Problem is for some people awareness and consciousness are no longer
mutually exclusive. That they are seems to be splitting hairs. Like
Krishnamurti I just don't care about these issues anymore. And
furthermore I am bewildered that people who have been practicing
meditation for decades have not achieved enlightenment or "moksha" yet.
Maybe there is something to the idea of an "old soul?"
On 12/17/2014 11:33 AM, anartax...@yahoo.com [FairfieldLife] wrote:
I was evaluating these statements a few months ago. All I can say is I
seem to get them in terms of my own experience, but that does not help
anyone else. Basically just meditating for half a century seems to be
the trick.
Also certain specific experiences that have occurred also helped
illuminate them for me. Specifically the transition from waking to
deep anaesthesia to waking, which is about as close to death one can
get as far as shutdown of the brain was one factor for me. Also the
transition from TC to waking although that is more erratic, and it
does not happen any more for me. Another experience is the realisation
that what one thinks is not true except in a very limited and
restricted sense.
In other words, feeling comfortable with these statements as having an
experiential significance can only come within one's experience, not
in the telling of that experience. You cannot prove a thing.
As also pointed out by others, translation is a factor, but basically
it is the same old thing, whatever you call 'absolute' and 'relative'
specifies a difference in experience and the mind has to recognise
that difference, the relationship of the words bring to light. It can
be as simple as life and death. Awareness is what you have in death,
but the awareness, i.e., being, does not do anything or is conscious
of anything. Consciousness and awareness is what you have in life.
Parsing the difference goes on in the mind until you no longer really
think of them as essentially different. It is just an exercise in
mental clarity rather than an exercise of truth.
Truth is really local. It is the relationship between a statement and
a situation. "I have a MAD magazine in my right hand" is a true
statement if you have a copy of a MAD magazine in your right hand. But
such a statement really does not say much about the character of the
items mentioned. It is a very coarse approximation of a unique
situation. For example, it did not contain information about the
pigeon crapping on my head while I was holding the magazine.
Trying to apply a statement to the entire universe as a whole simply
contains no useful content. The most generalised 'true' statements are
probably general relativity and the standard model of quantum
mechanics, and they are not entirely general about all the universe
is, they still have local value. No one has figured out how to combine
them into a more general statement, and we also do not know if there
is some unknown they cannot account for.
When a person says they grasp what Nisargadatta said, what they are
really saying is they are experiencing a certain way, and that way for
them is what they would call 'truth', but it is not an expressible
truth, a provable truth, like holding a magazine in hand, it just
means that whatever is being experienced can be no other way at that
moment, and that the mind is settled in the knowledge that it cannot
be any other way. Every moment is absolute.
Statements like 'awareness is not the same as consciousness' make the
mind work, and it is an exercise in mental flexibility to find
experiences that correspond to these terms, assuming such experiences
are possible. Eventually, like practising a musical instrument, like
fingers, or breath, or embouchure for a musician, the mind gets a bit
more flexible and responsive if you work it a certain way for a while.
Once that work is done, it can relax because what was previously work
now can happen automatically. Basically it breaks down previous
conditioning by replacing it with another sort of conditioning which
is presumably less restrictive in function.
Jiddu Krishnamurti said it a different way. He said 'My secret is I do
not mind what is happening'. That just means from his perspective
there is experience, and that is all there is, nothing else is
happening. For myself, I find the world of metaphysics simply vanished
as experience clarified. It was a reality created entirely by the
relationship of words to one another, but there were no magazines to
hold, it was imaginary, that mental world of things supposedly 'beyond'.
Awakening shows the mind there is nothing beyond what one experiences.
The universe becomes immanent and lean and mean, because a ton of
useless mental garbage is taken down. You can still make up stuff if
you want, you just do not have to; it is no longer necessary to rely
on a mental world of concepts to enjoy life. You do not have to parse
experience to enjoy, you just have it. But you can parse it if you
want. And to do stuff you do have to parse the world conceptually.
I have not had much time lately to post, I have been working on an
electronic form of a publication, which means working with Extensible
Markup Language, and attempting to remember and relearn stuff I have
not done for several years, and it gets harder every year as the brain
ages, so this has turned out to be an exercise in re-establishing
sufficient mentalclarity to get the project done.
If you want to do something, to have a beer for example, you have to
parse experience into, not necessarily fully blown concepts, but
sufficiently differentiated enough to distinguish a bar, or a can or a
bottle in a refrigerator, and so forth. I think I will now leave my
computer and go make a cup of coffee. There is also one beer in the
fridge, but its cold here now. Now, how should I do this?...parse,
parse, parse.
---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <no_re...@yahoogroups.com> wrote :
What can I do to test these statements?
Nisargadatta
"The scriptures say so, but I know nothing about it. I know myself as
I am; as I appeared or will appear is not within my experience. It is
not that I do not remember. In fact there is nothing to remember.
Reincarnation implies a reincarnating self. There is no such thing.
The bundle of memories and hopes, called the 'I', imagines itself
existing everlastingly and creates time to accommodate its false
eternity: To be, I need no past or future. All experience is born of
imagination; I do not imagine, so no birth or death happens to me.
Only those who think themselves born can think themselves re-born. You
are accusing me of having been born -- I plead not guilty!"
"By its very nature the mind is outward turned; it always tends to
seek for the source of things among the things themselves; to be told
to look for the source within, is, in a way, the beginning of a new
life. Awareness takes the place of consciousness; in consciousness
there is the 'I', who is conscious while awareness is undivided;
awareness is aware of itself. The 'I am' is a thought, while awareness
is not a thought, there is no 'I am aware' in awareness. Consciousness
is an attribute while awareness is not; one can be aware of being
conscious, but not conscious of awareness. God is the totality of
consciousness, but awareness is beyond all -- being as well as not-being."
---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <no_re...@yahoogroups.com> wrote :
What can I do to test these statements?
Nisargadatta
"The scriptures say so, but I know nothing about it. I know myself as
I am; as I appeared or will appear is not within my experience. It is
not that I do not remember. In fact there is nothing to remember.
Reincarnation implies a reincarnating self. There is no such thing.
The bundle of memories and hopes, called the 'I', imagines itself
existing everlastingly and creates time to accommodate its false
eternity: To be, I need no past or future. All experience is born of
imagination; I do not imagine, so no birth or death happens to me.
Only those who think themselves born can think themselves re-born. You
are accusing me of having been born -- I plead not guilty!"
"By its very nature the mind is outward turned; it always tends to
seek for the source of things among the things themselves; to be told
to look for the source within, is, in a way, the beginning of a new
life. Awareness takes the place of consciousness; in consciousness
there is the 'I', who is conscious while awareness is undivided;
awareness is aware of itself. The 'I am' is a thought, while awareness
is not a thought, there is no 'I am aware' in awareness. Consciousness
is an attribute while awareness is not; one can be aware of being
conscious, but not conscious of awareness. God is the totality of
consciousness, but awareness is beyond all -- being as well as not-being."
