Wednesday, 22 November 2017

Attention and the question of ‘Freedom’


What is freedom?
Obviously this question is asked only by a living person.
A machine or computer can’t think of asking this question.
There is ‘a consciousness’ where-in this question arises as a thought.
This consciousness, whatever name it is given, is essentially associated with a physical body, and the ‘one’ that says ‘I’ is too the essence of the food, a very subtle refinement though of the food it consumes.
Thought is thus a word-structure on one hand, there is also a ground where a sequence of such many thoughts keep continuously arising and subsiding. We can also see there may be a crowd of such thoughts and thought-sequences. We can’t perhaps have a single thought that stays on the fore as the prominent one. There is always the movement of thoughts in ‘mind’ and only one or some of those in a group, come up on the topmost layer of this mind.
Again there is an element of ‘attention’ that holds a specific thought firmly in ‘consciousnesses’. This ‘attention’, though seems to be the fixed, static, unmoving, unchanging aspect of consciousness, is not an attribute of consciousness, on the contrary, the ‘consciousness’ is the moving part / aspect of attention.
This ‘attention’ lacks the sense of ‘me’ and ‘I’ though the ‘consciousness’ inevitably and always is accompanied by ‘me’ and ‘I’.
‘Attention’ is devoid of person while consciousness is always of and about a person or the living being.
“What is Freedom?”
Is not the ‘consciousness’ and all that is the content of it, the result of food only? If the food intake is no more, this consciousness gradually becomes weak and weaker, until finally it fades away and is just totally dispersed and lost. This food is either in the form of whatever is eaten, or in the form of ‘information’, and ‘knowledge’ that is stored up as ‘memory’ in the brain.
Along-with the memory a sense of a center assumes existence in thought only. This center through memory, is translated into ‘I’ and ‘me’ which is not something true, but appears and accepted as thought only.
‘consciousness’ and the content of consciousness that is thought; keep moving in ‘attention’, though attention is the fixed, static, unmoved, immovable not-moving, unchanging background where all this movement takes place.
Exactly ‘Who’ or ‘What’ is the thing that asks:
“What is Freedom?”
Is not ‘Freedom’ an idea only?
‘Who’, ‘What’ and the consciousness along-with ‘I’ and ’me’, and its whole paraphernalia, as a whole are the one indivisible totality only, where division is imposed upon by thought only.
As is said, consciousness, along-with ‘I’ and ’me’ and thought as well are the result of the food that is consumed. Isn’t a result a consequence only, an effect of its cause?
Could we rationally and logically too, talk of the ‘Freedom’ of a result?
A result is always dependent inevitably upon its cause.
On account of this ‘fact’, there is no Freedom for the consciousness, neither for the person or the entity that in terms of thought, thinks it can have / find Freedom.
There is no Freedom of choice, but in choice-less awareness only, if and when the attention comes upon this Reality, the significance of the question of 'Freedom' is just no more.
--

No comments:

Post a Comment