Currently fascinated by the implications of "observer" and "observed" being the same thing; which seems to refute everything I was ever brought up to know and believe. Which implies... lots!

Chewing on this article...
https://vicshayne.medium.com/the-observer-is-the-observed-but-are-we-really-seeing-what-we-are-3d03429b269c

#psychology #jiddukrishnamurti #spirituality #suffering #depression

Society is the extension of ourselves; its disorder is our own.

#Society #disorder #jk #jiddukrishnamurti

Truth cannot be organized; it has no path, no system.

#JidduKrishnamurti

Entheogenic?

In our everyday dealings with the world around us, and with its inhabitants, both human and otherwise, we generally seem to make use of a practical mode of consciousness characterised, in my experience, by shortcuts and subroutines – usually referred to as “habits”. Half the time we’re not even really thinking about what we’re doing – which gives rise to the common but slightly disturbing experience of realising one’s just driven several miles on a regular route with no real conscious sense of the events of driving, or of the route itself. Where have we been?

Neuroscience offers the explanation of something called the “default mode network”:

It is best known for being active when a person is not focused on the outside world and the brain is at wakeful rest, such as during daydreaming and mind-wandering. It can also be active during detailed thoughts related to external task performance. Other times that the DMN is active include when the individual is thinking about others, thinking about themselves, remembering the past, and planning for the future.

(Wikipedia)

One might be tempted to rename it the woolgathering network.

Contemplative awareness, on one level at least, consists precisely in becoming aware of these changing brain-states, as opposed merely to knowing about them in theory.

Even just recognizing the impermanence of your mental states—deeply, not merely as an idea—can transform your life. Every mental state you have ever had has arisen and then passed away. This is a first-person fact—but it is, nonetheless, a fact that any human being can readily confirm. We don’t have to know any more about the brain or about the relationship between consciousness and the physical world to understand this truth about our own minds. The promise of spiritual life—indeed, the very thing that makes it “spiritual” in the sense I invoke throughout this book—is that there are truths about the mind that we are better off knowing. What we need to become happier and to make the world a better place is not more pious illusions but a clearer understanding of the way things are.

(Sam Harris, Waking Up: Searching for Spirituality without Religion)

But there is more, of course. Elsewhere on this blog I wrote:

Before I turned five, I contracted meningitis, and spent what would have been my first year of school slowly recovering. I spent some of the most peaceful and untroubled hours of my life lying on a rug by the old apple trees in the orchard at the back of our house, under the endless vault of the open sky, listening to distant aircraft passing high overhead, or on a flaking stone bench on the patio, watching the little velvety red mites scampering in the sunlight. Time was unlike anything I’d known before, an open ground of appearing, empty of thought, mostly, but fertile with becoming.

In those long months I had no name for this clear, undimensioned place, and I don’t suppose it would have occurred to me to ask anyone what, or where, it might be. I just was, and was where I was. In many ways, the years since have been a journey back.

But how does one make this kind of journey as an intentional, more or less healthy adult? Religion offers maps, of varying quality – The Cloud of Unknowing, any number of Buddhist and Vedantic texts, the writings of the Eastern Orthodox (Christian) monastic tradition, to name a few – but they come, as I wrote yesterday, with sticky remnants of their religious backgrounds clinging to both thought and practice.

Throughout history, in different cultures, people have made use of entheogens, drugs (including traditional psychedelics such as mescaline and psilocybin and DMT, as well as modern synthetics like LSD) intended precisely to achieve this kind of altered consciousness. But even the best-engineered pharmaceuticals are blunt instruments, and in my experience (I experimented with them myself in my twenties) can do at least as much harm as good. Besides, the traditional varieties are by no means immune to the sticky remnants of their own religious origins.

But the word entheogen is an interesting one. Roughly, it means something like, “giving rise to the god within” (éntheos genésthai). This is instructive, since although the scholars (Carl Ruck et al.) who coined the term were referring to the use of psychoactive drugs, maybe this useful word could be extended to cover many traditional, religious contemplative practices as well.

