Krishnamurti: Aware of The Totality - Total Attention

Consciousness is the total field in which thought functions and relationships exist.

All motives, intentions, desires, pleasures, fear, inspiration, longings, hopes, sorrows, joys are in that field. But we have come to divide the consciousness into the active and the dormant, the upper and lower level - that is, all the daily thoughts, feelings and activities on the surface and below them the so-called subconscious, the things with which we are not familiar, which express themselves occasionally through certain intimations, intuitions and dreams.

We are occupied with one little corner of consciousness which is most of our life;

the rest, which we call the subconscious, with all its motives, its fears, its racial and inherited qualities, we do not even know how to get into.

Now I am asking you, is there such a thing as the subconscious at all?

We use that word very freely. We have accepted that there is such a thing and all the phrases and jargon of the analysts and psychologists have seeped into the language; but is there such a thing?

And why is it that we give such extraordinary importance to it?

It seems to me that it is as trivial and stupid as the conscious mind - as narrow, bigoted, conditioned, anxious and tawdry.

So is it possible to be totally aware of the whole field of consciousness and not merely a part, a fragment, of it?

If you are able to be aware of the totality, then you are functioning all the time with your total attention, not partial attention.

This is important to understand because when you are being totally aware of the whole field of consciousness there no friction. it is only when you divide consciousness, which is all thought, feeling and action, into different levels that there is friction.

We live in fragments.

You are one thing at the office, another at home; you talk about democracy and in your heart you are autocratic; you talk about loving your neighbours, yet kill him with competition; there is one part of you working, looking, independently of the other. Are you aware of this fragmentary existence in yourself? And is it possible for a brain that has broken up its own functioning, its own thinking, into fragments

- is it possible for such a brain to be aware of the whole field?

Is it possible to look at the whole of consciousness completely, totally, which means to be a total human being?

If, in order to try to understand the whole structure of the `me', the self, with all its extraordinary complexity, you go step by step, uncovering layer by layer, examining every thought, feeling and motive, you will get caught up in the analytical process which may take you weeks, months, years–

--and when you admit time into the process of understanding yourself, you must allow for every form of distortion because the self is a complex entity, moving, living, struggling, wanting, denying, with pressures and stresses and influences of all sorts continually at work on it.

So you will discover for yourself that this is not the way;

you will understand that the only way to look at yourself is totally, immediately, without time;

and you can see the totality of yourself only when the mind is not fragmented.

What you see in totality is the truth.

Now can you do that?

Most of us cannot because most of us have never approached the problem so seriously, because we have never really looked at ourselves.

Never.

We blame others, we explain things away or we are frightened to look.

But when you look totally you will give your whole attention, your whole being, everything of yourself, your eyes, your ears, your nerves;

you will attend with complete self-abandonment, and then there is no room for fear, no room for contradiction, and therefore no conflict.

Attention is not the same thing as concentration.

Concentration is exclusion; attention, which is total awareness, excludes nothing.

It seems to me that most of us are not aware, not only of what we are talking about but of our environment, the colours around us, the people, the shape of the trees, the clouds, the movement of water. Perhaps it is because we are so concerned with ourselves, with our own petty little problems, our own ideas, our own pleasures, pursuits and ambitions that we are not objectively aware.

And yet we talk a great deal about awareness.

Once in India I was travelling in a car.

There was a chauffeur driving and I was sitting beside him. There were three gentlemen behind discussing awareness very intently and asking me questions about awareness, and unfortunately at that moment the driver was looking somewhere else and he ran over a goat, and the three gentlemen were still discussing awareness - totally unaware that they had run over a goat.

When the lack of attention was pointed out to those gentlemen who were trying to be aware it was a great surprise to them.

And with most of us it is the same.

We are not aware of outward things or of inward things. If you want to understand the beauty of a bird, a fly, or a leaf, or a person with all his complexities, you have to give your whole attention which is awareness.

And you can give your whole attention only when you care, which means that you really love to understand - then you give your whole heart and mind to find out.

Such awareness is like living with a snake in the room;

you watch its every movement, you are very, very sensitive to the slightest sound it makes.

Such a state of attention is total energy; in such awareness the totality of yourself is revealed in an instant.

When you have looked at yourself so deeply you can go much deeper.

When we use the word `deeper' we are not being comparative. We think in comparisons - deep and shallow, happy and unhappy. We are always measuring, comparing.

Now is there such a state as the shallow and the deep in oneself?

When I say, `My mind is shallow, petty, narrow, limited', how do I know all these things?

Because I have compared my mind with your mind which is brighter, has more capacity, is more intelligent and alert.

Do I know my pettiness without comparison?

When I am hungry, I do not compare that hunger with yesterday's hunger. Yesterday's hunger is an idea, a memory.

If I am all the time measuring myself against you, struggling to be like you, then I am denying what I am myself. Therefore I am creating an illusion. When I have understood that comparison in any form leads only to greater illusion and greater misery, just as when I analyze myself, add to my knowledge of myself bit by bit, or identify myself with something outside myself, whether it be the State, a savior or an ideology

–when I understand that all such processes lead only to greater conformity and therefore greater conflict–

when I see all this I put it completely away.

Then my mind is no longer seeking.

It is very important to understand this. Then my mind is no longer groping, searching, questioning. This does not mean that my mind is satisfied with things as they are, but such a mind has no illusion. Such a mind can then move in a totally different dimension.

The dimension in which we usually live, the life of every day which is pain, pleasure and fear, has conditioned the mind, limited the nature of the mind, and when that pain, pleasure and fear have gone (which does not mean that you no longer have joy: joy is something entirely different from pleasure)

--then the mind functions in a different dimension in which there is no conflict, no sense of `otherness'.

Verbally we can go only so far: what lies beyond cannot be put into words because the word is not the thing.

Up to now we can describe, explain, but no words or explanations can open the door.

What will open the door is daily awareness and attention–

awareness of how we speak, what we say, how we walk, what we think.

It is like cleaning a room and keeping it in order. Keeping the room in order is important in one sense but totally unimportant in another. There must be order in the room but order will not open the door or the window. What will open the door is not your volition or desire. You cannot possibly invite the other.

All that you can do is to keep the room in order, which is to be virtuous for itself, not for what it will bring. To be sane, rational, orderly.

Then perhaps, if you are lucky, the window will open and the breeze will come in.

Or it may not. It depends on the state of your mind. And that state of mind can be understood only by yourself, by watching it and never trying to shape it, never taking sides, never opposing, never agreeing, never justifying, never condemning, never judging –which means watching it without any choice.

And out of this choiceless awareness perhaps the door will open and you will know what that dimension is in which there is no conflict and no time.