Loneliness

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Her son had recently died, and she said she did not know what to do now.  She had so much time on her hands, she was so bored and weary and sorrowful, that she was ready to die.  She had brought him up with loving care and intelligence, and he had gone to one of the best schools and to colleges.  She had not spoiled him, though he had had everything that was necessary.  She had put her faith and hope in him, and had given him all her love; for there was no one else to share it with, she and her husband having separated long ago.  Her son had died through some wrong diagnosis and operation - though, she added smilingly, the doctors said that the operation was 'successful'.  Now, she was left alone, and life seemed so vain and pointless.  She had wept when he died, until there were no more tears, but only a dull and weary emptiness.  She had had such plans for both of them, but now, she was utterly lost.
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The breeze was blowing from the sea, cool and fresh, and under the tree it was quiet.  The colours on the mountains were vivid, and the blue jays were very talkative.  A cow wandered by, followed by her calf, and a squirrel dashed up a tree, wildly chattering.  It sat on a branch and began to scold, and the scolding went on for a long time, its tail bobbing up and down.  It had such sparkling bright eyes and sharp claws.  A lizard came out to warm itself, and caught a fly.  The tree tops were gently swaying, and a dead tree against the sky was straight and splendid.  It was being bleached by the sun.  There was another dead tree beside it, dark and curving, more recent in its decay.  A few clouds rested on the distant mountains.
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What a strange thing is loneliness, and how frightening it is!  We never allow ourselves to get too close to it; and if by chance we do, we quickly run away from it.  We will do anything to escape from loneliness, to cover it up.  Our conscious and unconscious preoccupation seems to be to avoid it or to overcome it.  Avoiding and overcoming loneliness are equally futile; though suppressed or neglected, the pain, the problem, is still there.  You may lose yourself in a crowd, and yet be utterly lonely; you may be intensely active, but loneliness silently creeps upon you; put the book down, and it is there.  Amusements and drinks cannot drown loneliness; you may temporarily evade it, but when the laughter and the effects of alcohol are over, the fear of loneliness returns.  You  may be ambitious and successful, you may have vast power over others, you may be rich in knowledge, you may worship and forget yourself in the rigmarole of rituals; but do what you will, the ache of loneliness continues.  You may exist only for your son, for the Master, for the expression of your talent; but like the darkness, loneliness covers you.  You may love or hate, escape from it according to your temperament and psychological demands; but loneliness is there, waiting and watching, withdrawing only to approach again.
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Loneliness is the awareness of complete isolation; and are not our activities self-enclosing?  Though our thoughts and emotions are expansive, are they not exclusive and dividing?  Are we not seeking dominance in our relationships, in our rights and possessions, thereby creating resistance?  Do we not regard work as 'yours' and 'mine'?  Are we not identified with the collective, with the country, or with the few?  Is not our whole tendency to isolate ourselves, to divide and separate?  The very activity of the self, at whatever level, is the way of isolation; and loneliness is the consciousness of the self without activity.  Activity, whether physical or psychological, becomes a means of self-expansion; and when there is no activity of any kind, there is an awareness of the emptiness of the self.  It is this emptiness that we seek to fill, and in filling it we spend our life, whether at a noble or ignoble level.  There may seem to be no sociological harm in filling this emptiness at a noble level; but illusion breeds untold misery and destruction, which may not be immediate.  The craving to fill this emptiness - to run away from it, which is the same thing - cannot be sublimated or suppressed; for who is the entity that is to suppress or sublimate?  Is not that very entity another form of craving?  The objects of craving may vary, but is not all craving similar?  You may change the object of your craving from drink to ideation; but without understanding the process of craving, illusion is inevitable.
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There is no entity separate from craving; there is only craving, there is no one who craves.  Craving takes on different masks at different times, depending on its interests.  The memory of these varying interests meets the new, which brings about conflict, and so the chooser is born, establishing himself as an entity separate and distinct from craving.  But the entity is not different from its qualities.  The entity who tries to fill or run away from emptiness, incompleteness, loneliness, is not different from that which he is avoiding; he is it.  He cannot run away from himself; all that he can do is to understand himself.  He is his loneliness, his emptiness; and as long as he regards it as something separate from himself, he will be in illusion and endless conflict.  When he directly experiences that he is his own loneliness, then only can there be freedom from fear.  Fear exists only in relationship to an idea, and idea is the response of memory as thought.  Thought is the result of experience; and though it can ponder over emptiness, have sensations with regard to it, it cannot know emptiness directly.  The word loneliness, with its memories of pain and fear, prevents the experiencing of it afresh.  The word is memory, and when the word is no longer significant, then the relationship between the experiencer and the experienced is wholly different; then that relationship is direct and not through a word, through memory; then the experiencer is the experience, which alone brings freedom from fear.
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Love and emptiness cannot abide together; when there is the feeling of loneliness, love is not.  You may hide emptiness under the word love, but when the object of your love is no longer there or does not respond, then you are aware of emptiness, you are frustrated.  We use the word love as a means of escaping from ourselves, from our own insufficiency.  We cling to the one we love, we are jealous, we miss him when he is not there and are utterly lost when he dies;  and then we seek comfort in some other form, in some belief, in some substitute.  Is all this love?  Love is not an idea, the result of association; love is not something to be used as an escape from our own wretchedness,  and when we do so use it, we make problems which have no solutions.  Love is not an abstraction, but it's reality can be experienced only when idea, mind is no longer the supreme factor.
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~ J. Krishnamurti - from 'Commentaries on Living First Series'

