Absence of mind...

Krishnamurti.: Quero descobrir, em vez de aceitar afirmações. Quero

descobrir se é mesmo possível libertar-me da crueldade. Será possível livrar-me dela, sem repressão, sem fugir, sem tentar forçar? O que é que posso fazer?

Interlocutor.: A única coisa a fazer é expor essa crueldade.

K.: Para a expor, tenho de a deixar revelar-se, aparecer, tenho de a deixar

mostrar-se – mas não no sentido de me tornar mais cruel. Por que não a deixo revelar-se?

Antes de mais, tenho medo dela. Não sei se ao deixá-la expor-se, não me tornarei mais cruel. E se eu a revelar, serei capaz de a compreender?

Serei capaz de a olhar cuidadosamente, ou seja, com muita atenção?

Só serei capaz, se a minha energia, o meu interesse e urgência coincidirem no momento da exposição. Nesse momento, tenho de sentir a urgência de a compreender, tenho de ter a mente sem qualquer tipo de distorção. Tenho de ter enorme energia para olhar. E estas três coisas têm de acontecer instantaneamente, no preciso momento da exposição da crueldade. O que quer dizer que tenho de ser suficientemente sensível e livre para ter essa energia vital, essa intensidade e atenção. De que modo terei essa intensa atenção?

Como é que ela acontece?

I.: Se chegarmos a esse ponto de querer compreender desesperadamente a crueldade, então teremos esta atenção.

K.: Compreendo.

Só pergunto: “Será que é possível estar atento?”

Espere, repare nas implicações disso, veja o que está envolvido nisso. Não dê significados, não introduza novas palavras. Vejamos. Não sei o que significa atenção. Provavelmente nunca dei atenção ao que quer que fosse, porque quase toda a minha vida tenho sido desatento. De repente, alguém aparece e diz: “Repare, esteja atento à crueldade”; e eu digo: “Assim farei” – mas o que

quer isto dizer?

Como é que vou criar este estado de atenção?

Haverá algum método?

Se houver, e eu puder treinar-me para me tornar atento, isso levará tempo e, entretanto, vou continuando a estar desatento; o que trará mais destruição. Portanto, tudo isso precisa de acontecer instantaneamente!

Sou cruel. Não quero exercer repressão, não quero fugir, o que não significa que estou determinado a não fugir, ou que decidi não exercer repressão. Mas vejo e compreendo, com inteligência, que a repressão, o controle, a fuga não resolvem o problema, portanto, eu ponho tudo isso de lado. Assim, tenho essa inteligência, que surgiu ao compreender a futilidade da repressão, da fuga, ou de tentar dominar isso. Com esta inteligência vou examinar, vou olhar a crueldade. Percebo que, para a olhar, tem de haver muita atenção, e que, para ter essa atenção, preciso de ter muito cuidado relativamente à atenção. Portanto, a minha preocupação é reparar na desatenção. O que quer isto dizer?

Se tentar praticar a atenção, isso torna-se mecânico, pouco inteligente, e não tem sentido, mas se me tornar atento, ou me der conta da falta de atenção, então começo a descobrir como surge a atenção. Por que é que estou desatento aos sentimentos dos outros, ao modo como eu falo, à minha maneira de comer, ao que as pessoas dizem e fazem?

Ao compreender o estado negativo, chego ao estado positivo, que é a atenção.

Assim, estou a investigar, tentando compreender como a desatenção desaparece.

Esta é uma questão muito séria porque o mundo todo está a “arder”. Se eu faço parte deste mundo e este mundo sou eu, tenho que extinguir o fogo.

Portanto, estamos intimamente ligados a este problema. Porque é a falta de atenção que origina todo este caos em que está o mundo.

Reparemos no curioso facto de que a desatenção é negação – falta de atenção, ausência no momento certo. Como é possível estar tão completamente consciente da desatenção, de forma a que isso se transforme em atenção?

