From Insomnia to Insight
by Jonathan Knudsen
The other night it took me awhile to get to sleep. My mind was in a contradictory state as I lay in bed, unable to relax.
On the one hand, inwardly, I felt an undefined emotional activation that, were it to be in command of my ego, seemed it might lead me to focused, energetic, physical action.
On the other hand, ostensibly dominating the self, there was the desire to go to sleep, and a mildly disconcerted feeling, because I was not able to do so.
There was thus a conflict between the two states, with one side having more influence, nominally in the seat of control, but neither one really getting its way.
My desire to go to sleep only made that opposing desire, to be active, more resistant.
The end result was that I whiled away the minutes in light rumination, not getting up to do something, nor using the time productively by reading. The desire to be active was essentially suppressed. Yet it was a Pyrrhic victory for the competing desire to go to sleep, because, though I lay in bed and denied myself activity, I was just in a sort of mental standby mode, insomnolent.
The futility of the situation reminded me of similar nights in the past, however. I saw that I needed to look carefully at what was going on. The question of what was happening in my mind became a matter of choiceless interest to me.
As I looked, I saw what I saw, and what I just described above became clear. I took a few notes to record my thoughts, and promptly fell asleep.
I had inquired honestly into what was going on, free of conclusions about what was there. Seeing with apparent objectivity, my consciousness no longer constituted a battle between two contradictory desires. Both of those desires in fact dissolved, replaced by a sense that wholeness required a motiveless inquiry.
Instead of being an observer who wanted to go to sleep, looking at the observed — an unwanted desire to be active — there was just observation, with no self involved, and thus it was pure observation.
I, as such, lost my self, as it was then manifesting, through giving complete attention to what was actually happening. As I see it, insight then happened, in the form of what I am sharing with you now. The state of confusion was transformed into what seemed to be clarity of perception.
In some similar situations, when I had insomnia in the past, my desire to go to sleep was strong enough that I embodied something Krishnamurti described in this way: in an effort “to perceive what is,” he said one may be “so eager to get what one wants that one dashes against it.”
My haste, which, in another sense, was really a resistance to perception, would take a certain form. While trying to look inwardly, at my self, seeking to discover why I was not able to sleep, I had a conclusion already in mind as to what I should find.
Though I had then the same sense of inner activation that I had the other night, making me unable to sleep, my mind gave conditioned meaning to that activation, instead of letting it speak to me, as it were, directly.
As a result, I interpreted the activation as being an amorphous, inarticulate expression of some deeper feeling, which I made it my objective to consciously experience.
So I surveyed my life problems, looking for logical reasons as to why I might have some particular hidden, discomfiting feeling, and then sought it out in my psyche. But this was a process of a will, or desire, to know. You can only will to know something that you already have an image of.
Thought remembered, that, in the past, if something psychologically painful arose, I would often ‘stay with it,’ as Krishnamurti advised, however unpleasant ‘it’ was. And I often found that the result would be a transformation of the constriction and pain into a new wisdom, detachment, and happiness.
And so thought, as the self, took the recollection of this causeless inquiry, found it gratifying to the ego, and made a facsimile of it as a method. The beautiful sunset one saw in joy, with a silent mind, is made into a memory that one identifies with as pleasure. It is then pursued in repetition, to accumulate more experience that affirms the self.
Spiritual awareness and spiritual attention, however, cannot be produced by desire or will. They are not manufactured by knowledge, nor precipitated by ritual, which are manifestations of thought. Methods, as Krishnamurti said, beget their own result. That result is an affirmation of the identified-with known.
Thought, as Krishnamurti said, is “a reflex of memory.” He emphasized that “there is nothing spiritual about thought.” One cannot enter into the Unknown with thought. Thought, as we know it, is of an entirely different order than the Immeasurable, which is the Source of Cosmic Intelligence, beyond the material plane. Thought, which is a very subtle form of matter — evidenced by how it conforms to material laws, such as that of Cause and Effect — is the evolutionary apex of matter itself.
