Why are you unhappy?
Because 99.9 per cent
Of everything you think,
And of everything you do,
Is for yourself —
And there isn’t one.

~ Wei Wu Wei

Again some mighty weirdness during the night. Does anyone really understand what happens to consciousness during the night?

I definitely need to sleep longer during the winter; the 0730 alarm felt like 0530 and that’s after going to bed around 2200. After a wash and brushing teeth I continued with the 28 day yoga course. The addition of supine twists and standing hip rolls brought the emphasis to the waist and lumbar spine.

Sitting afterwards it is clear that awareness doesn’t need ‘doing’, and any direction, choice or purpose in the awareness prevents natural occurrences unfolding and expressing. The prevention of this is what I have been trying to do all this time and limits existence, but seems safer that way. In sitting quietly, the subtleties of this controlling become apparent and can be understood.

Some snow in the air this morning and a few flakes falling as I walked to lunch. The school is still very quiet, with less than ten people eating pizza at the kitchen the table, quite cosy. The scrap metal man gave us a pack of beers as a thank you. I guess he doesn’t know Brockwood very well. Or maybe he does. Some more snow in tiny flakes this afternoon, like dandruff from hair clouds.

Before work in the afternoon, reading an article in the New York Times, as the Bank of America braces itself for possible postings on Wikileaks. They haven’t been mentioned by name, but when Assange said he has evidence to ‘bring down a bank or two’ it is suspected Bank of America is involved:

That Mr. Assange might shift his attention to a private company — especially one as politically unpopular as Bank of America or any of its rivals, which have been stained by taxpayer-financed bailouts and the revelation of improper foreclosure practices — raises a new kind of corporate threat, combining elements of law, technology, public policy, politics and public relations.

“This is a significant moment, and Bank of America has to get out in front of it,” said Richard S. Levick, a veteran crisis communications expert. “Corporate America needs to look at what happens here, and how Bank of America handles it.”

I am working on the transcripts of Krishnamurti and David Bohm in 1975, a series of twelve conversations they had together. Bohm does well to draw out precise meaning from K, while the two of them explore deeply the questions of what is truth, actuality, the limits of thought and the nature of desire. Bohm has the tendency to describe while K tends to unfold and both of them together sustain a serious inquiry into the most important subjects. I am on the last transcript now; here’s some extracts:

David Bohm: Desire includes belief and hope. That is, belief amounts to accepting something as correct because you desire it to be so – because otherwise you have no proof, you see – and hope is just simply the belief that what you desire is going to be realised. So all three are one and the same. I think belief is in some ways more deceptive than plain desire.

…

DB: Self-deception: I believe that I am the same as something greater because I feel better.

…

DB: The point is that we can’t go on with desire [leading our actions]. I mean, if we do our society will be destroyed.

…

DB: Thought tends to think that consciousness is a manifestation of a being or an entity who is deeper.

K: Yes.

DB: Who is not only thinking, but thinking correctly, more or less, and who is also seeing, who is perceiving, his thinking is describing his perception, and who is also experiencing, you see. I think that’s important. That gives a sense of reality that this being is the experiencer who is experiencing the sensations.

K: Quite.

DB: And all that makes the thing very real, a reality independent of thought. If all that were not present then the sensations would not be regarded as all that important by thought. Thought is now trying to produce a better set of sensations in order to make you feel better, you see, the state of…

K: Yes – better sensation, more sensation.

DB: More and better. It doesn’t want worse, you see. (Laughs)

K: (Laughs) Yes.

DB: Now, you see, that’s an inherently crazy activity, because the only point or function of the sensations is to give you some factual information. And if thought tries to make them better it can no longer give you any information, you see. And the whole thing anyway is self-contradictory because that very attempt cannot be kept under control, and so on.

…

K: So we come back to the point: the content of one’s consciousness is the product of desire.

DB: Well, in general.

K: Yes, apart from the knowledge, functional knowledge, the rest of it is the movement and the accumulation of sensations and desires.

DB: Yes, it’s some sort of imprints which contain the records of all that and the instructions to produce them again.

K: Yes, yes – again. Memory.

DB: Yes. It gets stronger and stronger.

K: Yes. Now, can that movement of desire come to an end? Should it come to an end?

DB: Well, it seems from what we have said that it should.

K: But I mean, all the religions though they say this, yet they become monks in order to identify – you follow?

DB: But I think that’s the self deceptive nature of desire. You see, one thing that happens when the brain begins to see the destructive nature of desire, it begins to think, ‘I would rather not have desire.’

K: Yes.

DB: But it begins to desire a state of non-desire, you see.

K: Yes, that’s right, that’s right, that’s right. Desires a state of non-desire.

DB: And therefore the whole thing is silly, you see.

K: Of course.

DB: And desire has this self-deceptive nature – I can desire not to be conscious that I have desire, you see, and therefore that will vanish from my consciousness and I will have no desires. (Laughs)

K: So our question is: can desire, which brings illusion, self-deception, and all the complications of objective, changing desires – can the root of the desire be dissipated? I think it is only then that you see what is truth.

DB: Well, I mean, that is very clear to me. As long as there is desire nothing can be done.

K: Nothing can be done – absolutely. You see, sir, but it’s very difficult because most people think desire is necessary to live.

DB: Yes, I know that. That’s part of our tradition.

K: Now, is it possible to eliminate altogether desire?

…

Unfolding the laundry from the tumble drier, it was mega-charged with static. A little fluffy pad that somehow got in the laundry leapt from C’s hand to the clothes. I then tried to video it as a magic trick but it didn’t turn out like that. We discovered ‘anti-zap’!