I’m not sure if this was for keeping ice, food, naughty children, or what. I suspect it was an ‘Ice House’
From the television last night. Recorded in 2005.
Amazing how serious and joyful he is.
When I see the Dalai Lama I am always reminded of Hunter S Thompson. They are brothers with very different paths!
When I see the Dalai Lama I am always reminded of Hunter S Thompson. They are brothers with very different paths!
You can feel how thought and conclusions and opinions and judgements form your facial expression
You can feel how tension and protection affect your posture
You can feel how the brain gets patterned and grooved
You can feel it happening in yourself
You can see it happening in others
You can feel all this undo
And end before it begins
Book of Life, 4 Feb:
Love admits no division. Either you love, or do not love.
Like a shrimp in a suitcase laying on a window ledge,
like a pair of tartan slippers and they’re underneath a hedge,
like a scout master at daybreak putting peanuts in his glove,
like a specially formed ice arch for climbing over doves,
like a sardine in a hair net and he’s staring at a priest.These things you’ll find constantly irritate our minds.
Like a sugar unicycle that’s being ridden by a fork,
like a batten berg owned by Jesus that can miraculously talk,
like a lemon pip with sideboards fighting a bearded crab,
or Bono in a boob tube on the choir master’s lap,
like a elaborate heating system apparently in Kent.These things you’ll find constantly irritate our minds.
Like a badger with an afro throwing sparklers at the Pope,
like a family of foxes and they’re glowering at some soap,
like a lump of Nazi nougat walking down an avenue,
like a Tudor vacuum cleaner saying “How do you do?”
like a kestrel having sex above a television set.These things you’ll find constantly irritate our minds.
Moles. Kind of cute. Kind of a nuisance to gardeners. Someone told me they have worm larders down there. They don’t just eat worms, they bite their heads off and keep them for later. The worms stay alive and fresh but can’t go anywhere because they have no mouth or brain. Do worms have brains? I don’t know, but moles do.
I began the morning not with asana but with yoga nidra and then awareness meditation. The true value of gentleness. Gentleness – not you being gentle so much as gentleness itself. Why be hard on yourself or on others? Hardness restricts, gentleness allows.
Book of Life, 3 Feb:
If I am stupid and I say I must become intelligent, the effort to become intelligent is only a greater form of stupidity; because what is important is to understand stupidity. However much I may try to become intelligent, my stupidity will remain. I may acquire the superficial polish of learning, I may be able to quote books, repeat passages from great authors, but basically I shall still be stupid. But if I see and understand stupidity as it expresses itself in my daily life … then that very awareness brings about a breaking up of stupidity.
As someone who relishes solitude, I enjoyed this article today. An extract:
I asked a few friends when they had last spent 24 hours without human company. “That’s a tough one,” one 40-year-old woman said. “A whole day, you mean?” No, a whole day, evening and night. “I simply couldn’t!” She has a young son, which would make things difficult right now, but what about before he came along? “Twenty-four hours, without seeing anyone at all? It's never happened to me.” Elsewhere, a few people suggested that, they guessed, it might possibly, perhaps have occurred a decade or two ago, when they were living on their own, or sharing with friends who had pushed off for the weekend. They were definitely ill, or they’d have invited someone over, or gone a-visiting.
Are people uncomfortable with solitude because they so rarely experience it, or do they so rarely experience it because they are uncomfortable with it? What is clear is that most of us persist in equating aloneness with loneliness, and company with companionship, despite a lifetime of evidence to the contrary. “We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers,” is how Henry David Thoreau put it after two years as the sole inhabitant of a house he had built in the Massachusetts woods. You’re never more alone than when you're in a crowd. A cliche, perhaps, but most of us recognise the truth in it.
Before moving to the back of beyond, I spent almost 40 years surrounded by people, first as one of five children, then in shared houses, and finally in a succession of London flats. I had girlfriends, a daughter, flatmates, people to the left of me, people to the right of me, people in front, behind and, in the more pleasant moments, under or on top of me. I sometimes feel unloved now, but I sometimes felt unloved then. Doesn’t everyone?
