In listening there is no listener. Try it next time. When there is listening to someone or to music, there is no listener. It is silence or emptiness that listens, there is no interpreter. This seems easily verifiable as direct experience.
Going back to this notion of âlost timeâ again - which I compared (probably wrongly) to Samadhi :
There might be occasions, during periods of relaxation when the observer dissapears - but so do all the things - and thus all experience (is this awareness? it feels like the opposite of awareness)
If something arises (eg. insistent thoughts or sensations), makes us conscious again from out of this non-experience, the world appears again, but there is a different quality of experience (awareness?) here where division/desire has not yet arisen.
Does any of this address the question?
If by âdirect experienceâ you mean what K called, âdirect perceptionâ, who or what is to verify whether itâs direct or not? Who or what does the verification?
Direct perception is naked, vulnerable, and more easily denied or distorted by unconscious desire/fear than âverifiedâ by any authority.
This question of âWhat is awareness?â is so important to get straight. So much rests on that.
In the common usage of the word awareness, identification is present. That is, we are identified with what is being perceived. Whether we take notice of it or not there is an inherent relationship between observer and observed, like, dislike, interest, non-interest, engagement, disengagement, boredom, disgust, irritation, delight, amusement, etc.
When the observer is wholly silent, not made silent, there is surely a different quality of awareness coming into being?
Then there is an altogether different, primal(?) type of awareness in which any sense of identity and thus any identification with what is being observed is wholly absent. Non-presence of self indicates that awareness in no way can interfere in the content of consciousness made possible by bare awareness. It isnât âhuman-likeâ. Much like the faculty of sight has no vested interest in what is seen, it just the means by which objects are consumed mechanistically by the brain. What is seen is âevaluatedâ from that point on.
Not having identity, awareness can be equated with freedom. Again not in the sense of I am free but in a negative sense of there being no instance of self which alone is capable of notions like freedom or its opposite. Kâs âwhere the self is, the other is notâ analogy.
Krishnamurti has appropriated many words in the English language to convey this 'bare awareness" , namely meditation, intelligence, beauty and even love and death. This has let to a whole host of confusion. That is a topic for another thread but it might be insightful to look into why that particular choice of words.
The question I try to hold and answer for myself is âwhy silence?â Why would I pursue that, pursue in the sense - why is that intelligent action, perhaps the only recourse available? Without a real understanding , it seems to me, we would be making ourselves silent.
If our brain / mind is an evolved organ that is capable of resonating with something âhigherâ than the material, then it seems that to do that, it needs to be free of ânoiseâ, still and silent. It canât be filled with the drama of the self, the pastâŚthe recorded residue of experience? It needs to be âemptyâ? If not empty it is mired in the âmuckâ of the past? And the possibility of the mind being one with the Universal Mind is forfeited? The âblossomingâ?
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As far as speech corresponds imperfectly to thought, because of the limitations of language, and thought being a response of memory, of the past, i.e., time, it must be that silence is closer to the truth, to what is timeless, than any word spoken or recollected.
In the past 17 years of engaging with Kâs teaching the one thing I have learnt is that the biggest illusion is the self believes it is aware. It is like the politicians involved in war. They believe the division is real and according to it act. In reality they are unaware. The blind believing they are aware, that is the tragedy. The irresponsible believing they are responsible
After listening to K, we see that our minds are not directly aware but actually self absorbed. That starts the inquiry into awareness. We see self absorption is not awareness at least in moments in which we are not self absorbed
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Itâs because the self is destructive and destroying. There is no relationship where self is active. This might be difficult to accept for anyone who believes strongly in self and individualism. Modern life allows to function in individualism, but fact is life is relationship.
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If I pursue silence, itâs still all about I, me, mine, so I donât pursue it. I just acknowledge that without the silence of I, me, mine, I am miserable and wretched because the brain needs silence to listen, to look, to feel, to be empty, unidentified, unlimited, etc. All the conditioned brain knows is the constant noise of thought, regardless of how practical, rational, or incoherent thought is.
The human condition is the problem of incessant thought, the never-ending noise that makes it impossible to be free, empty, nothing but the sounds of what weâre resisting constantly, what Paul Simon called the sound of silence.
Monks devote their lives to learning how to be quiet, silent, to finding out how to stop the infernal chatter that makes us delusional, deranged, desperate and depressed. And one can come to believe that theyâve done it, pleased with their new-found delusion. But we know we canât silence ourselves because we are what we are until/unless we are not what we were.
Douglas, perhaps it may confuse things if we unquestioningly take our personal experiences of âmeditationâ to be universally objective facts? You seem to be equating the absence of an âobserverâ (in Kâs sense) with the absence of phenomenal objects (or the awareness of those objects)?
