Simple Life - J. Krishnamurti

Simple life does not consist in the mere possession of a few
things but in the freedom from possession and non-possession,
in the indifference to things that comes with deep understanding.
Merely to renounce things in order to reach greater happiness,
greater joy that is promised, is to seek reward which limits it
and prevents it from flowering...

Simplicity of life comes with inner richness, with inward
freedom from craving, with freedom from acquisitiveness,
from addiction, from distraction.  

Simple life is not the result of outward circumstances...
If you depend on circumstances to make you satisfied
with life then you will create misery and chaos [for yourself
and others], for then you are a plaything of the environment, and
it is only when circumstances are transcended through understanding
that there is order and clarity.  To be constantly aware of the process
of acquisitiveness, of addiction, of distraction, brings freedom from
them and so there is a true and simple life.

J. Krishnamurti
from The Collected Works Volume III Ojai
8th Public Talk 2nd July, 1944

With thanks to The Beauty We Love

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Death - J Krishnamurti

.....can you look at death without the image of death?
As long as the image exists from which springs thought,
thought must always create fear.  Then you either rationalize
your fear of death and build a resistance against the inevitable
or you invent innumerable beliefs to protect you from the fear
of death.  Hence there is a gap between you and the thing of
which you are afraid.  In this time-space interval there must be
conflict which is fear and anxiety...

Thought, which breeds fear of death says, 'Let's postpone it, let's
avoid it, keep it as far away as possible, let's not think about it' -
but you are thinking about it.  When you say, 'I won't think about
it', you have already thought out how to avoid it. You are frightened
of death because you have postponed it.

We have separated living from dying, and the interval between the
living and dying is fear.  The interval, that time, is created by fear.
Living is our daily torture, daily insult, sorrow and confusion, with
occasional opening of a window over enchanted seas.  That is 
what we call living, and we are afraid to die,  which is to end this
misery. We would rather cling to the known than face the unknown
- the known being our house, our furniture, our family, our
character, our work, our knowledge, our fame, our loneliness, our
gods - that little thing that moves around incessantly within itself
with its own limited pattern of embittered existence.

We think that living is always in the present and that dying is
something that awaits us at a distant time.  But we have never
questioned whether this battle of everyday life is living at all.
We want to know the truth about reincarnation, we want proof
of the survival of the soul, we listen to the assertion of clairvoyants
and to the conclusions of physical research, but we never ask, never,
how to live - to live with delight, with enchantment, with beauty
every day.

We have accepted life as it is with all its agony and despair and
have got used to it, and think of death as something to be carefully
avoided.  But death is extraordinarily like the life we know how to
live.  You cannot live without dying.  You cannot live if you
don't die psychologically every minute.  This is not an intellectual
paradox.  To live completely, wholly, every day as if it were a new
loveliness, there must be dying to everything of yesterday, otherwise
you live mechanically, and a mechanical mind can never know what
love is or what freedom is.

Most of us are frightened of dying because we don't know what it
means to live.  We don't know how to live, therefore we don't 
know how to die.  As long as we are frightened of life we shall be
frightened of death.  The man who is not frightened of life is not
frightened of being completely insecure for he understands that
inwardly, psychologically, there is no security.  When there is no
security there is an endless movement and then life and death are
the same.  The man who lives without conflict, who lives with
beauty and love, is not frightened of death because to love is to
die.

Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895-1986)

Freedom from the Known

with thanks to No Mind's Land

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Aligning with What Is - Eckhart Tolle on Krishnamurti

Jiddu Krishnamurti spoke and traveled almost continuously all
over the world for more than fifty years attempting to convey 
through words - which are content - that which is beyond words,
beyond content.  At one of his talks in the later part of his life, he
surprised his audience by saying, "Do you want to know my secret?"
Everyone became very alert.  Many people in the audience had
 been coming to listen to him for twenty or thirty years and still
failed to grasp the essence of his teaching.  Finally, after all these
years, the master would give them the key to understanding.
"This is my secret," he said.  "I don't mind what happens."  He
did not elaborate, and so I suspect most of his audience were
even more perplexed than before.  The implications of this
simple statement, however, are profound.

