Live from your own center

.
The divine manifestation is ubiquitous,
   Only our eyes are not open to it.

Awe is what moves us forward.
.
Live from your own center.
The divine lives within you.
The separateness apparent in the world is secondary.
.
Beyond the world of opposites is an unseen,
but experienced, unity and identity in us all.
.
Today the planet is the only proper “in group.”
.
Participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world.
We cannot cure the world of sorrows,
but we can choose to live in joy.
.
You must return with the bliss and integrate it.
    The return is seeing the radiance is everywhere.
.
The world is a match for us.
We are a match for the world.
.
The spirit is the bouquet of nature.
.
Sanctify the place you are in.

Follow your bliss. . . .
.
~ Joseph Campbell 
.

How can I experience God

.

Question: How can I experience God, which will give a meaning to my weary life?  Without that experience, what is the purpose of living?

Krishnamurti: Can I understand life directly, or must I experience something which will give a meaning to life?  Do you understand , sirs?  To appreciate beauty,  must I know what its purpose is?  Must love have a cause?  And if there is a cause to love,  is it love?  The questioner says he must have a certain experience that will give a meaning to life – which implies that for him life in itself is not important.  So in seeking God,  he is really escaping from life, escaping from sorrow,  from beauty,  from ugliness,  from anger,  pettiness,  jealousy and the desire for power,  from the extraordinary complexity of living.  All that is life, and as he does not understand it, he says, ‘I will find some greater thing which will give a meaning to life.’

Please listen to what I am saying,  but not just at the verbal,  intellectual level,  because then it will have very little meaning.  You can spin a lot of words about all this,  read all the sacred books in the land,  but it will be worthless because it is not related to your life,  to your daily existence.

So,  what is our living?  What is this thing that we call our existence?  Very simply,  not philosophically,  it is a series of experiences of pleasure and pain, and we want to avoid the pains while holding on to the pleasures.  The pleasure of power,  of being a big man in the big world,  the pleasure of dominating one’s little wife or husband,  the pain,  the frustration,  fear and anxiety which come with ambition, the ugliness of playing up to the man of importance, and so on – all that goes to make up our daily living.  That is what we call living is a series of memories within the field of the known,  and the known becomes a problem when the mind is not free of the known.  Functioning within the field of the known – the known being knowledge,  experience and the memory of that experience – the mind says, ‘I must know God.’  So,  according to its tradition,  according to its ideas,  its conditioning,  it projects an entity which it calls God,  but that entity is the result of the known;  it is still within the field of time.

So you can find out with clarity,  with truth,  with real experience whether there is God or not, only when the mind is totally free from the known.  Surely, that something which may be called God or Truth must be totally new, unrecognizable, and a mind that approaches it through knowledge, through experience, through ideas and accumulated virtues,  is trying to capture the unknown while living in the field of the  known,  which is an impossibility,  All that the mind can do is to enquire whether it is possible to free itself from the known.  To be free from the known is to be completely free from all the impressions of the past, from the weight of tradition.  The mind itself is the product of the known, it is put together by time as the ‘me’ and the ‘not-me’, which is the conflict of duality,  If the known totally ceases, consciously as well as unconsciously – and I say,  not theoretically,  that there is a possibility of its ceasing – then you will never ask if there is God, because such a mund is immeasurable in itself; like love, it is its own eternity.

.

~ J. Krishnamurti

.

quietude

.
Ask the world to reveal its quietude -
not the silence of machines when they are still,
but the true quiet by which birdsongs,
trees, bellworts, snails, clouds, storms
become what they are, and are nothing else.
.
~ Wendell Berry
.

What is death

.

Question: What is death,  and why is there such a fear of it?

Krishnamurti: I think it would be worthwhile to go into this problem, not merely verbally, but actually.  Why do we divide life and death?  Is living separate from death?  Or is death part of living?  It may be that we do not know what living is,  and that is why death seems such a terrible thing,  something to be shunned,  to be avoided,  to be explained away.

