@Valer do you disagree that a human is highly conditioned to function the way we do - just like the bat cannot help but groom itself?
Or is your resistance only towards the words being used? eg. robots, animals, guilt etc
You asked an interesting question earlier that might help us with our inquiry into the authority of conditioning
Why did you ask this question? Can you say more?
The self forms and arises in a brain that has been a million years in the making and claims: “this is MY brain!”
Pretty audacious.
As regards psychological fear, ‘inattention’ seems to be the brain / mind’s ‘default ‘ mode. Thought projects negative images and the ‘thinker’ / me reacts toward them with resistance (escape) that creates the sensation we recognize as fear. It can be mild or in the case of death, disease, etc, intense.
But with ‘attention’ present the sensation subsides or doesn’t arise at all because the thinker / thought duality is seen as imaginary. You are not separate from the thought…you are it, you are the sensation, the ‘fear’. There is no separate you that can escape from it.
The situation then can be looked at clearly, not ‘hysterically’ and treated ‘sanely’.
If guilt and responsibility are just ideas, just words, feeling guilty or responsible is being obedient, supporting the system, maintaining the status quo, and making a mockery of emotion.
Words often have more than one meaning, depending on the context, don’t they?
You can use the word responsibility in a moral sense, as a kind of duty or social idea.
Or one can take the word as responsibility for the world, resulting from not being separate, not being different from the world, so it is not an imposed concept of society.
When we are inattentive, the ‘responsibility’ is to be attentive?
being attentive to inattention is responsibility?
In the quote below, K is responding to a question:
Questioner: What can we do to be aware, to be attentive?
Krishnamurti: I don’t think you can do anything. All that you can do is to be attentive to inattention. … If you are trying to be attentive, trying to be aware, then it becomes a conflict, a battle, a process which involves time. I won’t go into the question of time now - I will do that another day. What most of us want is a continuity; we think, ‘‘If I could only be attentive all the time, then I could solve my problems.’’ But we are not attentive all the time, it is impossible; our nerves won’t stand it - our physical brain itself is incapable of maintaining a continuous alertness. But if one were attentive to inattention - you know what I mean, if one were totally attentive to inattention - then one would find out for oneself, naturally, how attention comes about without trying.
Please listen; don’t say, ‘‘I will try,’’ but do it. That is, pay attention to your own inattention, which breeds conflict. It is only inattention that creates problems, isn’t it?
Krishnamurti, First Talk in Paris, 1965
Yes, but the conditioned brain isolates itself by constantly streaming its contents, thereby effecting separation, making its sense of responsibility confined to itself.
Inattention doesn’t create attention. Attention is the ‘response’. It may or may not come. The inattention is the ‘stream’, attention is the ‘stepping out of it’…the “new form of awareness “ I think K called it…he also called it “love” and “supreme”.
If the cause of inattention is the distraction of the stream of consciousness, attending to the stream is the only thing the brain can do to address the problem.
When the brain that is more interested in knowing what it’s doing (self-knowledge) than anything else, its stream of consciousness is front and center.
I don’t think attention is a product of the brain. It seems to be ‘outside’ the brain and ‘attends’ to the activity in the brain. The ‘stream’ of the self, of thought isn’t the “cause” of inattention, it’s inattention itself…attention is not part of it.
Whatever our beliefs about the brain and attention are based on - they seem to be besides the point, not useful to freedom from harm.
But in the spirit of taking sides in this peripheral debate - I’ll go with the materialist clan and say : we have no examples of attention in the absence of brains.
What Krishnamurti says about responsibility in relation to the world is that if we are the world - that is, if that of which a human being is made is all that and the same there is in the world - it’s one’s duty to sustain it, that is one’s responsibility. It means one is engaged, every and any action has its consequences and affects the sustainability of the whole. To be responsible in this sense doesn’t mean we are responsible for other people’s fault, rather we are responsible for the contribution we offer to the sustainability (sanity) of the world.
Agreed - so the word “duty” might be misleading.