When I don't mind what happens, what does that imply?  It 
implies that internally I am in alignment with what happens.
"What happens" of course, refers to the suchness of this moment,
which already is as it is.  It refers to content, the form that this
moment - the only moment there ever is - takes.  To be in
alignment with what is means to be in a relationship of
inner nonresistance with what happens. It means not to label
 it mentally as good or bad, but to let it be.  Does this mean you
 can no longer take action to bring about change in your life?  On
 the contrary.  When the basis for your actions is inner alignment
 with the present moment, your actions become empowered by
 the intelligence of Life itself.

Eckhart Tolle on J. Krishnamurti

From Simon Bartholome

with thanks to No Mind's Land

~

Photo Mystic Meandering

 

Eradicating Violence? - J. Krishnamurti

...is it possible to eradicate violence in ourselves?

I am asking whether it is possible for a human being living
psychologically in any society to clear violence from himself
inwardly?  If it is, the very process will produce a different way

of living in this world.

Some of us, in order to rid ourselves of violence, have used a
concept, an ideal, called non-violence, and we think by having
an ideal of the opposite to violence, non-violence, we can get rid
of the fact, the actual - but we cannot.  We have had ideals
without number, all the sacred books are full of them, 
yet we are still violent - so why not deal with violence itself and
forget the word altogether?

If you want to understand the actual you must give your whole
attention, all your energy, to it.  That attention and energy are
distracted when you create a fictitious, ideal world.  So can you
completely banish the ideal?  The man who is really serious,
with the urge to find out what truth is, what love is, has no
concept at all.  He lives only what is.

To investigate the fact of our own anger you must pass no 
judgement on it, for the moment you conceive of its opposite
you condemn it and therefore you cannot see it as it is.  When
you say you dislike or hate someone, that is a fact, although
it sounds terrible.  If you look at it, go into it completely, it
ceases, but if you say, "I must not hate; I must have love in my
heart," then you are living in a hypocritical world with double
standards.

To live completely, fully, in the moment is to live with what is,
the actual, without any sense of condemnation or justification -

then you understand it so totally that you are finished with it.

When you see clearly the problem is solved.

J. Krishnamurti
from Freedom from the Known

with thanks to The Beauty We Love

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering
Bleeding Enso 
2011

~

Enso is a sacred symbol of Zen Buddhism meaning circle...
It is traditionally drawn using only one brush stroke as a 
meditative practice in letting go of the mind...  While at
first glance, the enso symbol appears no more than a 
misshapen circle, it symbolizes many things: the beauty
in imperfection, the art of letting go of expectations, the
circle of life, and connection.  The enso is a manifestation
of the artist at the moment of creation and the acceptance of
the innermost self.  The enso is said to leave the artist fully
exposed at that one particular moment in time.

Barbara Bash - Artist

(I have no idea what I was feeling at the time I created 
this enso on wax paper, thus the drips - the only one I ever did.)

 

 

The Song of Life - J. Krishnamurti

I have no name,
I am as the fresh breeze of the mountains.
I have no shelter;
I am as the wandering waters.
I have no sanctuary, like the dark gods;
Nor am I in the shadow of deep temples.
I have no sacred books;
Nor am I well seasoned in tradition.
I am not in the incense
Mounting on high altars,
Nor in the pomp of ceremonies.
I am neither the graven image,
Nor in the rich chant of a melodious voice.
I am not bound by theories,
Nor corrupted by beliefs.
I am not held in the bondage of religions,
Nor in the pious agony of their priests.
I am not entrapped by philosophies,
Nor held in the power of their sects.
I am neither low nor high,
I am the worshipper and the worshipped.
I am free.
My song is the song of the river
calling for the open seas,
Wandering, wandering,
I am Life.
I have no name...

