Part One: Exploring Consciousness, Thought and Awareness
~There’s a stimulating dialogue beginning here on ‘James and Filo’s Nonduality Living Cafe’ (FB) about awareness, what it is, may be, etc. For sincere seekers, it’s very important to dive deeply into the matter of awareness directly, for oneself, – to be one’s own authority – not to merely mentally understand what it is, but to recognize and know that it is, and you are it. From that lived recognition, one moves in wonder; without that ‘knowing’, it seems one may only, conceptually, wander. 😉
While I’ve written on this theme elsewhere, it seems foundationally important to innitally present some ‘pointers’ of what J Krishnamurti has said, from his Notebook. Perhaps from this we can further explore and deepen our own non-verbal, non-personal knowing of ‘awareness’ ‘consciousness’ and ‘attention’, and allow clarity, aka love and beauty, to present. Indeed, as Nisargadatta says: “It is necessary to grow, it is necessary to outgrow.” You’re invited to post relevant quotes, comments and questions as we explore together.
James and Filo 🙂 🙂
“Consciousness is always receiving, accumulating, and from what it has gathered, interpreting; receiving through all its pores; storing up, experiencing from what it has gathered, judging, compiling, modifying. It looks, not only through the eyes, through the brain but through this background. Consciousness goes out to receive and in receiving, it exists. In its hidden depths, it has stored what it has received through centuries, the instincts, the memories, the safeguard, adding, adding, only to take away to add further. When this consciousness looks out, it is to weigh, to balance and to receive.
Looking from the outside, in, is projection.
“And when it looks within, its look is still the outer look, to weigh, to balance and to receive; the inward stripping is another form of adding. This time-binding process goes on and on with an ache, with fleeting joy and sorrow. But to look, to see, to listen, without this consciousness – an outgoing in which there is no receiving, is the total movement of freedom. This outgoing has no centre, a point, small or extensive, from which it moves; thus it moves in all directions, without the barrier of time-space. Its listening is total, its look is total. Attention has not distraction.
“This outgoing is the essence of attention. In attention, all distractions are, for there are no distractions. Only concentration knows the conflict of distraction. All consciousness is thought, expressed or unexpressed, verbal or seeking the word; thought as feeling, feeling as thought. Thought is never still; reaction expressing itself is thought and thought further increases responses. Beauty is the feeling which thought expresses. Love is still within the field of thought.
Is there love and beauty within the enclosure of thought?
“Is there beauty when thought is? The beauty, the love that thought knows is the opposite of ugliness and hate. Beauty has no opposite nor has love. Seeing without thought, without the word, without the response of memory is wholly different from seeing with thought and feeling. What you see with thought is superficial; then seeing is only partial; this is not seeing at all. Seeing without thought is total seeing. Seeing a cloud over a mountain, without thought and its responses, is the miracle of the new; it’s not “beautiful”, it’s explosive in its immensity; it is something that has never been and never will be. To see, to listen, consciousness in its entirety must be still for the destructive creation to be. It is the totality of life and not the fragment of all thought. There is no beauty but only a cloud over the mountain; it is creation.
~ J Krishnamurti