When the ocean finally comes to you

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When the ocean finally comes to you as a lover,
Marry, at once, quickly,
For God's sake!
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Don't postpone it!
Existence has no better gift.
No amount of searching
Will find this.
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A perfect falcon, for no reason,
has landed on your shoulder,
And become yours.
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~ Rumi
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You stay home too

I will wait here in the fields

to see how well the rain

brings on the grass.

In the labor of the fields

longer than a man's life

I am at home. Don't come with me.

You stay home too.

I will be standing in the woods

where the old trees

move only with the wind

and then with gravity.

In the stillness of the trees

I am at home. Don't come with me.

You stay home too.

~ Wendell Berry

to go in the dark

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.

To know the dark, go dark.  Go without sight,

and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,

and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

~ Wendell Berry

other creatures

All other creatures look into the Open
with their whole eyes. But our eyes,
turned inward, are set all around it like snares,
trapping its way out to freedom.

We know what’s out there only from the animal’s
Face; for we take even the youngest child,
Turn him around and force him to look
At the past as formation, not that openness
so deep within an animal’s face.

Free from death,
we only see it; the free animal
always has its destruction behind
and god ahead, and when it moves,
it moves toward eternity like running springs.

Not for a single day, no, never have we had
That pure space ahead of us, in which flowers
endlessly open.

It is always World
and never Nowhere without No:
that pure, unguarded space we breathe,
always know, and never crave.

As a child,
one may lose himself in silence and be
shaken out of it. Or one dies and is it.

Once near death, one can’t see death anymore
And stares out, maybe with the wide eyes of animals.

If the other weren’t there blocking the view,
Lovers come close to it and are amazed…
It opens up behind the other, almost
an oversight…but no one gets past
the other, and the world returns again.

Always facing creation, all we see
is the reflection of the free and open
that we’ve darkened, or some mute animal
raising its calm eyes and seeing through us,
and through us.

This is destiny: to be opposites,
always, and nothing else but opposites.

If this sure animal approaching us
from a different direction had our kind
of consciousness, he’d drag us around
in his wake. But to the animal, his being
is infinite, incomprehensible, and blind
to his condition, pure, like his outward gaze.
And where we see the future, he sees
all, himself in all, and whole forever.

And yet the weight and care of one great sadness
lies on this warm and watching creature.
Because what often overwhelms us
Also clings to him — the memory
that what we so strive for now may have been
nearer, truer, and its attachment to us
infinitely tender, once.

Here all is distance, there it was breath.
After that first home,
the second seems drafty and a hybrid.

Oh, blessed are the tiny creatures
who stay in the womb that bore them forever;
oh the joy of the gnat that can still leap within,
even on its wedding day; for the womb is all!

And look at the half-certainty of the bird
almost aware of both from birth,
like one of the Etruscan souls rising
from the dead man enclosed inside the space
for which his reclining figure forms a lid.

And how confused is anything that comes
from a womb and has to fly. As if afraid
of itself, it darts through the air
like a crack through a cup, the way a wing
of a bat crazes the porcelain of night.

And we: spectators, always, everywhere,
Looking at everything and never from!
It floods us. We arrange it. It decays.
We arrange it again, and we decay.