My perception of the world determines my actions in the world. I have no choice in the matter, my actions in the world make up that world.
All the crazy, violent stuff I do is merely a reflection of my internal mental conflict, selfishness and confusion.
If there is a choice (as much as a determined choice is actually a choice) it is in terms of whether I build a castle or a museum, put on a blue shirt or a red one.
Responsibility means acknowledging that it is me that is doing what I am doing.
It may be that our ‘responsibility’ is to get our heads out of the sand! To actually ‘discover’ what we’re not. To discover this quality called ‘attention’ , not through trying but as he put it: paying attention to inattention. To pay attention to this ‘me’ ; the feelings, the fears, the worry, the pursuit of pleasures, the aspirations, the sorrow etc…we can’t ‘get rid’ of the ‘me’ / self and we can’t capture this “new form of awareness “: attention , through effort but we can consider the possibility of the truth that “where the self is, love is not”….and to be that love, virtue, intelligence etc maybe our only ‘duty’.
Sounds good to me - I would love it if everyone felt that was the only meaningful life.
K once said : “if you make it personal you will never understand the full significance of the enormity of sorrow”
meaning that our duty cannot be only to ourselves - seeing that selfishness is evil necessitates that we care not only for ourselves, but for the suffering of all beings.
In other words : the end is the means.
In other words : happiness based on desire is still part of sorrow
Insight into the whole movement of sorrow starts with sensitivity and compassion.
Freedom based on love or conflict based on fear - not both, its either or.
Pay attention in order to see its whole movement, what sorrow is, not merely to address each individual itch
Absolutely, macdougdoug! As you say, responsibility means acknowledging that it’s me that is doing what I’m doing. It is myself. This self/ me, I will always have as long as I am a human being, we don’t throw it away or change according to the colour as you do with a t-shirt, but it (the self ) changes on its own according to the way you live. The self is dynamic and must be looked at as cooperating with the ‘light’ that we all as human beings are endowed with. Of course it’s one’s job to find about one’s self. Dan speaks of attention, you speak of perception… well, it’s a matter of perspective, I think, it’s a tool that we have in order to make sense of the experiences we live as we go along.
That’s what we’re inquiring into here : the possibility of the brain receiving the whole universe. That’s the whole universe of the me, not one part here and one there…you get a taste of that ‘attention’ and it hits you like a shock. It puts everything in a new light and then it’s gone! It shows clearly how if there is division that conflict is inevitable.
It’s confusing to me when K was asked the question, how can I get this attention he was speaking about , his reply was that you can’t do anything to get it except ‘pay attention to inattention.’(?) Does that mean that ‘paying attention’ isn’t doing? And is the ‘attention’ in this ‘paying attention’ different from the ‘attention’ that he describes as the “highest form of virtue, love, supreme’? Anyone have an idea about this?
I prefer to say either “the self is the ultimate authority” or there is “freedom from the self”.
Maybe we need to look closely at what we mean by the “self”?
Is the self = the experience of being this all important central entity?
Is the self = the necessary center that gives meaning to fear and desire?
In which case how dynamic can it be? Can selfishness become love?
But maybe you have a different definition of “self”?
My definition has problems too - for example the question : what is freed from the self?
Communication is difficult - we often use words interchangeably in different contexts - but “paying attention” (to the movement of self) and “sense perception” are 2 separate concepts that are not always synonymous.
As for our intellectual models of reality, they are only useful in so much as they assist in accepting death (if such an opportunity ever arises).
You cannot do anything - because anything you do is necessarily the movement of sorrow ie. time + thought in the service of fear/desire.
First ask : why am I paying attention? What is the source of this action? Because motive determines the fruit.
If we pay attention without effort this is because we have realised that there is danger in the habitual movement of self.
If attention is love supreme it is because selfishness dissolves in its light like a shadow.
If selfishness dissolves like a shadow it is because fear has no authority.
If fear has no authority it is because we have seen the fullness of life in death.