Como posso tornar-me, completa e instantaneamente, consciente

da crueldade em mim, com grande energia, para que não haja fricção nem contradição, de modo que a acção seja completa, total?

Como posso fazer acontecer isso? Dissemos que é possível apenas quando há atenção completa; e

esta não existe porque a nossa vida é passada a desperdiçar energia na

desatenção.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

“O voo da águia”

There is a point at which one becomes aware of deeper truths present in what one perceives as reality, and although scientific-management and the other social experiments exacted upon the world by those who seek to create come kind of rational human being, a superman from the nascent gene pool of human nature, attempted to insert in SchizoAffectives (although at birth it could not have been known that these particular individuals—true individuals and not the rugged individuals of whom Watts speaks—would resist this insertion by becoming SchizoAffective [or Autistic or even Schizophrenic]) this rational thinking process, the mechanism of the system, the SchizoAffective resisted, with his very life.

When a human being is born, he has no inherent thinking process; he has only sensation and awareness of those sensations. He lives only in the Now, he has no extrinsic concept of time, he has no ability of mind to predict behavior. At infancy, the human being is at his most mindful: all mind and no thought. All awareness and the glimmers of consciousness from his first intake of oxygen (and perhaps before). Through systematized familial relationships (whether that familial relationship be biological or institutional or on the street is irrelevant, for the etymological origins of the term family stem from the word “familiar”. Family is that which one is most familiar. That which one encounters and engages every day) a process of thought begins to supplant or replace that natural mindfulness and awareness. In Western Culture, rather than raise the levels of consciousness begins to break them down, to disintegrate them. Not necessarily out of meanness or malice or even evil, but out of efficiency and necessity.

To disintegrate the consciousness and narrow the awareness makes for easier rearing of a child in an already systematized culture and society. Thus begins the Social Game. Without knowing the effects of such play, the familial institutions begin to prepare the infant for a childhood of systemized living: schooling, social interactions (rather than friendships), social communication (the forming of consciousness and awareness and sensations into rational, logical, linear thought, and thought into rational, linear, logical language). A schizophrenic meanders in speech, seemingly illogical, lacking linear capacity, therefore difficult to follow or comprehend. One thing does not naturally lead to another. It takes a path untrodden through the wooded fabric of his still intact mindfulness, awareness, and consciousness. Like grasping Alice’s hand and wandering thought Wonderland for a spell, visiting bits and pieces of nonsense. Like looking at the first layer of a highly iterated fractal. The SchizoAffective mind works (not processes) like layers of fractal chaos. It tessellates. Only making any kind of sense when the full pattern of the fractal can be seen from a higher level of magnification. As such, systematized society and its rules are traumatic to the schizoid mind.

The schizoid mind is not fragmented by years of systematic abuse (that is AB-use, used badly or wrongfully) despite his speech appearing so to systematized society. His depth of emotion remains wide along the spectrum, not divided into sad/happiness, anger/contentment, crying/laughter. It retains its seemingly inexplicable nonduality and laterality: Cry-laughing-anger-smiling-sorrow-contentment-pensivity-stillness, etc. In effect, a chaos of emotion and mental associations that is like a quantum code. Every iterant absorbs the previous and results in a new iteration, which then absorbs, and so forth. Iterations can be understood to mean manners of speech, sentence structure, sensation, awareness, of environment, empathy of others’ emotions, words and meanings of others in their environment, and so on. Although, not an algorithm naturally, the mind of a SchizoAffective (and schizophrenic) behaves like one, more like IBM’s Watson, or higher level AI. The schizoid mind learns in this manner as well. Thus, he is a difficult addition to the social consciousness. He does not fit. He becomes the discordant (and contrariwise, society appears discordant to the schizoid mind; the affect to the schizo of SchizoAffective). Quite plainly, the social game can and does drive the schizoid mind into madness; hence his defense mechanism of dissociation, or isolation, or hallucination, or paranoia, or delusions.