Who’s turned us around like this,
so that whatever we do, we always have
the look of someone going away? Just as a man
on the last hill showing him his whole valley
one last time, turns, and stops, and lingers –
so we live, and are forever leaving.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

the woman I love lives inside of you

Because the Woman I love lives

Inside of you,

I lean as close to your body with my words

As I can -

And I think of you all the time, dear pilgrim.

Because the One I love goes with you

Wherever you go,

Hafiz will always be near.

If you sat before me, wayfarer,

With your aura bright from your many

Charms,

My lips could resist rushing to you and needing

to befriend your blushed cheek,

But my eyes can no longer hide

The wondrous fact of who

You Really are.

The Beautiful One whom I adore

Has pitched His royal tent inside of you,

So I will always lean my heart

As close to your soul

As I can.

~ Hafiz

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Two Bears

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Once,
After a hard day's forage
Two bears sat together in silence
On a beautiful vista
Watching the sun go down
And feeling deeply grateful
For life.
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Though, after a while
A thought -provoking conversation began
Which turned to the topic of
Fame.
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The one bear said,
"Did you hear about Rustam?
He has become famous
And travels from city to city
In a golden cage;
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He performs to hundreds of people
Who laugh and applaud
His carnival
Stunts."
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The other bear thought for
A few seconds
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Then started
Weeping.
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~ Hafiz

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Don't surrender your loneliness

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Don't surrender your loneliness

So quickly.

Let it cut more deep.

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Let it ferment and season you

As few human

Or even divine ingredients can.

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Something missing in my heart tonight

Has made my eyes so soft,

My voice

So tender,

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My need of God

Absolutely

Clear.

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~ Hafiz

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"There is nothing of value in here."

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I was

looking for that shop

where the shopkeeper would say,

"There is nothing of value in here."

I found it and did

not leave.

The richness of not wanting

wrote these

poems.

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~ Kibir

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self-centeredness?

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Question: Does not this process of constant self-awareness lead to self-centeredness?

Krishnamurti: It does, does it not?  The more you are concerned about yourself,
 watching, improving, thinking about yourself, the more self-centered you are,
 are you not?  That is an obvious act.  If I am concerned with changing myself, 
then I must observe, I must build a technique which will help me to break up
 that centre.  There is self-centeredness as long as I am consciously or unconsciously
 concerned with a result, with success, as long as I am gaining and putting aside
 – which is what most of us are doing.  The incentive is the goal I am pursuing; 
 because I want to gain that end, I watch myself.  I am unhappy, I am miserable,
 frustrated, and I feel there is a state in which I can be happy, fulfilled, complete, 
 so I become aware in order to gain that state.   I use awareness to get what I want, 
 so I am self-centered.  Through awareness, through self-analysis through reading,
 studying, I hope to dissolve the ‘me’, and then I shall be happy, enlightened, 
liberated, I shall be one of the elite – and that is what I want.   So, the more I am 
concerned with gaining an end, the greater is the self-centredness of thought.
  But thought is ever self-enclosing anyhow, is it not?

So – what?  To break down the self-centeredness, I must understand why the mind
 seeks an end,  a goal, a particular result.  Why does my mind go after a reward? 
  Why?  Can it function in any other way?  Is not the movement of the mind
 from memory to memory, from result to result?  I have acquired this, 
 I don’t like it, and I am going to get something else.  I don’t like this thought,
 but that thought will be better, nobler, more comforting. more satisfying. 
 As long as I am thinking,  I can think in no other terms;  for the mind moves
 from knowledge to knowledge, from memory to memory.  Is not thinking
 self-centered in its very nature?  I know there are exceptions, but we are not 
discussing the exceptions.  In our everyday life,  are we not consciously or
 unconsciously pursuing an end,  gaining and avoiding,  seeking to continue, 
  putting aside anything that is disturbing,  that is insecure, uncertain? 
 In seeking its own certainty, the mind creates self-centeredness; 
 and is not that self-centeredness the  ’me’, which then watches over and analyses itself?
   So, as long as we seek a result, self-centeredness must exist, whether in an individual,
 in a group, in a nation or a race.  But if we can understand why the mind seeks a result,
 a satisfying end,  why it wants to be certain – if we understand that, then 
there is a possibility of breaking sown the walls that enclose thought as the  ’me’. 
 But that requires an astonishing awareness of the total process, not only the conscious,
 but also of the unconscious levels, an awareness from moment to moment in which
 there is no gathering, no accumulation, no saying,  ’Yes, I have understood this,
 and I am going to use it for tomorrow’,  a spontaneity which is not of the mind. 
 Only then is there a possibility of going beyond 
the self-enclosing activities of thought.

