I think I understand what you say, yes, in most cases we are not ready to see that a change of state has occurred in our consciousness, I mean from -let’s say half a second or less of interval with no thoughts to the appearance of a new one. I think that happens because we are immediately absorbed with the content of thought which catapults us immediately in a separate reality. At least this is what I feel. It seems to me there is a gap between the rise of a thought and the realization: ah! Here it is a new one. So my awareness is imperfect. But K. said we cannot be aware all the times and if we are aware of our distraction that means we are aware as well. I think the solution is not to be entangled with the content of the thought. Then after a while the thought loses its grip and disappears the same way it has arrived. I wouldn’t call it a distortion of our experience of the present moment. That thought is part of the experience of the present moment. Or perhaps we can call a distortion the absorption we fall in with the content of thought?
Absolutely…no question about that.
All content is real, whether it represents truth or falsehood. Every thought is important enough to arise, so to dismiss a thought before examining it and determining its significance is arrogant and foolish. You are thought, the mind that generates them, and they will keep recurring until their reason for doing so is understood.
any attempt at choiceless awareness will be vane
Attempting to be choicelessly aware is always in vain because it is choiceless.
“The very activity of the mind is a barrier to its own understanding. Have you never noticed that there is understanding only when the mind, as thought, is not functioning? Understanding comes with the ending of the thought process, in the interval between two thoughts .”
J. K. Commentaries on living, Series II - Chapter 7 - ‘Discipline’
This sounds like saying : I am of utmost importance. Which is of course true, in a sense.
If a thought keeps recurring, surely this is because I am obsessed. Something has grabbed hold of me and demands a solution.
These days its usually the worry caused by my teenage son.
We are self-centered, so “I” am of utmost importance, insane as that may be. If we see the error of being self-centered, we want to correct it, and the only means we have is our ability to observe our erroneous activity.
This conclusion you have come to is based on what exactly? We all have to learn to distinguish between rank, baseless opinion and conclusions based on facts and sound logic.
We all have so many “throw away” thoughts. Why dwell on thoughts or thinking when we already know thinking is limited and conditioned? And because of these two facts we can never arrive at truth through thinking. And why give thoughts an importance that K never did.
Have you ever considered not believing everything that you think?
Who says its erroneous? who wants to see? Why does he want to see?
Yes, but then resist the temptation to immediately come to conclusions about that activity through thinking about it. Just try staying with the “thinking activity” without conclusions. That’s what choiceless awareness means.
What is the matter sir?
Don’t you want to know your mistakes well enough to correct them? Incoherent thinking is full of errors, cognitive distortions. If you can’t see and acknowledge your own incoherent thinking, you’re just blabbering.
Who says its erroneous? who wants to see? Why does he want to see?
Did K ever speak about flowering of desire. K spoke about staying with anger/jealousy, sorrow which all arise from thought. These feeling one can stay with when they arise. Then it flowers and dies down. My own experience is that when there is sorrow with eye full of tears, lump in the throat etc and when I stayed with that feeling of sorrow,i it flowered, and withered away, but at the end there was sense of joy and I ended laughing. But in case of desire, it is a thought. So staying with desire means dwelling in it , identifying with it etc which only strengthens to ego.
I reckon he was encouraging us to look into, investigate, the flowering of desire. As in how, why does desire arise. What is desire, why is it always arising/flowering?
K said when there is experiencing of sensation, if all senses are fully awake, it is not recorded. Otherwise it becomes a knoweldge-momory-thought-desire for experiencing it again. But I have not been able to actually see the truth of his statement in the sense my experience gets always recorded and from that arises desire.
When we have experiences (breakfast, driving to work etc) everything that we think happened is considered to be what actually happened. It becomes part of what we consider to be reality and conditions our futur perceptions of reality.
All the stuff in our world : those yuckky things, wonderful things, bad people, stupid whatevers, beautiful, dangerous or whatever things out there and in here (myself) conditions the futur reactions (emotional, psychological, intellectual and all the rest) that we will have in relation to them.
Sorry, if I explained that badly, but its pretty simple really.
Our experience and our reactions (anger, desire whatever) are conditioned by our previous experiences, and reinforce our conditioning (personality, beliefs, world view) and futur reactions.
What stops me changing? What is change, a change in or to? I need to be fully myself to observe the fact of it first. To be all that I am there has to be an end to control.
Is this a Taoist kinda Wuwei naturalistic vibe?
Not as far as I am aware. Krishnamurti addressed this issue a lot. He asked who is the controller of thought, and pointed out that the controller is the controlled. The controller is one thought trying to dominate others. In the world we can see the obsession with control. Control over the individual, control over the population, self-control. Not to have self-control is considered dangerous, and control is seen as necessary for order, which is no actual order. So Krishnamurti rejected control, and likewise rejected licence, as in licentiousness or doing whatever I want. Instead he pointed to a different factor - observation - and said that in observation there is no control, but there is order. So the question about change is connected to the question of why we do not see ourselves as we actually are, and that is connected to the mind seeking control, which makes for fragmentation. Self operates a buffer zone as myself and other to protect itself from the sight of what it actually is. It isn’t that this space it has set up can’t be foreclosed; it doesn’t want its safety barriers removed is all. So it has to pretend it is faced with all kinds of difficulty, and generates all kinds of hoops for itself to have to jump through first before anything can be done. It has to endlessly find things out as part of its heroic quest to find itself. Anything but just face up.
This is similar to his use of “complete attention” and “choiceless awareness”. Just as our attention is not complete and our awareness is not choiceless, our senses are not fully awake. His teaching was all about how we fall short of what we would be if we were not compromised and conflicted by egocentricity.