Delightful twirly curly blossoms in the grove today
Book of Life, 2 Feb:
You are struggling to become something, and that something is part of yourself. The ideal is your own projection. See how the mind has played a trick upon itself.
For sure!
Starting today, I’m taking one photograph every day for one year. I tried it last lear, and took 238 photos. Expect many of the same views, but an all new year! Expect lots of Brockwood photos, but a new, 2010 Brockwood!
If there is becoming, there is pain. It’s a law. But I pretend it isn’t. The subtle levels of changing, of striving, of becoming. I pretend I don’t know what I am becoming, so pretend that I am not doing that. And yet this law seems in the face of the world, society, which is based on becoming something you are not now, or ridding yourself of the things you don’t want in your life. Get richer, get fitter, get more popular, be a better person – it’s normal, right? It seems natural. Society is based on progress, achievement, changing. And yet it is clear that if there is this desire, urge, striving, goal there is inherent pain. No wonder no one seems very happy. And those involved in teaching ‘change’ seem very stern. It’s not that we shouldn’t look after ourselves. It’s that the pushing causes pain (which causes more pushing). Strive and strife are one.
Krishnamurti:
Life as we know it, our daily life, is a process of becoming. I am poor and I act with an end in view, which is to become rich. I am ugly and I want to become beautiful. Therefore my life is a process of becoming something. The will to be is the will to become, at different levels of consciousness, in different states, in which there is challenge, response, naming and recording. Now, this becoming is strife, this becoming is pain, it is not? It is a constant struggle: I am this, and I want to become that.
Sample at the end:
Boy: How do you like that?
Man: Why, it’s preposterous!
Boy: Thank you very much!
And so January draws to an end. A month of re-establishing the relationship with my body in daily asana practice, a month in which I realised a daily practice needn’t be feared, a month in which I turned 39, a month in which the relationships in my life began to find their right place again, a month in which I taught my first yoga class, a month in which I felt the possibility of instructing on a regular basis, a month of deep cold and snow to start with, clear bright cool days to end. On we go…
From Jan 30:
You and the world are not different entities with separate problems; you and the world are one. Your problem is the world’s problem. … We are one; we are one humanity, though the artificial frontiers of economics and politics and prejudice divide us. If you kill another, you are destroying yourself.
…
We have an intellectual knowledge of this unity but we keep knowledge and feeling in different compartments and hence we never experience the extraordinary unity of man.
From Jan 31:
Self-knowledge is not according to any formula. You may go to a psychologist or a psychoanalyst to find out about yourself, but that is not self-knowledge. Self-knowledge, comes into being when we are aware of ourselves in relationship, which shows what we are from moment to moment. Relationship is a mirror in which to see ourselves as we actually are.
So in looking to stray from the line
we decided instead
we should pull out the thread
that was stitching us into this tapestry vile.
And why wouldn’t you try?
Perfect weather to fly.
Living the dream
I don’t know about that
How about: Living in a dream
And within that, daydreams
And night dreams
Dreams within a dream
And if it is a dream
How about: Waking up?
…
At the end of film Waking Life:
A: Yeah, but I mean like how did you, how did you finally get out of the dream? See, that’s my problem. I’m like trapped. I keep thinking that I’m waking up, but I’m still in a dream. It seems like it’s going on forever. I can’t get out of it, and I want to wake up for real. How do you really wake up?
B: I don’t know, I don’t know. I’m not very good at that anymore. But, um, if that’s what you’re thinking, I mean you probably should. I mean, you know, if you can wake up, you should, because, you know, someday, you know, you won’t be able to. So just, um… But it’s easy. You know. Just, just wake up.
…
Krishnamurti, Book of life, 29 Jan:
…the state of creative emptiness is not a thing to be cultivated – it is there, it comes darkly, without any invitation, and only in that state is there a possibility of renewal, newness, revolution.
