moment : when your reality was immediately transformed by an attitude, is it not possible to see that our reality is a subjective projection?
The problem though of course is that we conclude that I am the master of the universe - which is a philosophy that is being sold to us by certain magical self help gurus
I think the discussion has been looking at something a little bit different Jess? We have been talking about looking at sorrow or fear as a whole, in its totality. This is not something “everybody knows”.
In the extract from Krishnamurti we have been reflecting on most recently K says
The mind analyzes sorrow, and then imagines it has understood and is free of sorrow - which is nonsense. You may get rid of one particular kind of sorrow; but sorrow will come up again in another form. We are talking about sorrow as a total thing
To meet the jewel of sorrow (or fear, or envy, etc) in its totality, the mind must be in a state of total attention, in which - to use K’s language - ‘You are sorrow, you are not separate from sorrow’. It is only then that a transformation in the state of sorrow may come about.
This is not a fact, a reality, that “everybody knows” - if they did, then they would have dissolved sorrow at the root - which K says results in passion, ‘the passion of compassion’.
Hello, James!
This ‘everybody knows’ I refer to is confined, of course, to this elite of people who take the time to care about what Krishnamurti has said and written. Of course Krishnamurti is always right because the way he puts things ends up like this: yes, if you still live in sorrow it’s because you haven’t looked at sorrow in its totality. Who can say if you have looked at sorrow in its totality or not???! Well, as he said in different situations, if you do your best, you’re always at peace and you don’t even have to be worried about conclusions and you just inquire without a motive, otherwise it is not valid if you’re aiming - coming back to this particular case - at getting rid of sorrow!!
If there is no transcendance of self (sorrow) then we have not seen the totality of that process.
Unless of course K is wrong, or unless it is possible to have insight into self/freedom from self, without any sense of having seen/understanding?
Say you see that the snake is not a snake, but a coiled rope. You have no doubt, it’s as clear as day, the rope is real, the snake was imagined. You’re not dreaming, not hallucinating, that it’s a rope is utterly unquestionable, it’s an incontrovertible fact.
Does that mean the next time you encounter that object, the thought-reflex, “Egads, a snake!” definitely won’t arise? Maybe won’t arise? Might arise for a second, then disappear? If, for some reason, the mind wants/needs to see a snake, will it? What may drive the mind to that?
Oups! At first I was confronted by the twin headed hydra of “oh, there goes Rick again off on some weird tangent” and "the correct response of : he who says he knows, knows not" (which has to do with awareness being something that arises in conjunction with the ever arising present)
But I get it now, sorry. And the answer is : habit.
Though a brain may have seen clearly all that the self implies, its circular experience of reality - its habitual process (of projecting its subjective reality) is still able to function.
Guess I’m the Rick who cried “Wolf!” I’ve conditioned you all to expect “How many angels?” tangents from me. Thing is, from my pov, I’m always on topic, just not linearly.
Habit, definitely. But there’s more to it, I think. Dysfunctional/neurotic thinking-feeling can get the body-mind into all sorts of awkward situations, like knowing it’s a rope but make-believing it’s a snake. And when I say neurotic thinking, I mean: the universal neuroses we all share.
Hello Jess
Say something happens in the body, it feels like something is not working right. That’s the fact. Now thought starts up and images appear about what ‘may’ be wrong, go wrong, where this could lead, etc. This to me is what I call fear: a ‘trigger’ and then thinking, ‘speculating’ about the outcome, a possibly ‘bad’ outcome…K has said “thought is fear” not thought leads to fear but that thought IS fear. If there is not awareness of those thoughts as they are arising ie. that what is happening is ‘seen’, then there is suffering and fear. But if it’s seen, the thoughts are not identified with and their ‘danger’ is revealed?
Whats the difference? Another word for the above : neuronal pathways
Roger that. You just gave me an idea for an Experiment! Merci.
It seems that emotion, feeling, is choiceless response to stimuli, whereas thought is conditioned response; that the psychologically conditioned brain is more about control than choicelessness, and reacts to choiceless response by interrupting it, muddling it, creating the separation of feeling and feeler.
Hello, Danmcderm!
If you’re simply concerned about avoiding suffering, I guess an army of thoughts will be ready to come and give you some sort of escape of one kind or other. Krishnamurti said ‘thought is fear’ but he also said thought is intelligence, thought is this, thought is that, many things he said, as you know, about thought and thoughts. Yes, I guess thought is dangerous and it is a precious tool at the same time. It’s important to see for what it is in the occurring situation, I think you call it discernment. When Krishnamurti said ‘thought is fear’ he meant, I think, yes, that when we’re afraid of something thought is the trigger for this condition, but there is a combination of factors that bring it about like for example previous experiences, habits, instincts… The human psyche is very complex and… none of us was its creator to say what it is for sure!
I agree with you, Macdouddoug, that an insight may reveal the totality of the process, as you say, but the transcendence of the self sounds rather vague to me. Do you mean a liberated being?? If so, the question still remains, I guess.
Hi Jess - I think Douglas is correct when he says
If sorrow comes back, then (according to K) we really haven’t had an insight into its nature.
This doesn’t mean that our partial insights are invalid - it’s just a matter of accepting (with humility) the fact that they are partial insights and not total insight.
It may be an ‘escape’ in the sense that my current overriding interest seems to be: “participating in the Immensity” as K and DB referred to it in The Ending of Time. As regards psychological fear, conflict, greed, envy, jealousy, suffering, etc, those ‘dissonant’ states distort the brain like static in a radio and preclude the possibility of a silent, quiet, empty brain which as I understand it is the prerequisite for resonating with ‘mind’. A resonance in which the brain is mind! The possible maturation of the human brain / mind! Our birthright?
But as someone somewhere said: “Many are called, few are chosen.”