Thursday, February 4, 2010

I have practised meditation

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Question: I have practised meditation most earnestly for twenty-five years, and I am unable to go beyond a certain point.  How am I to proceed further?
Krishnamurti: Before we enquire into how to proceed further,  must we not find out what meditation is?  When I ask,  ’How am I to meditate?’, am I not putting a wrong question?  Such a question implies that I want to get somewhere,  and I am willing to practice a method in order to get what I want.  It is like taking an examination in order to get a job.  Surely, the right question is to ask what meditation is,  because right meditation gives perfume, depth, significance to life, and without it life has very little meaning.  Do you understand, sirs?  To know what is right meditation is much more important than earning a livelihood,  getting married,  having money,  property,  because without understanding,  these things are all destroyed.  So the understanding of the heart is the beginning of meditation.
I want to know what is meditation.  I hope you will follow this, not just verbally, but in your own hearts, because without meditation you can know nothing of beauty, of love, or sorrow, of death and the whole expanse of life.  The mind that says, ‘I must learn a method in order to meditate’, is a silly mind, because it has not understood what meditation is.
So, what is meditation?  Is not that very enquiry the beginning of meditation?  Do you understand, sirs?  No?  I will go on and you will see.  Is meditation a process of concentration, forcing the mind to conform to a particular pattern?  That is what most of you do who ‘meditate’.  You try to force your mind to focus on a certain idea, but others ideas creep in; you brush them away, but they creep in again.  You go on playing this game for the nest twenty years, and if at last you can manage to concentrate your mind on a chosen idea, you think you have learned how to meditate.  But is that meditation?  Let us see what is involved in concentration.
When a child is concentrating on a toy, what is happening?  The attention of the child is being absorbed by the toy.  He is not giving his attention to the toy, but the toy is very interesting and it absorbs his attention.  That is exactly what is happening to you when you concentrate on the idea of the Master, on a picture, or when you repeat mantras, and all the rest of it.  The toy is absorbing you, and you are merely a plaything of the toy.  You thought you were the master of the toy, but the toy is the master.
Concentration also implies exclusiveness.  You exclude in order to arrive at a particular result, like a boy trying to pass an examination.  The boy wants a profitable result,  so he forces himself to concentrate, he makes tremendous effort to get what he wants, which is based on his desire, on his conditioning.  And does not this process of forcing the mind to concentrate, which involves suppression, exclusiveness, make the mind narrow?  A mind that is made narrow, one-pointed, has extraordinary possibilities in the sense that it may achieve a great deal;  but life is not one-pointed, it is an enormous thing to be comprehended, to be loved.  It is not petty.  Sirs, this in not rhetoric, this is not mere verbiage.  When one feels something real, the expression of it may sound rhetorical, but it is not.
So, to concentrate is not to meditate, even though that is what most of you do, calling it meditation.  And if concentration is not meditation, then what is?  Surely, meditation is to understand every thought that comes into being, and not to dwell upon one particular thought; it is to invite all thoughts so that you understand the whole process of thinking.  But what do you do now?  You try to think of just one good thought, one good image, you repeat one good sentence which you have learnt from the Gita, the Bible, or what you will;  therefore your mind becomes very narrow, limited, petty.  Whereas, to be aware of every thought as it arises, and to understand the whole process of thinking, does not demand concentration.  On the contrary.  To understand the total process of thinking, the mind must be astonishingly alert, and then you will see that what you call thinking is based on a mind that is conditioned.  So your enquiry is not how to control thought , but how to free the mind from conditioning.  The effort to control thought is part of the process of concentration in which the concentrator tries to make his mind silent, peaceful, is it not?  ’To have peace of mind’ – that is a phrase which all of us use.
Now, what is peace of mind?  How can the mind be quiet, have peace?  Surely, not through discipline.  The mind cannot be  made still.  A mind that is made still is a dead mind.  To discover what it is to be still, one must enquire into the whole content of the mind – which means, really, finding out why th mind is seeking.  Is the motive of search the desire for comfort, for permanency, for reward?  If so, then such a mind may be still, but it will not find peace, because its stillness is forced, it is based on compulsion, fear, and such a mind is not a peaceful mind.  We are still enquiring into the whole process of meditation.
People who ‘meditate’ and have visions of Christ, Krishna, Buddha, the Virgin, or whoever it be, think they are advancing, making marvelous progress, but after all, the vision is the projection of their own background.  What they want to see, they see, and that is obviously not meditation.  On the contrary, meditation is to free the mind from all conditioning, and this is not a process that comes into being at a particular moment of the day when you are sitting cross-legged in a room by yourself.  It must go on when you are walking, when you are frightened, when you are getting into the bus; it means watching the manner of your speech when you are talking to your wife, to your boss, to your servant.  All that is meditation.
So meditation is the understanding of the meditator.  Without understanding the one who meditates, which is yourself, enquiry into how to meditate has very little value.  The beginning of meditation is self-knowledge, and self-knowledge cannot be gathered from a book, nor is it to be had by listening to some professor of psychology, or to someone who interprets the Gita, or any of that rubbish.  All interpreters are traitors because they are not original experiences, they are merely second-hand repeaters of something which they believe someone else has experienced and which they think is true.  So beware of interpreters.
The mind which understand itself is a meditative mind.  Self-knowledge is the beginning of meditation, and as you proceed deeply into it you will find that the mind becomes astonishingly quiet, unforced, completely still,  without motion – which means there is no experiencer demanding experience.  When there is only that state of stillness without any movement of the mind, then you will find that in that state something else takes place.  But you cannot possibly find out intellectually what that state is;  you cannot come to it through the description of another, including myself.  All that you can do is to free the mind from its conditioning, from the traditions, the greed, and all the petty things with which it is now burdened.  Then you will see that, without your seeking it, the mind is astonishingly quiet; and for such a mind, that which is immeasurable comes into being.  You cannot go to the immeasurable, you cannot search it out, you cannot delve into the depths of it. You can delve only into the recesses of your own heart and mind.  You cannot invite Truth, it must come to you;  therefore don’t seek it.  Understand your own life and then Truth will come darkly, without any invitation; and then you will discover that there is immense beauty, a sensitivity to both the ugly and the beautiful.
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~ from a talk in New Deli, October 31st, 1956
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Carried by the surprise Of its own unfolding