But as Sam Harris points out in one of the passages I quoted yesterday,

This is a difficult problem for me to address in the context of a book, because many readers will have no idea what I’m talking about when I describe certain spiritual experiences and might assume that the assertions I’m making must be accepted on faith. Religious readers present a different challenge: They may think they know exactly what I’m describing, but only insofar as it aligns with one or another religious doctrine. It seems to me that both these attitudes present impressive obstacles to understanding spirituality in the way that I intend.

Once again, Jiddu Krishnamurti’s term “choiceless awareness” is so useful here, along with the simple practice it entails. My childhood experience in the orchard was precisely that, as have been so many more momentary occasions in the long years since. Andreas Müller (I have quoted him on this blog before) has one of the best descriptions I know:

All there is is oneness. The unknown. No-thing appearing as it appears. It is already whole. It is already complete. That which seems to be missing – wholeness – is not lost…

What remains is indescribable. It is indescribable simply because there is no one left who can describe it. There is no one left who experiences oneness (which, by the way, would then not be oneness anymore) and could possibly know how that is. Yes, there is no one left who knows how it is. That is freedom.

#AndreasMüller #consciousness #contemplative #JidduKrishnamurti #practice #psychedelics #religion #SamHarris #Wikipedia

To arrive where I started…

Whatever the origin of religion, it is so often present in our lives as a way to try to understand the ineffable; a way to give presence and weight to an experience that defies words; that takes place outside of thought and perception. What are we to do with such an experience – a thing commonly known as mystical, or numinous? It cannot be thought, or described, since it is entirely beyond the realm of cognition and language.

This was my own experience; as a young man – even as a child – I had been prone to experiences like this, for which I had no words, nor even a broad category or discipline to which to assign them. (The nearest I got to the feeling was reading about astronomy or zoology or meteorology – a sense that here was something in terms of which everything else made sense, rather than my trying to make sense of it.)

It wasn’t until I spent an extended period in hospital in my teens that I had the freedom to begin to explore; to realise that the natural direction of this condition of mind was philosophical, even metaphysical; and I was in my early twenties before it became clear that it was something I learned to call “spirituality”. When I began to discover that I was not alone in this, of course my fellow pilgrims were in general religious people, and so it seemed to me that these must be religious experiences. Despite my having early on read Jiddu Krishnamurti and Lao Tzu, it was all too easy to understand these experiences in terms of either Buddhism, or later, irresistibly, the Christian mystical tradition – which of course brought the whole complex machinery of faith clattering along with it.

Extraordinarily, despite my by then growing and scarcely repressed doubts, it took the enforced isolation of the recent pandemic, and the discovery of writers like Sam Harris and Susan Blackmore, finally to shake me loose; to let me realise that, as Harris points out so poignantly in the first chapter of Waking Up, “Either the contemplative literature is a catalogue of religious delusion, psychopathology, and deliberate fraud, or people have been having liberating insights under the name of ‘spirituality’ and ‘mysticism’ for millennia… there are deeper insights to be had about the nature of our minds. Unfortunately, they have been discussed entirely in the context of religion and, therefore, have been shrouded in fallacy and superstition for all of human history.” Somehow, I had to recapitulate this for myself; it often amazes me to realise that it took me the best part of my adult life “to arrive where [I] started, and know the place for the first time.”

#awakening #awareness #faith #JidduKrishnamurti #LaoTzu #philosophy #religion #SamHarris #SusanBlackmore #TSEliot

Road songs

Since my teens I’ve loved the idea of the road song – music that you play to accompany driving, that somehow measures out the miles in bars and choruses, but is not (probably) about the travelling in itself.

I’ve been blogging on one platform or another since 2005; for four or five years before that I kept a website where I regularly published something like this kind of episodic writing. At one point, and I honestly can’t remember when, it occurred to me that all these bits of (mainly) prose were something like my own road songs, much more than considered accounts of anything. Consequently, they’re not autobiographical as such; they don’t tell a connected story, but are more in the nature of snatches of music heard in passing.

