If by “this” you mean this K-forum, it depends on why one is here. As I see it, there are those who come here to announce and reinforce their belief that they “get” what K was trying to get across, and those who don’t get it and want to find out why. But that’s my view of the situation. What’s your assessment?
By “What is this?” I mean “What is actually going on in the present moment?” Externally and internally, the total situation as Toni put it. Which involves but isn’t limited to the forum. Why do you come here?
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If one take the text of Toni as a whole, it looks like what K. did for years. But that is just my take. Since she is no longer here to explain herself, we just can try to figure out.
K. for years has give, express, his insights on what is going on in the world, inside and outside, establishing facts about life, world, society and more. Abhorring autority or guideline, method, guru…or believes , K. was in fact mirroring what is for the most part.
There is also the question of actuality, which is not static.
Each one of us has their own answer to that question, and as fun as it may be share and compare our answers, it seems to me that the only way to ascertain “what is actually going on in the present moment” is to be nothing but choiceless awareness…but I’m only theorizing because I don’t know if I’ve ever been choicelessly aware.
I don’t know if you have come across this passage from Krishnamurti? where he talks about there being two aspects involved in our awareness of a present moment - the simple sensory perception of what is going on around us, and then our reactions (within us) to what is going on:
Let us begin as though we know nothing about it at all and start from scratch. Let us not make any assertions, dogmatic or subtle, but let us explore this question which, if one really went into it very deeply, would reveal an extraordinary state that the mind had probably never touched, a dimension not touched by superficial awareness.
Let us start from the superficial and work through.
We see with our eyes, we perceive with our senses the things about us - the colour of the flower, the humming bird over the flower, the light of this Californian sun, the thousand sounds of different qualities and subtleties, the depth and the height, the shadow of the tree and the tree itself. We feel in the same way our own bodies, which are the instruments of these different kinds of superficial, sensory perceptions… There is no preference, no comparison, no like and dislike, only the thing before us without any psychological involvement.
Is all this superficial sensory perception or awareness quite clear? It can be expanded to the stars, to the depth of the seas, and to the ultimate frontiers of scientific observation, using all the instruments of modern technology… the rose and all the universe and the people in it, your own wife if you have one, the stars, the seas, the mountains, the microbes, the atoms, the neutrons, this room, the door.…
Now, the next step; what you think about these things, or what you feel about them, is your psychological response to them. And this we call thought or emotion.
So the superficial awareness is a very simple matter: the door is there. But the description of the door is not the door, and when you get emotionally involved in the description you don’t see the door….
So there is the superficial awareness of the tree, the bird, the door, and there is the response to that, which is thought, feeling, emotion.
Now when we become aware of this response, we might call it a second depth of awareness.
There is the awareness of the rose, and the awareness of the response to the rose. Often we are unaware of this response to the rose. In reality it is the same awareness which sees the rose and which sees the response. It is one movement….
Now can there be an awareness, an observation of the tree [the bird, the rose, etc], without any judgement, and can there be an observation of the response, the reactions, without any judgement?..
All that you have to do is to be aware from the beginning to the end, not become inattentive in the middle of it. This new quality of awareness is attention, and in this attention there is no frontier made by the ‘me’. (The Second Krishnamurti Reader)
In one of her books Toni Packer explores this “second depth of awareness” in more relational terms, exploring how our judgements in relationship stir up images and reactions that are linked to the wider collective (or social) consciousness (of which our own consciousness is a continuation) - as this is also what is generally occurring in the present moment:
Something that is happening now, unless it is happening in the clarity of awareness, trails the whole past with it: feelings, emotions, reactions, and memories repressed and unrepressed…. We are linked to all the thoughts, feelings, and emotions that our parents and other people surrounding us had when they reacted to us—their fears, their anger, their beliefs and hopes manifest in us…. I can see that in reacting without awareness, habitually, automatically, the whole past is reacting, not just my personal past, but the impact of everyone and everything that I have ever been linked with…. Can one just be with all of that, wholly, without looking for a result? Just be with it because it’s there, like the wind, the cicadas, the cool rain, the gurgling in the stomach, the breathing? (The Work Of This Moment)
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Do we share the present moment?
Indeed, much of what is going on in the ‘here and now’ of the present moment - as can be witnessed in our relationships, in the world, and on this and other online discussion forums - is just this ‘second depth of awareness’ in action.
Most of Krishnamurti’s teachings - and, from what I’ve read, much of Toni Packer’s writings too - are attempts to address this ‘second depth of awareness’: the reactions and images we have of each other, the hurts, the fears, the desires, the sufferings, the assumptions and the beliefs we have built up ‘inside’, psychologically.