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I would like to live
Like a river flows,
Carried by the surprise
Of its own unfolding.
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~ John O'Donohue
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Wednesday, February 3, 2010

Jerusalem








A hand in my soul can reach out and touch Jerusalem
as my other hand tastes the beauty of the Rhine.

And my bare foot can stand upon the holy ashes of rain – each drop a
fallen Phoenix – that sang out from the fire of union
with clay.

The hills, the valleys, the beasts, the vineyards, the sacred meadows
on our earth and body – they shall pass and ascend as all form does,
tiring of the space within a cage;

for all crowds the soul but the infinite. Ascenders to God we are.

Look though how we enrich this planet with our melting organic
shadows, wondrous shadows are all but He.

What a womb God has – what wild love He must have made to
Himself for days and days without stopping

to have given birth to all you can imagine, and to all you cannot
conceive.

All language has taken an oath to fail to describe Him;
any attempt to do so is the height of arrogance and will
always declare some kind of war:
the inner ones that undermine our strength, and the outer conflicts
that maim red.

I cried out one night in the madness of separation from love,
in the madness of doing, of trying to add to the Perfect;
for Perfect is All.

The awakened heart is like a luminous sphere – just giving without
thought to any who may come close or gaze at it.
The soul becomes blessedly lost to all
but its own holy
being.

When we cannot be who we are our divine senses become mute,
mute and sick from the insanity of judging
what He made Immaculate.

Who must God have made love to in order to have given birth to
all this sound,
to this sacred spectrum of color, scents, and music from the
wind’s body and existence’s plea for mercy – that
plea for the real mercy, unbearable joy?

Once we had four legs and tails so useful to balance our raid into
heaven, and I found them again.
I am a swimming galaxy tonight. Angels prowl around me
hoping I will toss them a fresh piece of light -
here dears, here, my sack is full.

The universe rents space from me, and oceans are drawn
from my will. How can that be?

For I can touch Jerusalem while my other hand tastes
the beauty of the
Rhine.

Yes, I can kiss Jerusalem while my mouth
tastes the wonders of
the Rhine.





~ Meister Eckhart





A man traveling across a field encountered a tiger


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Buddha told a parable in a sutra:
 
A man traveling across a field encountered a tiger.
He fled, the tiger after him. 
Coming to a precipice, he caught hold of the root of a wild vine
 and swung himself down over the edge. The tiger sniffed at him from above. 
 Trembling, the man looked down to where, far below, 
 another tiger was waiting to eat him. 
 Only the vine sustained him.

Two mice, one white and one black, 
 little by little started to gnaw away the vine.
 The man saw a luscious strawberry near him.
 
 Grasping the vine with one hand, he plucked the strawberry
 with the other. How sweet it tasted!
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from  Zen Flesh Zen Bones
 compiled Paul Reps and Nyogen Senzaki
 
 
 
 
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surrender






If the goal is surrender,
or freefall,
remove the safety net.


Security is prison
if freedom
lives outside.


There is only unity
Everything else is chaotic healing of 
thinking we are separate.