Lately I’ve been trying harder to be honest about some of the tentative conclusions I come across along the way, but I know that knowing is not as easy as that. AC Grayling:

One can believe a true proposition and have a justification for doing so, but the justification can be the wrong one for holding that belief. For example: suppose you believe that Fred is in the next room because you heard Fred’s favourite tune being strummed on Fred’s peculiar-sounding guitar. Fred is indeed in the next room, so your belief is true; but he has taught a friend to strum his favourite tune on his peculiar guitar, and it is the friend strumming. Your justification for holding this true belief is therefore not the right justification in the circumstances. So if you claim to know that Fred is in the next room on the basis of the evidence you employ to justify that claim, you cannot be said to know that Fred is there; you only or merely believe that he is. And very often, indeed, our beliefs are merely beliefs because the justification for them is insufficient to make that belief amount to knowledge.

Human consciousness is not – well, mine isn’t, anyway – so coherent a thing, or so independent of the objects of its perceptions, as to allow me to say, “This is what I think,” and have done with it. Susan Blackmore, in her luminous and heartwarming book Zen and the Art of Consciousness, writes:

At any time in a human brain there are multiple parallel processes going on, conjuring up perceptions, thoughts, opinions, sensations and volitions. None of these is either in or out of consciousness for there is no such place. Most of the time there is no observer: if consciousness is involved at all it is an attribution made later, on the basis of remembering events and assuming that someone must have been experiencing them in the past, when in fact no one was…

Even more interesting will be to understand the basis of those special moments in which one asks ‘Am I conscious now?’ or ‘Who am I?’ I suspect that these entail a massive integration of processes all over the brain and a corresponding sense of richer awareness. These probably occur only rarely in most people, but contribute disproportionately to our idea of ‘what it’s like to be me’. This kind of rich self-awareness may happen more of the time, and more continuously, for those who practise mindfulness. Does it completely disappear in those who transcend it?

To be still, not interfering – not even to ask Blackmore’s questions – allows something odd to happen, it seems to me. The “multiple parallel processes” appear to settle out, like sediment in a disturbed pond. Some sort of clarity supervenes: the layers of the mind rearrange themselves, perhaps, to continue with the metaphor, and the sense of a sequence, or progress, of events is replaced with something else, that is like the patterning of sunlight on the wavelets across the pond. Jiddu Krishnamurti:

When there is no illusion the “what is” is most sacred. Now let’s look at what actually is. At a given moment the “what is” may be fear, or utter despair, or a fleeting joy. These things are constantly changing. And also there is the observer who says, “These things all change around me, but I remain permanent”. Is that a fact, is that what really is? Is he not also changing, adding to and taking away from himself, modifying, adjusting himself, becoming or not becoming? So both the observer and the observed are constantly changing. What is is change. That is a fact. That is what is.

All that happens is that the stillness allows what is to appear, that’s all. The road disappears; the road songs go on changing, and yet somewhere there is something steady. Wieland Samolak:

When I was a teenager I used to sit on an empty field listening for hours to the sounds of distant cars, railroads, helicopters, and other motorized objects. These sounds, which are very rough and noisy when they are near, attracted me from the distance because they had merged and diffused into a continuum when they reached my ears. By this experience it came to my mind that it is more satisfying for me to listen to continuous changes within one sound than to the combinations of discrete sonic events usually found in music.

Just noticing what is – whatever appears in the field of consciousness, without having to label it or evaluate it, without having to either focus one’s attention on it or wrench one’s attention away from it – is perhaps the freshest, most peaceful thing one can do. There is no technique to adhere to, no doctrine to conform to: what is, is, and there’s nothing that needs to be done about it.

#ACGrayling #consciousness #contemplative #isness #JidduKrishnamurti #stillness #SusanBlackmore #WielandSamolak

Die #Fähigkeit, zu #beobachten, ohne zu #bewerten, ist die höchste Form der #Intelligenz.
(Jiddu #Krishnamurti)
#psychotHHerapie #Zitat #Zitate #Beobachtung #Bewertung #JidduKrishnamurti

https://www.jangoeritz.de/zitate