Yes, like reflexes. But not always. The kind of consciousness work we’re doing asks us to be less controlled by our conditioned reflexes. For me, it’s easier to feel the ‘knowing’ awareness when I’m meditating than in everyday activities.
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Would you be willing to try and describe/discuss the work/activity of meditation as you see it?
I’d be interested in exploring that in more detail.
PS- I practise zazen (which could be seen as “unlearning” 
)
First of all, are we ever aware that we are thinking?
So what is thinking? What exactly do we mean by the word ‘thinking’? Before we consider meditation, awareness, attention et cetera, shall we look at this first?
Thinking (I think) is the welling up of our conditioning (experience/conclusions/knowledge) in its exigent instinct for progress and security?
It is the naming/knowing (comparison) in order to confirm itself in its perceived environment - checking itself in order to ascertain its proper (fitness/survival) reactions.
What I’m doing these days is similar to the Zen practice of shikantaza: no object of meditation, just resting in being/awareness. I also sometimes do my spin on choiceless awareness, watching things rise and fall in consciousness without thinking about them.
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Good one, Doug.
I see thinking as parsing perceived reality into separate objects and then mentally acting upon them: interpreting them, analyzing them, judging them, comparing them to similar objects stored in memory, modifying them, dismissing them, and so on.
Paul?
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When we are thinking, we are using the past, aren’t we?
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Thinking draws upon memory. If memory were totally out of the picture, there would likely still be mental activity, but it probably wouldn’t be appropriate to call it thinking.
Yes - for what end? Is there necessarily a motive?
The question is, are we using the past or is the past using us? If the answer to a question or the solution to a problem lies in the past, it makes sense to use any knowledge which has been stored in memory. But for all of our most fundamental questions and problems there are no answers and solutions. This is what makes them so fundamental. Yet we seem to be capable of offering up only a very superficial response, which is to offer whatever lies in the past. The past keeps us tethered to the superficial.
As I see it:
If you rely too strongly on the past/memory/conditioning, you risk being mechanical, as in rote-ish repetition.
If you rely too little on the past, you risk losing the depth that comes from incorporating it into the present moment.
I guess on this point I disagree with Krishnamurti’s view. The past is not dead or meaningless to me, on the contrary it’s rich and layered. But, as with all aspects of psychological thinking, memory is a trickster, you need to be vigilant when using it.
Why do you ask? Are you not aware of your thoughts, be they spontaneous or deliberate?
does any awareness of our own intellectual behavior immediately get translated into more thinking?
If your thoughts need translation, you’re thinking in one language and acting in another.
We are the past. That’s our identity. But isn’t all of that very superficial?
I feel angry or annoyed with someone; that anger then gets translated, doesn’t it?
At what point are we aware? When we get angry with one another, at what point are we aware of this?
Not to me! On the contrary, my past enriches and deepens my present. I think we’ve hit that point again where my of-time-ness and your not-of-time-ness clash.
No, it gets explained, attributed, justified, or it’s passively observed. This isn’t “translation”. It’s a conditioned response or and intelligent response.
It gets turned into something else: an explanation, an attribution, a justification or an observation - that’s what I’m saying. Why should it be passively observed? Passive observation of anger is not anger; it has become something else.
But the importance of it all to you is still of very superficial importance. Does the present have any quality of depth or shallowness to it? While the past is there, it has that quality to it because there is an observer looking at the present through the eyes of its own knowledge and past experiences. But it is always a quality that is concerned only with itself.
When we are looking at the world as it is right now with total attention there is neither shallowness nor depth. Our inattention is what provides us with these qualities, whether they are the product of daydreams or beliefs and opinions superimposed as images upon whatever it is that we are looking at. Those images of the world are the images we hold of ourselves. That actually is what we are looking at - ourselves. It may look deep or it may look shallow; but it is superficial observation only.
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The ‘present moment’ you’re pointing to is entirely new and unprecedented, the one I’m pointing to is part of a process that stretches from past to future and is both old and new, precedented and unprecedented. Two different perspectives, ways of seeing. Which is right(er)? Convincing arguments can be made for both views. I don’t think we can ever know, at least not like we know the earth orbits the sun.
An interesting question for me in a situation like this: When two people see the same thing from nontrivially different points of view, can they still manage to connect? I say yes, love sees past the differences to the underlying kinship.
There must be total attention, in which there is no sentiment at all, no emotion.
Kinfonet Quote of the Day
Nov 5, 2021