The schizoid mind experiences intrinsically the external world like a person on LSD. His experience is psychedelic always, his awareness is synesthetic, his empathy almost like telepathy. What then of the socially constructed ego? Why is the schizo without one? Even if he were born with an ego, he would discard it out of preservation for his consciousness. The ego does not fit into the schizoid mind’s psychedelic experience and perception of the world about him. He MUST rid his mind of the ego; else, he shall not survive the continual and constant onslaught of the social order. In other words, the riddance and absence of the ego is a self-defense mechanism in the schizo.

In https://nikotheorb.wordpress.com/2013/09/13/a-look-at-the-absence-of-ego-in-the-schizoaffective-mind/

“Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self”

by Marilynne Robinson

In this ambitious book, acclaimed writer Marilynne Robinson applies her astute intellect to some of the most vexing topics in the history of human thought—science, religion, and consciousness. Crafted with the same care and insight as her award-winning novels, Absence of Mind challenges postmodern atheists who crusade against religion under the banner of science.

In Robinson’s view, scientific reasoning does not denote a sense of logical infallibility, as thinkers like Richard Dawkins might suggest. Instead, in its purest form, science represents a search for answers.

It engages the problem of knowledge, an aspect of the mystery of consciousness, rather than providing a simple and final model of reality.

By defending the importance of individual reflection, Robinson celebrates the power and variety of human consciousness in the tradition of William James.

She explores the nature of subjectivity and considers the culture in which Sigmund Freud was situated and its influence on his model of self and civilization.

Through keen interpretations of language, emotion, science, and poetry, Absence of Mind restores human consciousness to its central place in the religion-science debate.

Published by

Yale University Press

(first published 2010)

Absence of Mind by

Marilynne Robinson

At the same time as the western scientific revolution empowered human beings, opened new worlds and broadened their horizons, it progressively punctured their self-esteem. Increasingly, luminaries of modern thought have told us that our minds are not to be trusted: that even though we thought we were standing on a static Earth, our planet was moving very fast indeed; that we could never be sure that our ideas corresponded to objective reality outside our own heads, that some of our noblest ideals were simply the product of repressed sexuality; and that, finally, we are deluded if we imagine that we "think", "reason," "learn" or "choose".

Our minds are simply a passive conduit for an unknown, indifferent force.

In this published version of the Terry lectures, delivered at Yale University last year, the novelist Marilynne Robinson argues that positivism, the belief that science is the only reliable means to truth, has adopted a "systematically reductionist" view of human nature.

Since Huxley, for example, Darwinians have found altruism problematic, as evolution would necessarily select against benevolence to another at cost to oneself.

Altruism can only occur because of the "selfishness" of a gene. Thus for EO Wilson, a "soft-core altruist" expects reciprocation from either society or family; his byzantine calculations are characterised by "lying, pretence and deceit, including self-deceit, because the actor is more convincing who believes that his performance is real".

Every apparently compassionate action is, therefore, simply a matter of quid pro quo.

In the same way, because it transfers useful information to somebody else and requires an expenditure of time and energy, language seems essentially altruistic.

But, says the evolutionary biologist Geoffrey Miller, "evolution cannot favour altruistic information-sharing", so the complexities of language probably evolved simply for verbal courtship, "providing a sexual payoff for eloquent speaking by the male and female".

"Oh, to have been a fly on the wall!" Robinson comments wryly, when our "proto-verbal ancestors found mates through eloquent proto-speech".

In the same way, art may appear to be "an exploration of experience, of the possibilities of communication, and of the extraordinary collaboration of eye and hand," but according to some neo-Darwinians, it too is simply a means of attracting sexual partners.

"Leonardo and Rembrandt may have thought they were competent inquirers in their own right, but we moderns know better."

This disdainful "hermeneutics of condescension" cannot function outside of a narrow definition of relative data.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the positivist critique of religion.

Daniel Dennett, for example, defines religion as "social systems whose participants avow belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought".

