I was staring at a blank page of this post for quite sometime. Thoughts were there, somewhere. Just needed time to find words. But then, does the mind really stay empty?
J Krishnamurti usally talks about an empty mind like it was the most natural thing. His mind mostly wandered from the curl of a leaf to the colour of dusk. The observer being observed. He spent time with trees and open skies.
What about the rest of us? We mostly stare at walls, screens and almost right angles everywhere.
There is this study that I came across in the media. The Coffer illusion. People from the US and UK almost always see rectangles. Rural Himba people from Namibia almost always see circles.
Half of them can’t see the rectangles even when told to look. Not because one group sees better. But because the environment trained the eye. Grow up around round huts and curved horizons, your brain learns curves. Grow up in a modernized and industrial world, most of us see straight lines, sharp edges, right angles. Our brain learns geometry. None is superior but the way brain is trained to see things.
The observer is not neutral here, I believe.
This is what I have been looping around in the tulips post. The brain builds the things based on the inputs received and sometimes it is beyond. What we call perception is just the brain pattern matching to everything it has already seen.
So when JK says empty the mind and observe the observer, which observer? Observe the trained observer?
I’ve been doing oil pastels lately. Mostly curves, sharp edges are not quite easy in pastels. I cuuld see that I am reaching more of rounded edge pastels instead of a ruler.
Does emptiness truly exist? Or does the mind just hallucinate a quieter version of what it already knows?
I don’t have an answer yet.
Cheers!
Check out the previous posts: Things nobody tells you before your first trek!
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