Living Here: the brain, experience and awareness.
The heart of wholeness and contentment lies in the direct recognition of awareness. It’s – in a word – what Self-Inquiry is all about. Here’s a brief collection of words on that theme that may resonate and be insightful and delightful for our growing community. Please enjoy, share and comment if so moved. 🙂
The infinite awareness one is, cannot be recognized by the finite brain – the knower or the known ie. experience. It is, and all else appears.
That which one is,- the knowing of experience – is not a concept, an idea or ideal – all of which are the sole domain of the brain. Awareness is that constant infinity which is aware of the passing finite brain and its’ activity. The brain is animated by awareness and is an expression of awareness…but the brain cannot know reality, it can only conceptually compare and contrast verbally, sort and sift data (0-1) from its either/or daulity; it conjures with words and feelings about reality from its culturally conditioned good/bad, right/wrong dual nature.
“Every experience leaves a mark, and every mark distorts experience; so there is no experience which has not been. Everything is old and nothing new.
But this is not so. [in awareness] All the marks of all experiences are wiped away; the brain, the storehouse of the past, becomes completely quiet and motionless, without reaction, but alive, sensitive; then it loses the past and is made new again.”
J Krishnamurti’s Notebook
Brain is an excellent tool for technical functions but itself can only describe, measure, devise and theorize; it is always attempting to conclude, but it keeps dividing and separating and labeling and fragmenting that reality which is One. It cannot know nonconceptual, nonpersonal facts beyond its descriptions using merely words-about-words. Indeed, reality lies beyond its’ comprehension.
Awareness is reality; it does not exclude; it includes the brain and the body ‘consciousness,’ ie. body/brain experience, but is itself not any passing ‘experience.’ Awareness is indescribable, unknowable, inaccessible by the brain; it is what one is – peace, beauty and joy – so to speak – all of which only arise in and from, emptiness. Empty of self. In awareness, the love one is, presents itself to itself – one is it, yes. 🙂
~ A further note: The brain as talked about here, is thought and memory – which constitutes the suppossed ‘person’. In direct awareness, there is the recognition that in fact there is no person. Only awareness, being not personal, is aware. That infinite, choiceless awareness includes the personal, the passing of finite experience. That fact can only be directly, not personally, conceptually, recognized only by awareness itself – not by the brain, thought and memory, (sentient, body/brain experience) but only from and by awareness itself, so to speak. In other words, the lower ( phenoumena: brain, time and space relative ‘world’) cannot know anything about the higher (noumena: absolute, timeless awareness.)
~ In fine, “..what detracts a person from his irrevocable clarity of awareness?” is the belief in being ‘a person’. In deepening self-knowing, there’s a movement beyond the person/brain, beyond belief. In that seeing of truly being much more than a limited, mind-made ‘person,’ there’s emptiness: all beliefs are fully and freely abandoned and awareness arises.. (it is seen that it was and is, obviously, already here, now.) There is only awareness; all else is illusion. In quietude and gratitude, in open, unfiltered, belief-free, non-personal watching and listening – as a child – one may be graced to see and know the awareness of simply being it. Love is the light that reveals what one is.
Normal aware living.
In aware living, there’s a gentle quieting – usually first of the mind and then of the body; there’s a plain observing and delighting in, what is, as it is. That which is ‘watching’ is the changeless constant – awareness; the comings and goings are the flow of consciousness, so to speak.
Awareness includes consciousness. Over time in aware living, the waves of conflict in consciousness (sensations and vibrations) settle down more and more into the ocean of awareness. Love. The apparent ‘two’ dissolve into one non-duality and a spacious, non-personal freedom and peacefulness remains as the ground for all the body/mind’s activities in daily living. In daily loving, yes. 🙂