To use thought, such as through a meditation technique, to catapult oneself beyond thought is an illusion that never leaves the field of thought. Krishnamurti suggests we must first look at the known, the conditioning, see it for what it actually is, and therefore stay with it, in stillness. The reactivity to pain may be there, as well as the desire for reflexive escape and the longing to become, but one is not possessed by these things. One inquires into them, and relates to them as though they are friends, in affection for truth. Undivided from such fragments of the self, by repression or projection, truth then is.
Krishnamurti put it about inattention, that, as soon as you see it, attention is there. The content of one’s conditioning must be emptied in awareness before the cup of the mind can be filled with the Immeasurable.
Because the mind is distinct from the brain, however, though the brain may still hold conditioning in its cells and processes, the mind itself can be temporarily emptied, allowing awareness to be — in one who has not been as yet freed of the self.
In terms of the development of consciousness, there was first instinct, and later, in essence with the appearance of humanity, the dawn of thought. Now, humanity is reaching the “limits of thought” as Krishnamurti and Bohm talked about. Further refinement of thought is not going to meet the global challenges we face. The new time requires, as an existential necessity, ending separation and the self, and thus our enthrallment to thought, and the keeping of thought in its right place.
This opens the door to humanity being guided, consciously or unconsciously, by the same Intelligence that has created and sustained the Universe from its inception. This would constitute the transformation and renewal of our civilization, and the birth of the Immeasurable in the mind of all humanity, not merely the few.
Grand words, but they mean one simple thing: to be who we actually are, now, not as something to become in time, but who we are, as a fact, in our thoughts, and emotions, at this moment. To be who we are means not being inwardly cleaved into images of self and not-self. By bringing awareness and attention to these images, their supply of oxygen, as it were, is cut off. They are born in denial, and can live only in darkness.
As I mentioned, Krishnamurti says that to be individual is to be undivided. In individuality, there is creativity, perception, and uniqueness. And there is love, not the image of love from the separated mind, but the fact of love from the Universal Mind.
Inattention, by contrast, means division, starting inwardly through repression, and then externalized outwardly as projection, manifesting an illusory observer separate from an unreal observed. Inattention, which is the consequence of the self, comes about as we deny what is, reducing it to images, which are thoughts. We then translate sensory input in psychological terms, with meaning drawn from our conditioned minds. Therefore, we never have perception of the fact, and only see in terms of the past.
Continuity, and thus security, for these ego images necessitates the ever present need for recognition — the fuel of psychological becoming — and thus desire for the ‘more and more.’ We live therefore in a constant state of implicit or explicit competition and comparison. And from all this, our civilization is generated.
The sense of activation I had during the previous nights of insomnia — which was readily apparent and accessible if I had but looked — was not of real interest to me, but that was exactly what was knocking at the door, what needed to be ‘stayed with.’
Rather, I evaded looking at it, trying instead to uncover the sought after, hidden mental content I believed was beneath it — which was just an idea, a speculation, a belief, not ‘what is.’ I took the feeling of activation to be basically a nuisance, an impediment to reaching my image of the uncontacted known. I lacked the patience to truly inquire, and the ‘me’ sought to accumulate knowledge in the form of experiencing the chimera of anticipated feeling.
The fact was this sense of activation, but I tried to push it aside, and thus denied ‘what is.’ I was instead looking for an image of the truth, drawn from my knowledge of psychology. This desire to pursue a mirage took the form of a fruitless self-psychoanalysis, in a search for a carrot that ever moved away from me as I moved towards it.
Knowledge of psychology can be invaluable, as is knowledge of biology, or knowledge of how to care for a garden, if it is not a vehicle for the self. In this case, I identified with knowledge — rather than using it, as inspired to, to facilitate honest inquiry. That foreclosed on awareness and lead me astray. Last night, however, I avoided this past error, because of a previous insight into its futility.