So part of the ‘work of this moment’ - it seems to me - is just to remain with our inner reactions (to what is going on around us), and to be aware of these reactions as they operate, as they act - non-judgmentally (if we can do that).
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That the entire past of existence is the foundation upon which things happen now makes sense to me. That the entire foundation of past disappears in awareness is questionable. Consciously, maybe. But what about the unconscious mind, which is where most of what happens mentally happens?
Level 1: superficial awareness
Level 2: awareness of response
Level 3: awareness of awareness ???
What do you think?
I should say that the quote here is from Toni Packer, not me. She is using the word awareness here in a way that better captures the way that Krishnamurti uses the word attention.
Attention - as per Krishnamurti’s usage in the passage I shared - is free from the past, free from any sense of ‘I’, and so free from what was being referred to as the ‘second depth of awareness’.
However, this is not generally where we find ourselves when we begin to investigate the present moment! According to Krishnamurti, attention without a centre, without the ‘I’, is the necessary ground for a total insight (into the total situation) to take place.
What we are ordinarily aware of (when we investigate the present moment) is just this combination - pointed to in the passage of K’s previously quoted - of
- sensory perception (of the world around us, and of the sensations of the body, the organism), and
- our reactions to those perceptions, in the form of images, feelings, emotional responses (fear, hurt, pleasure, envy, desire, etc); which involve both conscious and ‘unconscious’ background contents (aka memories).
It is not so much that these are hierarchically different “levels” of experience; but rather that they are different aspects of the same unitary movement of awareness, moving inwardly and outwardly.
If we are to speak of another ‘level’ of awareness (and as you know Krishnamurti rejected the language of ‘levels’), it would be the aforementioned phenomenon, or “new quality”, of attention.
Does this communicate?
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So… given that on a forum like this we cannot physically see or hear each other (though we can of course experiment with the sensory perception of things in our immediate vicinity); and, given that the whole subject of total insight is rather far removed from our daily experience (though we can speculate about it, and people are of course free to claim that they have had a total insight!) - what is actually going on for us in the ‘here and now’ is mostly
the reactions and images we have of each other, the hurts, the fears, the desires, the sufferings, the assumptions and the beliefs we have built up ‘inside’, psychologically
Right? In which case our primary concern or interest (or at least my own interest) is
to be aware of these reactions as they operate, as they act - non-judgmentally (if we can do that)
Because we share a common basic human consciousness with all human beings (if you accept that), these reactions are largely common. So we can, to some extent at least (if we feel like it), communicate or commune about these shared contents, as part of our ‘work of the moment’.
Speaking for myself (and not according to K), awareness is a matter of inner housekeeping: clearing away the refuse that has been left-over from the past, bringing light (non-judgmentally) into the darkness of habit and emotion, and thereby (as a by-product of this awareness) emptying the mind of - or at least loosening the hold of - present moods and reactions, moment by moment.
What does awareness mean to you?
Yes, I agree, attention might qualify as its own unique aspect of awareness.
Awareness of awareness seems at first glance to be quite different, but I wonder?
Remember that the question (as I understood it) is
which you summarised as
Are you wanting - in this dialogue into the present moment - to skip-over what we (or I) were calling ‘the second depth’ of awareness (i.e. the part played by our inward psychological reactions, as they manifest in our minds from moment to moment)?
… straight into the perhaps speculative question of whether there is an awareness of awareness (and whether it differs from attention)?
I’m not criticising, just asking.
Inevitably, choicelessly, but we experience the present moment according to our conditioning, so each of us is living in our own version of the present moment.
Awareness perceives (sees, hears, feels, usw) phenomena. It doesn’t ‘do’ anything beyond that.
No. I’m going with the flow of the exploration.
Does your version of the present moment share some common ground with my version?
If we call “our inward psychological reactions, as they manifest in our minds from moment to moment” the “second depth of awareness”, logically, the first depth, or surface of awareness, is direct perception prior to the distortion of the second depth. Which is to say that we’re always responding intelligently, but reflexively dumbing ourselves down for fear of losing our sense of self.
Of course. We’re living in consensus reality. We agree on enough to get along and cooperate without losing our stubborn sense of self.
Is your present experience 100% yours? Or is it in some way mine too? Or are we both experiencing something that is neither yours nor mine?
Not sure I’m expressing myself clearly.
Yes. So the enquiry may have to limit itself for the time being to asking simply:
What are you, nobody - or myself, or another - aware of right now?
It may be a little boring, but unless you - or I, or another - can begin to unpack this a little, it may not be possible to dialogue much beyond that (not that we have to do so anyhow).
I attempted to answer this question by drawing attention to the area that K called (in the passage above) a ‘second depth of awareness’. But we can drop this.
What are you presently aware of?