Is not living part of dying?  Am I living if I am constantly accumulating property,  money,  position,  as well as knowledge and virtue,  all of which I cherish and hold on to?  I may call that living, but is it living?  Is not that whole process merely a series of struggles,  contradictions,  miseries,  frustrations?  But we call it living,  and so we want to know what death is.

We know that death is the end for all of us;  the body,  the physical organism,  wears out and dies.  Seeing this,  the mind says ‘I have lived,  I have gathered,  I have suffered,  and what is to happen to me?  What lies for me beyond death?’   Not knowing what lies beyond, the mind is afraid of death,  so it begins to invent ideas,  theories – reincarnation, resurrection – or it goes back and lives in the past.  If it believes in reincarnation, it tries to prove that belief through hypnosis, and so on.

That is essentially what we are all doing.  Our life is overshadowed by this thing called death, and we want to know if there is any form of continuity.  Or else we are so sick of life that we want to die, and we are horrified at the thought that there might be a beyond.

Now, what is the answer to all this?  Why have we separated death from living,  and why does the mind cling to continuity?  Cannot the mind be aware of that which it calls death in the same way that it knows living?  Can it not be aware of the whole significance of dying?  We know what our life is – a process of gathering, enjoying, suffering, renouncing, searching, and constant anxiety.  That is our existence, and in that there is continuity.  I know that I am alive because I am aware of suffering, of enjoyment;  memory goes on, and my past experiences colour my future experiences.  There is a sense of continuity, the momentum of a series of events linked by memory.  I know this process,  and I call it living.  But do I know what death is?   Can I ever know it?  We are not asking what lies beyond, which is really not very important.  But can one know or experience the meaning of that which is called death while actually living?  While I am conscious, physically vigorous, while my mind is clear and capable of thinking without any sentimentality or emotionalism,  can I directly experience that thing which I call death?  I know what living is,  and can I,  in the same way with the same vigour,  the same potency,  know the meaning of death?  If I merely die at the last moment, through disease, or through some accident, I shall not know.

So the problem is not what lies beyond death, or how to avoid the fear of death.  You cannot avoid the fear of death so long as the mind accumulates for itself a series of events and experiences linked by memory, because the ending of all that is what we actually fear.

Surely, that which has continuity is never creative.  Only the mind which dies to everything from moment to moment really knows what it is to die.  This is not emotionalism;  it requires a great deal of insight,  thought,  enquiry.   We can know death, as well as life,  while living; while living we can enter the house of death, the unknown.  But for the mind, which is the result of the known, to enter the unknown, there must be a cessation of all that it has known, of all the things it has gathered – not only consciously, but much more profoundly, in the unconscious.  To wipe all that away is to die, and then we shall find there is no fear.

I am not offering this as a panacea for fear, but can we know and understand the full meaning of death? That is, can the mind be completely nothing, with no residue of the past?  Whether that is possible or not is something we can enquire into,  search out diligently,  vigorously,  work hard to find out.  But if the mind merely clings to what it calls living – which is suffering, this whole process of accumulation – and tries to avoid the other, then it knows neither life nor death.

So the problem is to free the mind from the known,  from all the things it has gathered,  acquired,  experienced,  so that it is made innocent and can therefore understand that which is death,  the unknowable.

.

~ J. Krishnamurti, from a talk in Brussels – 1956

.

I have practised meditation

.

.

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.

.

~ from a talk in New Deli, October 31st, 1956

.

Carried by the surprise Of its own unfolding

.

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

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

.

.

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!
.

 

 

from  Zen Flesh Zen Bones, 

 compiled Paul Reps and Nyogen Senzaki

 

 

 

 

.

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

.

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

.

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

.

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,

.

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

.

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,

.

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

.

To be eternal. Such a bliss

Of bloom’s no ornament, but root

And light, a saving loveliness,

Starred firmament here underfoot.

.

~ Wendell Berry

.

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

 

 

.

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)