Hello Nico, Thanks for joining this “play”. Perhaps the title is provocative, especially if one believes that the “thinking process” is the only way to achieve freedom.  This topic is very counter-intuitive, or better said, counter conventional wisdom. But please don’t let that doubt put you off from enquiring into this connection.  Can you hold that belief in abeyance?

From the get-go I acknowledged that scientific progress is a work in the symbolic realm of evolutionary thought, taking place in past, present, and future.  So, what you see is true in the physical realm.  But please don’t confuse that with man’s psychological realm, WHICH HAS NO EVIDENT PROGRESS for 1’000’s of years.  Our civilizations are good at masking man’s violence with beautiful city centers, museums, universities and opera houses. But just now, that violence has popped out more virulent than ever.

If you are always thinking the same genre of thought, those of experiences and conclusions gathered from the past and held in memory, you are not free, but bound in that cage.  Those thoughts we call conditioning.

What is conditioning to you?  Where is it held?

One cannot explore anything of relevance to the world in which we live without an awareness of one’s own inner freedom. If we feel we are somehow limited or constricted in our approach to social, economic, political, and moral problems—in particular religious and spiritual problems—then we explore them from some base other than the real one, which is the only base of being free. Therefore, freedom must be the negation of conditioning by any culture, by any religious division, by political division.

The struggle for freedom is precisely the attempt to break through, undercut, or get at that which underlies these various conditioning processes. The primary conditioning agency in our world is the totality of the kinds of thoughts, categories, concepts or constructs—call them fantasies—that people deal with, and which somehow they justify as real.

If we are concerned with peace, with ending war, with living in a world of no conflict, in which this terrible violence, separation, fear for security, emotional reactions, worry, disdain or hate, judgements, blame, comparison, ambition, hope; is to end; it must be the function of any serious religious man. The inability of religious people to in some way or other, transcend their own religious concepts or legends or myths or dogmas is evidence of this conditioning.

Whether you can make-up an unfounded experience of freedom or non-freedom is irrelevant. Freedom and unfreedom are largely definitions arrived through thought and feeling, and are anecdotal at best.

You say: AS life becomes more complex, awareness grows. Technology becomes more complex; and man goes to the moon.  Does that mean he is more conscious?  Probably, (surely) he is going to the moon to militarize it.

Thinking is a temporal process. Awareness is instantaneous, it doesn’t need, nor doesn’t call up time.  If I see violence, I want to reject it and move away from it.  I take it out of my mind and move to non-violence.  Non-violence does not exist in what I had seen, so it is a future concept with no “weight” to it.  It is a fantasy, but I give it all of my attention.  I mull it over, and project countless schemes.  In the mean time violence in the present remains unchanged.

You say “everything in the physical world is fragmented”. How would you know, if the thoughts by which you describe them are fragmented?  Doesn’t that deserve rigorous inquiry?  (Then, you say the consciousness of the universe does see wholeness?)  You say everyone learns in their own way, at their own pace.  No, they don’t; they go to school or take training to find a new pace.  And freedom can always be experienced at anyone’s pace, if you choose it???  If you are bound in the violence of yesterday, how can you ever be free?

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Hi Nico, if it is true you don’t understand this subject matter, then thanks for hanging-in-there anyway.

The subject line is a little obscure in that it equates freedom with the dissolution of the past. What might not be direct is that the past equates exactly to memory and the old experiences that fill it. Where else is the past located, if not in man’s memory? Out of memory is produced some slight modifications of thought. But they are all from the same source, from the same conditioning.

Can old thoughts be reconfigured and produce new thoughts? Please say how that can be done. Freedom is defined as the ability to explore new thinking and arrive at new territory. (It works in science through experiments, but it hasn’t worked with psychology, what is held as the behavioral possibilities.) That last statement is empirical. If you have studied history, as far back as you go, there were devastating wars. Today there are the same wars, even worse. There is no freedom in the mentality that produces war.

Maybe you could take a little time and develop how you see that psychological progress will be made. Then the discussion could turn to topics that you may feel more comfortable with?

