Swanwick Star Issue No. 12 (2019)
Mind and Awareness
Contents
Some Notes on Mind and Passive Awareness
Naftaly Ramrajkar
“Meditation is the process of understanding oneself. Self-knowledge brings wisdom. And the mind begins to understand the whole process of itself. It becomes very quiet, completely still, without any sense of movement or demand. Then, perhaps, that which is not measurable comes into being.”
- Krishnamurti; Collected Works of J. Krishnamurti, Six lectures given at Hamburg, Germany, 1956.
The conscious mind is what we use in our everyday waking life and it includes perceptions, memories, concepts, imaginations, emotions and desires.
The unconscious mind was discovered very recently. The whole of unconscious is below the ‘threshold of consciousness’; we can be conscious only what is above the threshold. Like an iceberg, above the water is conscious, below the water is unconscious.
Between conscious and unconscious, just below the threshold of consciousness lies the region of subconscious, which hold all the skills and knowledge we have acquired. It is the region of our abilities and talents, not fully conscious but easily made so when required.
Between the subconscious and the unconscious there lies the main dividing line, what may be called the threshold of suppressions, which can be crossed only with the greatest difficulty and usually under abnormal conditions.
The unconscious contains not only the memories of everything that has ever happened to us but also our biological, racial, national and family heritage as well as painful experiences of the past, mostly those of early childhood.
It is the threshold of suppression that is the cause of trouble, because it keeps the vast content of the unconscious away from the conscious, though it cannot completely prevent the unconscious from affecting deeply our actions and sometimes bursting through the barrier; invading our life in various forms of insanity.
Krishnamurti stresses the importance of breaking down the barrier of repression and finding a way of bringing the unconscious in to the field of conscious.
The image that is usually chosen to describe the mind is that of an iceberg. The water line is the threshold; the tiny visible part above it is the conscious mind, whilst the huge submerged portion represents the unconscious. If we melt away the top of the iceberg, the iceberg will gradually rise up and if the process of melting is maintained, the entire iceberg will ultimately disappear and only the ocean will remain.
This process of melting the iceberg can be maintained by a piece of ice shaped like a lens to create a hot spot to melt away the ice.
This is exactly what we need to do; to create in our conscious mind a focus of intense passive awareness, of full consciousness of its content and watch the content dissolving and new content emerging to dissolve in its turn. This process will eventually break down the barrier between the conscious and the unconscious.
In fact, the conscious and unconscious together form one mind and dividing line is accidental. The opacity of the barrier makes direct awareness of the unconscious impossible, but it is possible to gradually bring the unconscious into conscious by a process of simplifying and reducing the resistance of the conscious content. This is done by fully passively aware of the whole content.
Both the subconscious and the unconscious are composed of memories, of two kinds: factual and psychological.
The former are memories of factual experiences, judgements of facts. They create no problems as they are helpful to the conscious mind, enabling it to learn by experience. Psychological memories are those of past valuation or ‘judgement of value’, each heavily charged with emotions. They do not rise to the conscious mind individually or as separate factors, but as a vague background, a coloring, a conditioning of the conscious content.
This conditioning obeys no fixed rules and follows no fixed pattern.
Conditioning of mind is divided into two classes or kinds: 1) Primary 2) Secondary
Secondary conditioning is related to the more obvious problems of life, the miseries, sorrows, conflicts, frustrations, worries and fears which are the common lot of men. There are general lines, grooves or channels along which conditioning usually flows.
Primary conditioning: Habitual conditioning which is universally present in all forms, is the presence of the ‘self’ or ‘I’. Wherever there is conditioning, there is the presence of ‘I’, and conversely, wherever ‘self-consciousness’ exist, conditioning is bound to be there.
This primary conditioning is at the root of all our problems, and arises out of this the very nature of all mental activities.
This primary conditioning takes three distinct forms:
- Partial use of our minds
- More emphasis is given to ‘what was’ and ‘what will be’ than to ‘what is’.
- Mind works in dichotomy, pairs of opposites; e.g subject/object, thinker/thought, experiencer/experience.
It somehow cannot see the ‘Antiphony’ in nature but only pairs of opposites.
This thinker takes form of ‘Self’ or ‘I’, the owner of body and mind, who is continually engaged in strengthening and expanding itself.
We should live with whole of our mind (Wholistic) and not only with a small portion of it, which is least interesting. It is also already impressed with stale memories and valuation.
Actually, part of the mind dominated by self-consciousness is a wasted, crippled part almost impervious to Life, to Truth and to Joy.
Primary conditioning truncates the total mind, while secondary conditioning distorts and maims that part of the mind which we use daily and call our own.
This double conditioning deeply affects our relationship with others; the primary separates us from our fellow being whilst the secondary pits us against them.
In short, we cannot cure conditioning by more conditioning. Therefore, generally methods of meditations or intellectual discipline, austerity or physical discipline, cultivation of virtues, moral discipline, practice of prayers or religious discipline, introductions of reforms or social discipline does not help.
No amount of efforts can destroy memory. The only remedy against our conditioning is to accept the fact, to see it as conditioning, to go down to its very roots and having laid it bare, to look at it without justification, identification or condemnation, in passive and silent awareness, without calling it one’s own.
Passive awareness is effective because it destroys the ignorance of primary conditioning and the possessiveness of secondary. When we try to see that our mind is conditioned, conditioning withers away.
Passive awareness puts an end to all forms and habits of thinking to which conditioned mind has been accustomed, as well as to the emotional reactions caused by conditioning.
Passive awareness gives us insight into working of our mind.
It is important to clear the mind of problems, for a mind tortured by conflicts is useless. We need a mind that is free from all conditioning, a transformed or unconditioned mind; for only then are we able to discover truth, reality, God – whatever the name we give to the Unknown. What we discover reflects the quality of our mind. We cannot discover what is quite foreign to the mind and for the discovery of the real we need a clear, a real mind, not a mere bundle of memories and habits, problems and conflicts. To find a real mind, we must first understand the full significance of that state which is a ‘passive awareness’.
A ‘Passive Awareness’ is important because it is the only means for putting an end to wrong thinking and distorted feeling, both of which not only make us utterly unhappy as individuals, but when projected on a larger scale threatens the whole of humanity.
A mind that is conditioned and mind that is aware that it is conditioned are entirely different states. The former will get more and more entangled in the meshes of its own conditioning, because it does not know that it is conditioned, much less how it can be free of the conditioning.
A mind that is aware of its conditioning, on the other hand, is already on the way towards disentangling itself and, therefore, is proof against further conditioning. The state of ‘Passive Awareness’ is both curative and protective.
References:
- Krishnamurti & The Texture of Reality by A.D. Dhopeshwarkar
- Krishnamurti and The Experience of The Silent Mind by A.D. Dhopeshwarkar
- Yoga of J. Krishnamurti: A Catechism by A.D. Dhopeshwarkar
- J. Krishnamurti and Awareness in Action by A.D. Dhopeshwarkar
- The Nameless Experience by Rohit Mehta
- Philosophy of J. Krishnamurti by R.K. Shringy
- That Pathless Land by Susunaga Weeraperuma
- J.Krishnamurti as I Knew Him by Susunaga Weeraperuma
- Saying of J. Krishnamurti by Susunaga Weeraperuma
Some of these books are out of print but available from the Acorn Press for regular price.
Web Site:
http://www.intuitiveapp.com/acornpress/product-category/author/a-d-dhopeshwarkar/
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