Insight is a manifestation from beyond the material plane, and it brings synthetic, holistic understanding. It actually changes the brain cells, so as to remove conditioning at the neurological level, as Krishnamurti and David Bohm related in The Ending of Time. It leaves an indelible mark on the one perceiving it. Once you see something with insight, you will never be able to see in terms of the illusion that was dispelled by it, because insight brings perception, and the illusion was the result of conditioning, which is blindness.
Krishnamurti, after seeing in the 1920’s that “truth is a pathless land,” and that no organization could ever lead people to the truth, dissolved the “Order of the Star” which was set up to promote him as the vehicle of the World Teacher, known to theosophists as Maitreya.
That was an insight, Krishnamurti related, and he said there was no possibility that at any later point would he think that perhaps a different organization could lead people to the truth. Once you see that the snake is really a rope, you know it.
To be conditioned is like being a blind person, led around by a deceiver, who symbolizes your conditioning, and who misleads you about all that is there in a psychological sense. The deceiver will accurately relate the mundane details, like what a traffic light is, or a volleyball, or someone’s name, but lie about everything that pertains to you as a separated self. Then imagine a world that filled with most everyone else in the same position. Well, we don’t have to imagine it.
Insight may also serve as a platform from which to ask new and different questions. It will precipitate as thought so that it can be shared with others, but true understanding is of course a matter of awareness and not knowledge.
Krishnamurti’s teaching is pure insight in itself, and though it is generally first received by our consciousness as thought, that thought does not have to be identified with. It can serve instead as an extraordinarily valuable sign pointer for inquiry. If his teaching is therefore held lightly as selfless knowledge, it won’t strengthen the self. On the contrary, if we give complete attention to it, it can lead consciousness in myriad directions that it would have otherwise been oblivious to.
Through spiritual inquiry we may come to perceive directly the same things Krishnamurti spoke of, but it will always be in a new way, a creative and thus unconditioned way, in which we make these teachings our own. This will not happen as an individualistic expression of the self, but rather, as a flowering of spiritual individuality.
Attachment to the known, however, taking such forms as my assumption about what I would find in self-analysis, means you translate one’s experience in terms of knowledge you have previously identified with.
When we identify with knowledge, we are incapable of actual inquiry, because such preconceptions seek only their own affirmation, presume truth as belief, and therefore obviate honesty and perception. You cannot see through the lens of knowledge and desire — we can only assign conditioned meaning drawn from memory.
True inquiry, which is synonymous with spiritual attention, may begin with an awareness of the emptiness of the self’s attachment to past knowledge. The known is seen to be bankrupt, and a movement has begun to proceed beyond thought. This, I think, is an example of what Krishnamurti meant by the need to “start in freedom.”
If a given pattern of the self fails to control the external, e.g., social, environment to its satisfaction, as well as the internal thoughts and emotional experience — the dual foci of the self — the mind may pause, in recognition of its own incapacity. When thought stops, awareness immediately is.
In that awareness, a causeless spiritual attention may arise, which opens the door to Intelligence and insight. To look with complete attention is to be whole, and therefore that negates the observer.
The observer denies true perception because to separate the observer and the observed is a non-fact, an illusion constructed by thought. It is a contrivance to envisage a self separate in consciousness from the observed. Consciousness is one.
To live in spiritual detachment means to not have a separated self, and instead to be who one actually is, without identification with a mask, or the ego image, of the observer. The observer is always the opposite side of the same coin as the observed, which is another image. They are a duality engendered by identification with thought, a product of our conditioning. To be who one actually is is the negation of that illusory duality.
Consciousness may demonstrate, and usually does, as the Stream of conditioned human thought in the mind-belt — in its general (e.g., the Stream itself) or particular (e.g., the conditioning in the mind of a given person) form.
Or it may manifest in some way as the Universal Mind. Yet when it does so, it will often evince itself in creative Individuality, as an expression of inward omnitude. Krishnamurti said that to truly be an individual means that you are undivided.
It is thought that divides, makes images, and compares. That is part of its nature, but when we identify with thought, as consciousness we are thought. Thought may separate, but as thought, we become separative.
