Perhaps a more positive definition might be
a state of perception in which psychological thought and memory do not exist.
I am thinking also of Mary Oliver’s line:
This is the first, the wildest and the wisest thing I know: that the soul exists and is built entirely out of attentiveness.
True! (For me in any case.) When you do a deep dive, pretty much anything can be unraveled exposing its emptiness. And though that approach has value in some situations, it probably does more harm than good in a situation like this, a situation in which someone is trying to communicate something ‘beyond’ the words.
Pure attention:
a state of perception in which psychological thought and memory do not exist.
Fine with me. The key points seem to be: undistracted perception, absence of thought/memory. It’s quite different than (my understanding of) Krishnamurti’s ‘freedom from thought,’ because being free from thought doesn’t mean absence of thought.
I don’t know how you square this with the direct quotes from K I just gave you in my last post?
K says “in that state of attention there is no thought ” (The Ending of Time), or “freedom is the non-existence of thought ” (from the ‘freedom’ thread), or “thought doesn’t enter into the field of understanding. Thought doesn’t exist where love is ”
Anyway, as I was saying, if this is unacceptable, then perhaps a working compromise might be
A state of perception in which psychological thought and memory are wholly - and we mean wholly - peripheral.
For years and years (decades!) it’s been said in every Krishnamurti forum I’ve been in (3?) that freedom from thought did not mean absence of thoughts, rather non-attachment to thoughts. (Please don’t ask me to dig up quotes, just trust me!) I don’t remember it being challenged until now, by you. That’s how I square it!
It means putting thought aside when it’s of no use.
This is because we are referring to the human experience - but of course “freedom from thought” is not necessarily synonymous to “pure attention”
I like to inquire into freedom from the known, and still think its important to describe the possibilities of human experience with precision - but maybe for now we can see what there is to say about “pure attention”
Because thoughts happen. It’s baked into the nature of the brain. A very few non-brain-dead, non-comatose, non-deep-sleeping humans might be thought-less for a while, but thoughts return. You might speculate that a deeply enlightened person could enter a state of thought-less samadhi that would last every second, continuously, with not a single thought arising, until their physical death. And who knows, you might be right. But that’s not a bet I’d make, not even at 100 to 1.
Freedom from the known, great territory to explore! (Start another thread, MDD?) And good job nudging the dialogue back to its theme, pure attention. Between my tendency to think non-linearly and jump to tangents, and James’ tendency to address and question my tangents, threads are quite likely to take on sub-threads, sub-sub-threads, sub-sub-sub’s, und so weiter!
Thought is necessary for survival, continuity, but for being aware of being, thought has no place and must be absent, turned off.
That may be. But I’m not saying thoughts necessarily need to happen existentially. Rather: Thoughts do happen, whether we want them to or not. They don’t happen continuously 24/7, but in the course of those 24 hours, I doubt any human being will have zero thoughts. Exceptions might be: brain-dead, deep-sleeping, comatose, or possibly in full-on samadhi.
Otoh, there may well be people that have zero psychological thoughts, those who have effectively jettisoned their egos, psyches.
There may be no thoughts when in deep sleep, but I can’t say that thought is not constant when I’m awake…most of it is repetition and mindless filler, serving the perverse purpose of preventing pure awareness.
I often feel that too, that my pretty much constant ‘drone’ of thought (sometimes background, sometimes foreground) serves the sneaky purpose of preventing me from seeing-feeling the emptiness. And that’s probably why meditation is often uncomfortable for me.
Meditation brings the “drone of thought” (the yack-track) to light, and makes one aware of the problem we all face…if we choose to face it.
And facing it, it seems to me, is acknowledging that anything I try to do to stop this infernal incessant distraction is futile, and that if I persist in “practicing” meditation, pursuing silence through effort and determination, I’m just wasting energy and time in pursuit of progress.
All I can do is be aware of all I am doing within the wider context of all I’m aware of.
For over 2 years I have been talking with you saying more or less what I am saying now. Furthermore I usually do my homework on K and find extracts, direct quotes, to show what K means. Either you have not read those extracts, or you haven’t closely read my posts.
All the words we have used on the forum since we first posted are words, concepts, ideas. We use them for the sake of communication, but in a state of pure perception or pure attention no words, concepts, ideas are necessary. This is obvious to anyone who has ever been in states of awareness that may approximate what K calls total attention. I’m sure there have been moments in your life when your mind has been in such states, but for some reason you deliberately ignore this and perpetuate the myth that the brain needs to be stimulated with thoughts and memories 9 to 5.
As has been exhaustively pointed out over these last several years, the brain has its own built in machinery of animal processing that is involved in physical perception. In addition to this, thought, thinking - i.e. the movement of memory, out of which we form images and concepts - has its own place, its own rhythm in the order of the brain. This is why someone like Krishnamurti could still remember how to use the English language or recognise Mary Zimbalist and David Bohm!
But thought, images, memory, has no place in the immediacy of seeing, in the immediacy of pure perception, total attention. Perhaps Rick you are one of those people who may genuinely benefit from taking some kind of psilocybin, LSD or what have you, because this would blast you out of your preconceptions and prove to you, without a shadow of a doubt, how totally vain and worthless thoughts are compared to the colour of a daffodil, a rose, or some creation of nature 
Why not?..
In the Wikipedia entry on Krishnamurti it quotes a section from Pupul Jayakar’s biography where Krishnamurti is asking himself about the state of his mind as a young boy:
“No thought entered his mind. He was watching and listening and nothing else. Thought with its associations never arose. There was no image-making. He often attempted to think but no thought would come.”
As an adult Krishnamurti sometimes mused in his journals about this thoughtlessness, saying that he often wandered on walks without any thinking taking place - even trying to think on purpose and not being able to.
And in his discussions with Bohm Krishnamurti said that he cannot use his brain to imagine things like other people can.
This doesn’t mean that Krishnamurti never thought or used thought, but that his relationship to thought was quite different from the experience of thought that most of us have.
Thoughts/images/memories have no place in a state of no-thoughts/no-images/no-memories. Arguing with that would be silly, it’s a tautology!
! 
Knowing me, things could get real crazy in there, doesn’t seem worth the risk. But in general I’m favorably disposed to the use of psychedelics for consciousness expansion. If my mind were more stable, I probably would have had great fun exploring that world!
Is the issue then what you mentioned above? Namely that
my pretty much constant ‘drone’ of thought (sometimes background, sometimes foreground) [may] serve the sneaky purpose of preventing me from seeing-feeling the emptiness.
That is, is it the fear of, or suspicion about, or boredom with, or revulsion towards, emptiness that lies behind one’s resistance to being in a state of pure attention?
There may be other factors (such as the energy one requires to be fully attentive, the degree of sensitivity of the whole brain-body organism that is necessary, etc), but is it the image we have of emptiness - an image we may have due to certain experiences we have had that we think of as emptiness - that is the chief block?
Yes, I was going to say: if there wasn’t a real danger that you could go completely crazy then I might recommend taking psychedelics more earnestly! There is something called microdosing which isn’t supposed to be so full on - more like having a mild taste of an altered state - but I’m not pushing this on anyone!
Friends have been trying to get me to take the plunge for years, but when it comes to risking getting even stranger than I already am brain-wise, I tend to err on the side of NOOOOOO! I already had full-on hallucinations with marijuana (student days), which raises my caution.