As was being discussed above, in the immediate moment of observation - our âinitial attentionâ to objects - there is no image (and so no observer). There is just the movement of a bird before we call it a âbirdâ, the colour of the sky before we call it âblueâ. This initial attention is usually lost in the following moment (i.e. we are quickly preoccupied with our own thoughts about the object of perception).
So when K talks about âobserving without the observerâ or âseeing without he seerâ, this is usually in the context of looking at a tree, at a flower, at a river, at a bird flying or a trail of ants, etc.
He then goes on to suggest that there may be a state of attention in which there is no centre and no periphery, which goes beyond our ordinary experience of awareness.
Maybe youâre imagining that Iâm imagining some high level mysticism? Iâm referring to very normal relaxed âzoning outâ, the âlost timeâ phenomenon - which I say might actually be the opposite of awareness (as there is no experience or memory of the incident)
And when drawn out of this state by some thought or sound, movement etc there is a period of âinitial attentionâ to the world without judgement as you say. (a different quality of awareness)
Douglas, the present topic (as far as I recall) is the nature of bare attention or initial attention in which there are no images and so no observer. This is what takes place in the immediacy of perception before thought comes in to give it meaning or create preferences, likes and dislikes, etc.
We are not talking about âzoning outâ, being relaxed, dozing off to sleep, daydreaming, becoming vague, losing consciousness, etc.
Iâm not sure that this is correct Dev. By bare attention or initial attention I simply mean the moment of awareness or perception (of an object) before it has been translated by the observer in terms of like and dislike - i.e. before images have been formed about it.
However, there may be a further, âdeeperâ or more fundamental kind of awareness that appears when all sense of self or thinking has entirely disappeared.
Bare attention may be the seed of this deeper kind of awareness.
The only way we can validate the teachings is to see where âchoiceless awarenessâ leads. And that means standing completely alone, being identified with absolutely nothing, including the teachings, no self-interest of any kind.
Quite right, Awareness cannot pursue anything. It isnât alive in the sense we are. It has no agenda. It is a faculty. A quality the mind is endowed with. All living creatures.
We may want to stop thought, but that is choice and has nothing to do with awareness. Unadulerated awareness allows us to see facts, that is all. Awareness does not care what those facts are. It sees the fact of thought as impersonally as it sees a flower.
I donât understand why people equate choiceless awareness with the stopping of thought. Awareness does not preclude thought or anything else. The incessant movement of thought may be slowed down or quelled to some degree as a result of the introduction of awareness. There is only one way to find out the effect of awareness on thought and it has nothing to do with willfully trying to stop thought or any other choice.
Choiceless awareness reveals; it does not act on what is revealed. Thought does. And thought is mechanical, it is not evil, it acts according to what it thinks is the case. If awareness sheds light on things it misconstrued thought/I will self-correct automatically. Surely the only value of choiceless awareness is to to see clearly. A very worthwhile endeavor for âmeâ I would say. That how i understand things anyway.
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I totally concur, James. By ;normalâ usage of awareness I meant interpretation, after âbare awarenessâ, after simple seeing. Sorry if that wasnât clear. I donât edit my posts too much these days as an experiment to get closer to what I am actually feeling and thinking without censor.
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Yes - this seems to be a common misunderstanding that people have. Choiceless awareness, as you say, is simply the awareness of facts:
Awareness itself (or bare attention or initial attention), as we have been saying, is not conceptual or made of concepts; but it can obviously be aware of concepts in the same way that it can be aware of trees. Both concepts and trees are phenomenal facts in the world, and choiceless awareness is simply the impartial noticing of these facts.
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Yes. It seems very reasonable that if the mind is full of noise (the âdrama of the selfâ) it cannot touch deeper waters.
Silence and space are simply the grounds for perceiving or being in contact with a subtler dimension of mind/Mind.
In the moment of listening (or seeing or sensing or being aware) there is no listener (or observer); but what usually happens is that this moment is quickly lost and the momentum of thought (with its thinker) takes over perception (or listening, seeing, awareness).
When this occurs there is an opportunity to be choicelessly aware of (or to listen to, or see) the reaction created by thought - without judging it, holding onto it, suppressing it, or indulging it.
One thing that strikes me is how K would often encourage his listeners to simply look at the mountains, a cloud or a tree. He seemed to give great importance to this. He obviously didnât think it was a waste of time to point out the beauty of the mountains to conditioned brains who would probably filter and reduce this beauty straight away. This suggests to me that in looking there is always the possibility of bare awareness becoming extended beyond an instant. How do the rest of you see this?
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If I see that âthere is no divisionâ, I would want you to see that too. But thereâs nothing I can do to help you see that. The self imposes itself between the seeing of the tree, the mountainâŚwithout the self-image, I guess, without the âobserverâ coming between the senses and the world, you are the world!