From the Tao Te Ching:
It is not wise to dash about.
Shortening the breath causes much stress.
Use too much energy, and
You will soon be exhausted.
That is not the Natural Way.
Whatever works against this Way
Will not last long.
Intelligence
110203 Love
On the phone to Hyderabad today where they are going to help remaster the entire Krishnamurti audio collection. AM is somewhat reluctantly going out there to help set up the project and make sure the production values meet our requirements. This is a project which will result in all the Krishnamurti audio professionally produced, based on the seven years of digitisation we’ve been doing.
This afternoon I’ve been working on a transcript. Instead of a typical round and round discussion with new Brockwood students, Krishnamurti talks for one hour on love. What it isn’t and what it might be. Towards the end he mentions the relationship between the extensive suffering we all go through and love. Certainly Krishnamurti is not like the gurus who go on and on about love in a vague but appealing fashion, with dreamy-eyed followers lapping it up. Instead K takes the approach of what it is not, and emphasises the need to address the way the world is, the way we are, rather than zone out into a fantasy over love.
To discover for yourself, not repeat what I am talking about, discover for yourself what this relationship is, between this suffering of man, of a human being, and the enormity of what he calls love. To discover their relationship. And when you discover the truth of that relationship, what comes out of that flowering? That may be the real compassion. So, to understand this, to go into it, that is part of meditation.
And some quotes along the way before this:
The word ‘love’ is loaded, spoiled, spat upon, vulgarised.
Love of the country, love of the flag, love of an ideal, has killed millions and millions and millions of people.
Actually find out, you know, in your heart, in your mind, find out what it means to love somebody, love human beings, love another.
Robert Anton Wilson on Quantum Physics
What’s really real? How we describe reality, in everyday language, in religion, in science, tells as much about our minds as it does about what we are describing. The tendency to act on the basis of ‘naive realism’ is prevalent historically and today, believing what we experience is truth when it is only a model, a ‘reality tunnel’. Philosophers and sages have pointed this out yet we still fight each other because of our rigid religious views.
The audio quality of the video improves as it goes on:
Heaven: We make it up
The notion and imagination of heaven is constantly changing. The heaven we generally think is a recent very recent invention.
In reality, the heaven you think you’re headed to – a reunion with your relatives in the light – is a very recent invention, only a little older than Goldman Sachs. Most of the believers in heaven across history would find it unrecognisable. Miller’s book, Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination with the Afterlife, teases out the strange history of heaven – and shows it’s not what you think.
Heaven is constantly shifting shape because it is a history of subconscious human longings. Show me your heaven, and I’ll show you what’s lacking in your life. The desert-dwellers who wrote the Bible and the Koran lived in thirst – so their heavens were forever running with rivers and fountains and springs. African-American slaves believed they were headed for a heaven where “the first would be last, and the last would be first” – so they would be the free men dominating white slaves. Today’s Islamist suicide-bombers live in a society starved of sex, so their heaven is a 72-virgin gang-bang. Emily Dickinson wrote: ” ‘Heaven’ – is what I cannot Reach!/The Apple on the Tree/Provided it do hopeless – hang/That – ‘Heaven’ is – to Me!”
via Heaven: A fool’s paradise – Faith, Opinion – The Independent.
Cunning
The ways of cunning are always complex and destructive. It is this self-protective cunning that makes for attachment; and when attachment causes pain, it is this same cunning that seeks detachment and finds pleasure in the pride and vanity of renunciation. The understanding of the ways of cunning, the ways of the self, is the beginning of intelligence.
– Krishnamurti
The Idea of Being Alone
So, what is the deeper issue? Is it that the mind abhors, fears, the idea of being alone? And does the mind know that state which it avoids?
– Krishnamurti
Dependence
We have never questioned the whole issue at all, why each one of us seeks some kind of dependence. Is it not that we really, deep down, demand security, permanency? Being in a state of confusion, we want someone to get us out of that confusion. So, we are always concerned with how to escape or avoid the state in which we are. In the process of avoiding that state, we are bound to create some kind of dependence, which becomes our authority. If we depend on another for our security, for our inward wellbeing, there arise out of that dependence innumerable problems, and then we try to solve those problems – the problems of attachment. But we never question, we never go into the problem of dependence itself. Perhaps if we can really intelligently, with full awareness, go into this problem, then we may find that dependence is not the issue at all – that it is only a way of escaping from a deeper fact.
-Krishnamurti
Book of Life, 26 Feb
Must we know drunkenness to know sobriety? Must you go through hate in order to know what it is to be compassionate? Must you go through wars, destroying yourself and others, to know what peace is? Surely, this is an utterly false way of thinking, is it not?
– From Krishnamurti, Book of Life, 26 February
The way of love
Thought must always be limited by the thinker who is conditioned. The thinker is always conditioned and is never free; if thought occurs, immediately idea follows. Idea in order to act is bound to create more confusion. Knowing all this, is it possible to act without idea? Yes, it is the way of love.
– Krishnamurti
Book of Life, 18 February
Can ideas ever produce action, or do ideas merely mold thought and therefore limit action?
– Krishnamurti
Meeting Everything Anew
This, after all, is the truth: to have the capacity of meeting everything anew, from moment to moment, without the conditioning reaction of the past, so that there is not the cumulative effect which acts as a barrier between oneself and that which is.
– Krishnamurti
Belief is escape
The man who believes in God, the man who believes in the hereafter, or who has any other form of belief, is escaping from the fact of what he is.
– Krishnamurti
Close by
Stay close by
There’s nowhere to go
Stay close to feel
There’s nothing to do
In attention
Then thoughts think
Stay close by
Do we need a belief of any kind, and if we do, why is it necessary? That’s one of the problems involved. We don’t need a belief that there is sunshine, the mountains, the rivers. We don’t need a belief that we quarrel. We don’t have to have a belief that life is a terrible misery with its anguish, conflict, and constant ambition; it is a fact. But we demand a belief when we want to escape from a fact into an unreality.
– Krishnamurti
When there is love, self is not.
Knowing is not experiencing:
But if you and I, as individuals, can see this whole working of the self, then we shall know what love is. I assure you that is the only reformation which can possibly change the world. Love is not the self. Self cannot recognize love. You say “I love,” but then, in the very saying of it, in the very experiencing of it, love is not. But, when you know love, self is not. When there is love, self is not.
– Krishnamurti
An Evil Thing
Krishnamurti, Book of Life, 6 Feb:
You know what I mean by the self? By that, I mean the idea, the memory, the conclusion, the experience, the various forms of namable and unnamable intentions, the conscious endeavor to be or not to be, the accumulated memory of the unconscious, the racial, the group, the individual, the clan, and the whole of it all, whether it is projected outwardly in action, or projected spiritually as virtue; the striving after all this is the self. In it is included the competition, the desire to be. The whole process of that, is the self; and we know actually when we are faced with it, that it is an evil thing. I am using the word ‘evil’ intentionally, because the self is dividing; the self is self-enclosing; its activities, however noble, are separated and isolated.
Trick
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!
Honesty
“It is discouraging how many people
are shocked by honesty and how few
by deceit”
~ Sir Noel Coward
Falling Awake 