There are many issues you could have with the iPad. No multitasking, still no Flash. No camera, no GPS. They all fall away the minute you use it. I cannot emphasise enough this point: “Hold your judgment until you’ve spent five minutes with it”. No YouTube film, no promotional video, no keynote address, no list of features can even hint at the extraordinary feeling you get from actually using and interacting with one of these magical objects. You know how everyone who has ever done Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? always says, “It’s not the same when you’re actually here. So different from when you’re sitting at home watching.”? You know how often you’ve heard that? Well, you’ll hear the same from anyone who’s handled an iPad. The moment you experience it in your hands you know this is class.
And that’s it! Four weeks of early(ish) mornings, daily asana, continuing when in the past I have given it a miss. Previously, I could find any excuse not to do yoga. Any excuse will do. But for four weeks I have listened to the excuses, the reluctance and resistance and done it anyway. That’s not to say one should force oneself to do it if there is a real feeling that it’s not the right thing. But yoga can be incredibly gentle and done no matter how fragile or tired one is feeling. If I’d made an excuse and not been there on the mat, it could take days and sometimes weeks to get back to it, knowing I was missing something but not sure what. The feeling of yoga can’t really be remembered, but when it’s back, you know it. It’s like your life is happening again. The beauty of it is ‘doing it’ on the bad as well as the good days. I heard of ‘fair-weather meditators’, who only sit when they are feeling pretty good, and never have a hard sit. The real learning takes place being in touch, whatever one is feeling that day, that moment.
So, to continue a daily practice without the model of a 28-day plan… here we go! And why not?
So, for the last time, a quote from Hittleman’s Thoughts for the Day:
You will discover that your body will never allow you to go for more than a few days without performing the exercises, because it will know intuitively that this is what is required for you to feel you are functioning at your best.
The book is available here (US) or here (UK)
Krishnamurti, from Book of Life, January 28:
To observe and see the fact, the actual, the what is. If I approach it with an idea, with an opinion – such as “I must not,” or “I must,” which are the responses of memory, then the movement of what is is hindered, is blocked; and therefore, there is no learning.
This was a vision, fresh and clear as a mountain stream, the mind revealing itself to itself.
In my vision, I was on the veranda of a vast estate, a palazzo of some fantastic proportion.
There seemed to emanate from it a light from within, this gleaming, radiant marble.
I’d known this place. I had in fact been born and raised there.
This was my first return. A reunion with the deepest well-springs of my being.
Wandering about, I noticed happily that the house had been immaculately maintained.
There’d been added a number of additional rooms, but in a way that blended so seamlessly with the original construction, one would never detect any difference.
Returning to the house’s grand foyer, there came a knock at the door.
My son was standing there. He was happy and carefree, clearly living a life of deep harmony and joy.
We embraced, a warm and loving embrace, nothing withheld. We were, in this moment, one.
My vision ended and I awoke with a tremendous feeling of optimism and confidence in you and your future.
That was my vision of you.
I’m so glad to have had this opportunity to share it with you.
I wish you nothing but the very best in all things.
(from Twin Peaks, the scene where Major Briggs explains his dream to his son, Bobby)
Kind of like a birthday present, the 27th day of the course is relaxation, breath and candle gazing. I really like the candle gazing; I hadn’t done it for a long long time. Darken the room, look at the flame of a candle without moving the eyes or head for about two minutes. Extinguish the flame and close your eyes. You will see the image of the flame. Keep looking upon this image. It will fade every now and then but you will find it again. The colours are amazing, and the image will subtly change over the course of the watching. It seems like a universe away and it seems closer than anything you have ever seen. It’s to aid concentration, but I prefer it as an aid to let go of any concentrating and just see.
Hittleman:
The individual is freed from the terribly confining limitations of what she has heretofore conceived of as me or I and the necessity of protecting the phantom known as the ego.
Krishnamurti:
When we are aware of ourselves, is not the whole movement of living a way of uncovering the me, the ego, the self? The self is a very complex process which can be uncovered only in relationship, in our daily activities, in the way we talk, the way we judge, calculate, the way we condemn others and ourselves. All that reveals the conditioned state of our own thinking, and is it not important to be aware of this whole process?
Ordinary don’t mean nothin’ no-how – look what’s ordinary now
It’s got a magic marker stain on its face and it needs a shower
Falling Awake 