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Hello Nico, is it more clear about my meaning of thought-does-not-produce-freedom.  Let it be a proposition to investigate, or provisional. Then in that proposal, new thought might only come from “insight”, it’s a crack in thought, or where thought breaks down.  Or a pause between two thoughts.  That’s unknow also, but it is indication that new thought does not necessarily come from old thought, (from conditioning).

Please don’t get bogged down in agree or disagree.  That stops inquiry cold.  Unless you use it only to back out.

How about posting on the Hearty Salon how you see that progress is to be made.  Remember we are not talking about the physical world of science, which works well with thought.  I propose we discuss the psychological world, where man’s fears, hostility, aggression and violence marches on.

Thanks

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Hi Nico, Happy New Year.  I just posted my number 14.  That does not mean that we can’t continue our discussion here.  Both these threads are adapted to dialog.  I’ll see you when you are ready.

Hello Nico, thanks for sharing your experience on this matter. I am NOT giving a “teaching” from personal experience, but I am making a proposal, that in my perception, has changed my emotional responses, my outlook, and my actions.

I understand when you say that freedom is a concept. It is a made up definition, out of a judgement of comparison; that I could be more free. So this-here must not be FREEDOM. In that sense, before the definition, (the thought) is applied, we are already free.

Can our thinking go in all directions, and come up with new thought? Isn’t there the context of all that I presently know about the world, and about life; and beyond that context, I have absolutely no awareness. Nothing other is even registered, much less considered. Those are the new thoughts, new territory, and the presently unknown.

Somehow the boundaries of that context have expanded, but it could very well be in spite of thinking. When the limits do expand, of course thinking jumps right in. So it might be interpreted that thinking found that growth. The proposal is that it is far from sure where growth comes from, (inspiration), and needs to be further investigated. If you hold conclusions, you can’t investigate.

You have introduced “Consciousness” that might contain, or control memory. Consciousness is just life, and no further definition is required. Life does hold memory. You mention that Akasha might have something to do with memory. Akasha means the basis and essence of all things in the material world; the first material element created from the astral world, (Akasha is “æther”).

So are you saying that memory is “Astral” or impressions in the “æther”? That is nice, and who am I to deny it? Maybe that is your experience. Do you voyage in the astral plane with an awareness of it? I don’t; so for me it is a diversion.

You say:
Our memory is not limited to our brain.
Our character is not limited to our brain.
Our choices are not limited to our brains.

Well, brains, or mind, or awareness, or consciousness, I am not sure that we have to pin down the location. (which is just another word attached to the reality of it). But if you look, I think you will see that our character is limited to our context of beliefs that reside in our memory, (even our personal memory), and our choices are also limited by the content of our memory.

If we were more in touch with a collective memory (like the libraries of the world?), could our choices be broader? I sincerely doubt we would make any such choice that came from afar. So many choices are robotic and habitual. They don’t go beyond our skin. So to what extent is the individual able? I would say NIL, until we give up the conditioning that we only act for our own benefit, only for our self-aggrandizement. (Which includes the spiritual search by the way, done to fulfill a personal desire.)

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Hi Nico, thanks for keeping this conversation going.

I am not against thought. I use it daily for many chores. In fact thinking is mixed in with most everything I do. Just because thinking is present, here mixed with my other faculties, doesn’t mean that it is the author of new insights. (You even mentioned intuition.) If I become aware of a conditioned mechanism, without any judgement about it, (not brining in thought based preferences), then with little or no thinking I begin to see what does not work. For me, I lose interest in that part of habituation.

It stops, or reduces significantly. If I see that; do I have to do anything with it? NO, it just drops. I am not going to manipulate it through future evolution. It is gone in the now.

What changes come out of feeling? Maybe you don’t stick your hand into fire. But feeling also reinforces old trauma, and keeps it going, not changing it.

I like your last point, even in a simple family relationship, or any throughout the day. Do you see the other so you can “figure him out” and be wary, or do you observe your own reactions in that mirror of relationship, AND FIGURE YOURSELF OUT? Surely that is much more important.

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