He deliberately avoids the contemplative side of faith explored by William James, as if, Robinson says, "religion were only what could be observed using the methods of anthropology or of sociology, without reference to the deeply pensive solitudes that bring individuals into congregations".

Bypassing Donne, Bach, the Sufi poets and Socrates, Dennett, Dawkins and others are free to reduce the multifarious religious experience of humanity "to a matter of bones and feathers and wishful thinking, a matter of rituals and social bonding and false etiologies and the fear of death".

Robinson takes the science-versus-religion debate a stage further.

More significant than this jejune attack on faith, she argues, is the disturbing fact that "the mind, as felt experience, has been excluded from important fields of modern thought" and as a result "our conception of humanity has shrunk".

Robinson's argument is prophetic, profound, eloquent, succinct, powerful and timely. It is not an easy read, but one of her objectives is to help readers appreciate the complexity of these issues. To adopt such a "closed ontology", she insists, is to ignore "the beauty and the strangeness" of the individual mind as it exists in time.

Subjectivity "is the ancient haunt of piety and reverence and long, long thoughts. And the literatures that would dispel such things refuse to acknowledge subjectivity, perhaps because inability has evolved into principle and method."

In the past, the voices that say "there is something more" have always been right. The positivist approach would not only marginalise religion, but also the arts, culture, history, and the classical and humanist traditions. Most prescient of all is Robinson's contention that "it is only prudent to make a very high estimate of human nature, first of all in order to contain the worst impulses of human nature, and then to liberate its best impulses."

I wish she had developed this crucial insight, because it is urgently needed at this moment of crisis in human history. If we are indeed completely in thrall to the selfish gene, why not throw all constraint to the winds and just be selfish – individually and collectively, in our politics, social arrangements, financial and economic dealings?

We saw during the 20th century (not to mention the first decade of the 21st) what can happen when the "me-first" mentality is given free rein. But this was also the century of Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Nelson Mandela, who revealed the potential for altruism in humanity. The tens of thousands of people who flock to hear the Dalai Lama seem to recognise that this too is an essential part of human nature.

Karen Armstrong's

The Case for God: What Religion Really Means

is published by Bodley Head

"Schizophrenic"

Psychotic episode

The schizophrenic experiences a stunning barrage of continuous, horrifying symptoms: auditory hallucinations, delusions, ideas of reference, paranoia, etc.

The “indescribable severe torture” is unrelenting and can go on except during sometimes restless sleep, at whichtime the symptoms are even active when one becomes conscious at all.

This experience is so overwhelming it is beyond the imagination. It cannot be conceived of intellectually.

By its very nature it in fact necessitates the concept of religion in order to relate to it at all.

This continuous experience of psychotic symptoms can be viewed as “spiritual exercises in perfection”.

The effect on the schizophrenic is similar to that of monks when practicing their rituals in monasteries. When these spirited exercises become a lifestyle for the schizophrenic (lasting 8-10 years) with no real evidence given to the schizophrenic that he will ever recover, a fascinating thing happens to the psyche of that schizophrenic — he loses the perspective of “ego”.

Ego consists of all his identifying factors in the world: his age, sex, race, religious affiliation or lack thereof, education level, social class, political affiliations, nationality, etc.

He begins to see his environment with the eyes of a newborn, without the bias or prejudices, preconditions of his particular circumstances.

It can be seen as a sort of continuous baptism by fire, a kind of purification, enabling him to see reality for what it is in actuality, rather than being viewed through the preconceptions of his individual mental, emotional, and behavioural repertoire instilled in him from birth.

The schizophrenic in this condition is able in his interior to walk around in someone else’s moccasins with perfection. This can be seen as loving your neighbour as you love yourself, perfectly.

I do not believe it is a condition that can be acquired by a “normal” individual by any method, because the horror of the symptoms of schizophrenia are unduplicable by man. (Religious persons would call this condition repentance for all one’s sins, e.g. “perfect repentance”.)

https://forfreepsychology.wordpress.com/2013/09/13/psychotic-episode-i-have-no-ego/