~ Beatrice Arroe




as I sit here





As I sit here
in my little boat
tied to the shore
of the passing river
in a time of ruin,

I think of you,
old ancestor,
and wish you well.



~ Wendell Berry


time of judging





The time of judging
Who is drunk or sober,
Who is right and who is wrong
Who is closer to god, and who is farther away
All that is over

This caravan is led instead by a great delight,
The simple joy that sits with us now

That is the grace



~ Hafiz

Here where the dark-sourced stream brims up


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Here where the dark-sourced stream brims up,
Reflecting daylight, making sound
In its stepped fall from cup to cup
Of tumbled rocks, singing its round
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From cloud to sea to cloud, I climb
The deer road through the leafless trees
Under a wind that batters limb
On limb, still roaring as it has
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Two nights and days, cold in slow spring.
But ancient song in a wild throat
Recalls itself and starts to sing
In storm-cleared light; and the bloodroot,
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Twinleaf, and rue anemone
Among bare shadows rise, keep faith
With what they have been and will be
Again: frail stem and leaf, mere breath
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Of white and starry bloom, each form
Recalling itself to its place
And time.  Give thands, for no windstorm
Or human wrong has altered this,
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The forfiet Garden that recalls
Itself here, where both we and it
Belong; no act or thought rebels
In this brief  Sabbath now, time fit
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To be eternal. Such a bliss
Of bloom’s no ornament, but root
And light, a saving loveliness,
Starred firmament here underfoot.
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~ Wendell Berry
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Friday, November 6, 2009

I liked her from the first




I liked her from the first. She was of most pleasing appearance.
 She was very mild. Her eyes were the mildest I had ever seen.
 In this she was quite unlike the rest of the girls and women of the Folk,
 who were born viragos. She never made harsh, angry cries,
 and it seemed to be her nature to flee away from trouble
 rather than to remain and fight.
...
The mildness I have mentioned seemed to emanate from her whole being.
 Her bodily as well as facial appearance was the cause of this.
 Her eyes were larger than most of her kind, and they were not so deep-set, 
while the lashes were longer and more regular. Nor was her nose so thick
 and squat. It had quite a bridge, and the nostrils opened downward.
Her incisors were not large, nor was her upper lip long and down-hanging,
 nor her lower lip protruding. She was not very hairy, except on the outsides
 of arms and legs and across the shoulders; and while she was thin-hipped,
 her calves were not twisted and gnarly.
...
I have often wondered, looking back upon her from the twentieth century
 through the medium of my dreams, and it has always occurred to me
 that possibly she may have been related to the Fire People. 
Her father, or mother, might well have come from that higher stock.
 
 
 
 
~ Jack London
 from Before Adam



 
 


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Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Interior Portrait



You don't survive in me
because of memories;
nor are you mine because
of a lovely longing's strength.

What does make you present
is the ardent detour
that a slow tenderness
traces in my blood.

I do not need
to see you appear;
being born sufficed for me
to lose you a little less.





~ Rainer Maria Rilke

 

Losing too is still ours



Losing too is still ours; and even forgetting
still has a shape in the kingdom of transformation.


When something's let go of, it circles; and though we are
rarely the center

of the circle, it draws around us its unbroken, marvelous
curve.



~ Rainer Maria Rilke
(For Hans Carossa)

Exposed on the cliffs of the heart



Exposed on the cliffs of the heart. Look, how tiny down there,
look: the last village of words and, higher,
(but how tiny) still one last
farmhouse of feeling. Can you see it?
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Exposed on the cliffs of the heart. Stoneground
under your hands. Even here, though,
something can bloom; on a silent cliff-edge
an unknowing plant blooms, singing, into the air.
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But the one who knows? Ah, he began to know
and is quiet now, exposed on the cliffs of the heart.
While, with their full awareness,
many sure-footed mountain animals pass
or linger. And the great sheltered birds flies, slowly
circling, around the peak's pure denial. - But
without a shelter, here on the cliffs of the heart... 
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~ Rainer Maria Rilke 


the lovers




See how in their veins all becomes spirit:
into each other they mature and grow.

Like axles, their forms tremblingly orbit,
round which it whirls, bewitching and aglow.

Thirsters, and they receive drink,
watchers, and see:they receive sight.

Let them into one another sink
so as to endure each other outright.






~ Rainer Maria Rilke


Monday, November 2, 2009




But as all severall soules containe
Mixtures of things, they know not what,
Love, these mixt soules, doth mixe again,
And makes both one, each this and that.
 
~ John Donne from The Extasie
    painting by Oliver Hunter






  

Sunday, November 1, 2009

though love be a day




 ...



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(though love be a day
and life be nothing,
it shall not stop kissing)

~ e.e.cummings

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