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~ J. Krishnamurti

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come closer to me

Come closer to me,

Push closer to me and take the best that I possess,

Yield closer and closer and give me the best that you possess.






~Walt Whitman

in His orchestra

We all
Sit in His orchestra,
Some play their
Fiddles,

Some wield their
Clubs.

Tonight is worthy of music.

Let's get loose
With
Compassion,
Let's drown in the delicious
Ambience of
Love.




~ Hafiz
art by Shahid Zuberi

How am I to overcome loneliness?

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Questioner: How am I to overcome loneliness?

Krishnamurti: Can you overcome loneliness?  Whatever you conquer has to be conquered again and again, does it not?  What you understand comes to an end, but that which you conquer can never come to an end.  The battling process only feeds and strengthens that which you fight.

Now, what is this loneliness of which most of us are aware?  We know it, and we run away from it, do we not?  We take flight from it into every form of activity.  We are empty, lonely, and we are afraid of it, so we try to cover it up by some means or other – meditation, the search for God, social activity, the radio, drink, or what you will – we would do anything else rather than face it, be with it, understand it.  Running away is the same, whether we do it through the idea of God or drink.  As long as one is escaping from loneliness, there is no essential difference between the worship of God and addiction to alcohol.  Socially, there may be a difference; but psychologically, the man who runs away from himself, from his own emptiness, whose escape is his search for God, is on the same level as the drunkard.

What is important, then, is not to overcome loneliness, but to understand it, and we cannot understand it if we do not face it, if we do not look at it directly, if we are continually running away from it.  And our whole life is a process of running away from loneliness, is it not?  In relationship we use others to cover up loneliness; our pursuit of knowledge, our gathering of experience, everything we do, is a distraction, an escape from that emptiness.  So these distractions and escapes must obviously come to an end.  If we are to understand something, we must give our full attention to it.  And how can we give full attention to loneliness if we are afraid of it, if we are running away from it through some distractions?  So when we really want to understand loneliness, when our intention is to go fully, completely into it, because we see that there can be no creativeness as long as we do not understand that inward insufficiency which is the fundamental cause of fear – when we come to that point, then every form of distraction ends, does it not?  Many people laugh at loneliness and say, ‘Oh, that is only for the bourgeois; for God’s sake, be occupied with something and forget it’.  But emptiness cannot be forgotten, it cannot be put aside.

So if one would really understand this fundamental thing which we call loneliness, all escape must cease; but escape does not cease through worry, through seeking a result, or through any action of desire.  One must see that without understanding loneliness every form of action is a distraction, an escape, a process of self-isolation, which only creates more conflict, more misery.  To see that fact is essential, for tonly then can one face loneliness.

Then, if we go still more deeply into it, the problem arises of whether what we call loneliness is an actuality, or merely a word.  Is loneliness an actuality, or merely a word which covers something that may mot be what we think it is?  Is not loneliness a thought, the result of thinking?  That is, thinking is verbalization based on memory; don’t we, with that verbalization, with that thought, with that memory, look at the state which we call lonely?  So the very giving of a name to that state may be the cause of the fear which prevents us from looking at it more closely;  and if we do not give it a name, which is fabricated by the mind, then is that state lonely?

Surely, there is a difference between loneliness and being alone.  Loneliness is the ultimate in the process of self-isolation.  The more you are conscious of yourself, the more isolated you are, and self-consciousness is the process of isolation.  But aloneness is not isolation.  There is aloneness only when loneliness has come to an end.  Aloneness is a state in which all influence has completely ceased,  both the influence from outside, and the inner influence of memory; and only when the mind is in that state of aloneness can it know the incorruptible.  But to come to that, we must understand loneliness, this process of isolation, which is the self and its activity.  So the understanding of the self is the beginning of the cessation of isolation, and there fore of loneliness.

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~ Krishnamurti from a talk in Seattle, in 1950

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Live from your own center

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

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

Follow your bliss. . . .
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~ Joseph Campbell 
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How can I experience God

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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.

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~ J. Krishnamurti

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