As I see it, and mentioned earlier, perception in a spiritual sense happens if the mind, distinct from the brain, is emptied of content, even temporarily, so that all that is present is what Krishnamurti and Bohm called the “mind that is not made by man.” Such a state is beyond thought, and in it there is no separation of the ‘me’ and the other.
Krishnamurti talked about partial insight as revelation into a specific, limited area, which could mean a limited area of one’s conditioning, such as an unconstructive habit of behavior, or involve creativity in any area of life, like art or science. Whatever conditioning that held back the breakthrough into new perception is removed by the partial insight, and that also changes the cells of the brain reflecting that conditioning — to extrapolate from what Krishnamurti said.
Total insight, as Krishnamurti described it, means the wiping out of the self as a whole, something that, as I understood it, he suggested was possible for any person. In such a case, he indicated, the brain is irreversibly liberated from all psychological conditioning, and the self is completely uprooted.
The elimination of the self is not a matter of evolutionary attainment, nor was it itself the product of evolution. It was created in the night of time, when humanity took “the wrong turn” that Krishnamurti discussed with Bohm. At that point, which may not have been a discrete moment in history, humanity broke ranks, as it were, with the Intelligence unconsciously expressed through Nature, through the evolutionary process of the universe.
It does not take evolution to simply be who one is, which the self is a denial of. Anyone can be true to themselves, and yet we find that to be the most difficult of problems. Is it worth the ruination of our planet to evade that responsibility?
The ending of the self is the transformation in consciousness that will change the world. As Krishnamurti and Bohm talked about, we have been conditioned for thousands of years by the notion that thought, in a more efficient or clever form, is the only answer to our problems. It is as if thought is the Messiah.
Thought as we know it is an important capacity, as is feeling, as well as that provided by our physical forms (though most feelings, as we know them, are the progeny of thought’s conditioning). To identify with thought, however, means we are a slave to its nature.
Krishnamurti noted thought means “to measure,” but beyond thought is the Immeasurable, as he called it. Our Cosmos is in perfect order, he said — and this is demonstrated by the fine tuning of the variables of the evolution of the universe, and by scientific laws themselves.
It is abundantly evident that there is a Creative Principle behind the origin and evolution of the universe. That Creative Principle expresses itself unconsciously in Nature, but can potentially be expressed consciously or unconsciously through humanity, as Love, Wisdom, Intelligence, Compassion, Sharing, Listening, Awareness, Attention, and so forth.
Such Intelligence, supplanting the conditioned self as the directing agency of consciousness, naturally would manifest a world that reflects the Order of the Universal Mind. The self is the denial of the Fabric of Unity, the fact of our oneness.
The disorder of our present civilization is a measure of how out of synchrony we are with that Universal Mind. Our oneness is not lost in this, but manifests in a distorted form — as the general human mind, as we know it. This Stream of commonly held consciousness conditions everyone with the same separative patterns of thought and feeling, the world over. This Stream is the font, as Krishnamurti and Bohm said, of each person’s particular mind, so the oneness still persists, but in a perverse sense. And yet the self imagines that it is distinct, like the nonconformist who denies convention according to a convention of nonconformity.
Inquiry, in the sense of spiritual attention, is essential to bringing humanity back into cooperation with the natural unfoldment of cosmic evolution. One is already moving away from the known — meaning thought we have identified with — in self- or co-inquiry, because the question at hand is not a search for missing static knowledge that you want to accumulate for the separated self.
Rather, it is a matter of giving attention to the known so completely that one negates, or loses the self, or the observer and its projections. There is then just observation, and that opens the door to true perception.
Transiting away from the field of thought, consciousness is thus subject to the sublimity of the Immeasurable, and at this point, but not before, moves into conscious relationship with it, to paraphrase Krishnamurti. Intelligence, in a capital ‘I’ sense, is therefore at the helm. And insight, which, as Krishnamurti said, is the sole factor that dissolves conditioning, thus becomes possible.