when thought does not interfere

I can see the totality of something only when thought does not interfere.

We humans have a rather strange relationship with our thoughts, with thinking. For most of us, thinking starts as soon as we wake up in the morning and continues more or less non-stop throughout the day, until we finally fall asleep at night. So there is this stream of thoughts, and not only is it there all day long, non-stop, but most of us also pay a lot of attention to this stream of thoughts.

If you pay careful attention, you'll see that your awareness might be resting on one of the five senses, or it might be involved with a thought. If you pay careful attention, you will see that when you are attending to a thought with your awareness in this way, your other senses fall into the background. We don't really pay that much attention to them when we are thinking. And perhaps now and then, something catches our attention – there might be a loud sound, or we might see something bright and colourful out of the corner of our eye – and for a moment, our thinking pauses or stops, and our attention is on those senses. but straight away, usually, thoughts resume.

And because we are paying attention to thoughts all day long, they come to be our life, really. If you ask somebody what is their life experience, they will talk about all sorts of things: relationships and jobs and countries and travel, who knows. But if they've really looked into themselves, the truth is, the life experience for most people is a stream of thoughts. It's a little personal world.

And if you look even more carefully, you'll probably find that the thinking mind is creating a story out of experience. And this story needs to be somehow coherent. Whatever is happening in the moment gets woven into the story. And there needs to be some flow in that story. If you are reading a novel or watching a TV drama and there was no logical flow, no structure to the plot, it would be very unsatisfactory. If merely random things were happening, without any coherence, it would not feel like a good novel or a good drama. So storytelling demands this coherence. And when our mind is creating a story in this way, the story of our life, commenting on everything that is happening, the mind is obliged to make the current experience fit in with the story, with the narrative. And it will necessarily distort the actual experience of the moment in order to create this coherent story.

So, for example, we are very selective in what we pay attention to and notice. We only see things which confirm our beliefs. We have this confirmation bias. So, of course, anything that doesn't really fit with our beliefs, we will ignore, or we will reinterpret in a rather inexcusable way in order to preserve our beliefs. 

So, of course, this thinking process – that we tend to identify with so strongly, that really is our life experience, at least for most people – this thinking experience is never a really accurate reflection of what is actually going on.

And so, let's come back to Krishnamurti's quote here: I can see the totality of something only when thought does not interfere.

This is a beautiful observation. As I've indicated, our thinking process is always partial. It's always trying to prove something subtly, confirm those beliefs, to reinforce my identity, which depends on my core beliefs. So the thinking is only ever seeing part of the whole, that which fits with a narrative, that which can be used to emphasise and reinforce my beliefs, and hence my sense of self, my identity, my ego.

And so Krishnamurti is right to use this word interfere. Only when thought does not interfere, can we see the totality of something. And it's perhaps challenging if so far we have lived only in thoughts. First, we have to begin to experience other ways of seeing things. Can you look at a rosebud without a thought coming into your mind? When we look at something in this way, we see it in a different way. Firstly, there's a great intensity in the senses – not just seeing, but also smelling, touching, tasting, hearing. When there is no thought present, there's a great intensity in this sensory world.

And from such direct present moment, perception, we can feel the situation, but not in words, not in thoughts. Just as one can feel the beauty of that rosebud when one is not thinking about it, so it is with every moment in life. When the thoughts are not interfering, we have a feeling for the moment. We could call it intuition or a gut feel, but somehow we can sense, in this intuitive way, the totality of a situation.

My feeling is it's a more primitive response in evolutionary terms. Before the thinking mind evolved, how did we go through life? How do animals that are simpler than us humans exist? Of course, they are sensing the world around them, and they are acting, moving in response to that. And my feeling is most animals probably don't have thoughts in the way we humans do. And yet, watching wild animals, they always seem to be so in tune with their surroundings, with the environment, with other animals, with the plants. It's as if they are sensing everything in some intuitive way that we've almost lost touch with. 

And I think this is what Krishnamurti is getting at with this quote. If we can set aside thoughts, if we can meet a moment with a silent mind, then we can feel the totality of the moment. And in that way of sensing the world there's a great interconnectedness.

Things are not as separate as our thinking mind makes out. This is another reason why the thinking mind interferes with seeing the totality of things. The totality is always fully interconnected. We could say existence is one big energy field, without any boundaries, without any lines of separation. And it's the thinking mind that divides everything up, separates one thing from the next, and starts judging this to be bad, that to be good, this to be right, that to be wrong. And these judgements are also part of the process whereby the thinking mind starts to filter and distort reality.

So, as usual with Krishnamurti's observations, in this short quotation, he's really challenging us to see if there's another way of looking at the world, a way where thoughts do not interfere, and we can see the totality of something. If we want to explore this possibility, then encouraging some gaps in our stream of thoughts is the way to go: practising some form of meditation, and perhaps trying to bring more awareness directly to the senses. So let's see, let's see if we can rise to Krishnamurti's challenge, and see the totality of something without thoughts interfering.