No view or perspective is ever right. It can’t be. It must always be limited by the position from which that person is standing. It is the limited observer who thinks in terms of connection and separation. And any observer, however erudite or ignorant, however experienced or naïve, must always be limited. There is a fact or a truth about all this that totally obliterates the observer. Then we can talk about love. But not until the observer, the learner, has completely disappeared.
Yes.
Then the word ‘love’ should never come up in our conversations. Ditto for all the other words that really only make sense when the observer is completely absent. If we were to follow this, our talks would be much less abstract, which might be a good thing!
So who or what is saying Yes? Is it still the learner? Is this still an abstract Yes?
The thinker.
So in these matters his Yes or No is meaningless. Therefore, what is the role of the learner, the thinker or the observer in all of this? How does the learner meet the fact that obliterates him or her?
It’s not meaningless, it’s just not 100% right. For me these are not yes/no questions, they’re nuanced. Partially right might be as good as it gets. 100% right might be reserved for tautologies, math, crossword puzzles, and magical thinking.
They are the subjects that learn about, think about, or observe objects.
How does the learner meet the fact that obliterates him? He stops being the learner. That’s all. It isn’t then about 80%, 90% or even 100%. Total attention isn’t 100% attention. Total attention means 0% learner.
What is your answer to your question, Paul:
What does it mean to learn?
To learn about the unknown, the new, the undiscovered, this is not a task for either the casual or the committed learner. The learner is a product of his own cultural and intellectual history. Therefore he can only meet the new through comparison with the old. He can accumulate knowledge, that’s all. He can gather, record and manipulate all that has come before. He can be amazingly clever. To learn about the unknown one has to be for oneself a totally unknown entity. That’s the start, isn’t it? This doesn’t take much working out. But a mind that has already accumulated for itself a few fragments of wisdom will inevitably remain caught in the limits of what it has found.
As I said somewhere upstream in this thread, what you are calling learning sounds to me like what Krishnamurti called meditation: the thought/time-free seeing of what-is.
One has to be for oneself a totally unknown entity. So you can’t compare it with anything else. That’s just bringing it all back into the field of the known.
Calling it ‘learning’ is bringing it back to the field of the known. Ditto for any word you use to describe the (non-)thing we’re talking about. But that’s a concession we make when we use language to communicate with each other.
And yet we are known to ourselves. All the way down to our cells.
Only when the learner comes in. When he says, ‘I have learnt something new,’ and yet leaves it alone, that’s real learning because it doesn’t impose a stop on the learning. But when he keeps what he has learnt, stores it away as memory, he has moved from learning into knowing.
Are we? What do you know about yourself that is one hundred percent true?
That’s not quite what I mean. I mean that words are concepts, and concepts are in the field of the known, so no matter what you call it, learning or observing or meditating, it brings you to the known. You clearly have some notion of what ‘learning’ means, and regardless of how open that notion is, it is in the field of the known.
Yes, it’s what we know most directly of all that we (think we) know! But, I’m not saying our knowledge is ‘correct.’ In fact I think we have a mental model of ourselves and the world that is full of fundamental errors. That’s what we’re exploring in our talks here, right?
This the ability we have, the learning and storing that has made us so successful in the practical, technological realm…but in the psychological, it has no place. It has brought a dead past into a living present and stripped it of the wonder and the awe. It has brought a feared ‘future’ into a place where only now is. The learner IS the learning. When they are separated into two, there is conflict.
Love is usually considered emotional, isn’t it?
If I’m an entity, I can’t be unknown for very long. Unless I’m in delusional, I’ll have self-knowledge enough to understand myself.
No, we are finding out what it means to learn and if there is such a thing as learning distinct from the mere accumulation of knowledge. The learner is the sum of his knowledge, the product of what he knows. But apart from specific technical information, what actually do we know about life, you and I? I am not talking about our wild ideas and fantastic models of the universe. Practically, actually, what do we know?
Yes, indeed, but am I willing to drop that in order to meet you?
Self-knowledge begins with me and ends with being human. Why should a human “drop” what it knows about being human?