J. Krishnamurti

with thanks to The Beauty We Love

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Fragmented Culture - J. Krishnamurti

We have broken up the earth as yours and mine -
your nation, your flag and his flag, this particular religion
and the religion of the distant man.  And for it we fight
and wrangle, and the politicians exult in their power
to maintain division, never looking at the world as a whole.
They haven't gotten the global mind.  They never feel nor
perceive the immense possibility of having no nationality,
no division...  They maintain a tribal attitude towards life.
They do not have a mind that steps beyond the division
of race, culture, and the religions that man has invented.

We carry on like machines with our tiresome daily routine.
How eagerly the mind accepts a patter of existence, and
how tenaciously it clings to it!  As by a driven nail, the
mind is held together by idea, and around that idea it 
lives and has its being.  The mind is never free, for it is
always anchored within the radius of its own center.
It is lost in fear...

Fear is not of the unknown,
but of the loss of the known.

One wonders how long it will take for man to learn to live
on this earth without wrangles, rows, wars and conflict.
Man has created the conflict by his division of the earth,
linguistically, culturally, superficially.  One wonders how
long man, who has evolved through so many centuries of
pain and grief, anxiety and pleasure, fear and conflict, will
take to live a different way of life.

J. Krishnamurti

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Superficial Existence - J. Krishnamurti

 Everywhere society is conditioning the individual, and this 
conditioning takes the form of self-improvement, which is
really the perpetuation of the 'me', the ego, in different forms.

Self-improvement may be gross, or it may be very, very
refined when it becomes the practice of virtue, goodness,
the so-called love of one's neighbor, but essentially it is the
continuance of the 'me', which is a product of the conditioning
influences of society.

All your endeavor has gone into becoming something [better],
either here, if you can make it, or if not, in another world; but
it is the same urge, the same drive to maintain and continue
 the self.

Being free of society implies not being ambitious, not being
covetous, not being competitive; it implies being nothing in
relation to that society which is striving to be something.

.....

As long as one wants to be part of this society, one must breed
insanity, wars, destruction, and misery; but to free oneself from
this society - the society of violence, of wealth, of position, of
success - requires patience, inquiry, and discovery...

.....

If one is capable of studying, watching oneself, one begins to
discover how cumulative memory is acting on everything
one sees; one is forever evaluating, discarding or accepting, 
condemning or justifying, so one's experience is always
within the field of the known, of the conditioned.

But without cumulative memory as a directive, most of us 
feel lost, we feel frightened, and so we are incapable of
observing ourselves as we are.

When there is the accumulative process, which is the cultivation

of memory, our observation of ourselves becomes very
superficial.  Memory is helpful in directing, improving oneself,
but in self-improvement there can never be a revolution, a 
radical transformation.  It is only when the sense of self -
improvement completely ceases, but not by volition, that there
is a possibility of something transcendental, something totally
new coming into being.

J. Krishnamurti

from talks given:
Aug. 7th - 28th, 1955

with thanks to The Beauty We Love

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

Simple Life - J.Krishnamurti

 Simple life does not consist in the mere possession of a few
things but in the freedom from possession and non-possession,
in the indifference to things that comes with deep understanding.
Merely to renounce things in order to reach greater happiness,
greater joy that is promised, is to seek reward which limits it
and prevents it from flowering...

To control thought-feeling for a greater reward, for a greater
result, is to make it petty, ignorant and sorrowful.  Simplicity
of life comes with inner richness, with inward freedom from
craving, with freedom from acquisitiveness, from addiction,
from distraction.  From this simple life there comes that
necessary one-pointedness which is not the outcome of
self-enclosing concentration, but of extensional awareness
and meditative understanding.

Simple life is not the result of outward circumstances;
contentment with little comes with the riches of inward
understanding.  If you depend on circumstances to make
you satisfied with life then you will create misery and
chaos [for yourself and for others], for then you are a
plaything of environment, and it is only when
circumstances  are transcended through understanding
 that there is order and clarity. To be constantly aware of
the process of acquisitiveness, of addiction,
of distraction, brings freedom from them

and so there is a true and simple life.

J. Krishnamurti
from The Collected Works Volume III Ojai
8th Public Talk 2nd July, 1944

With thanks to The Beauty We Love

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

Why We Fear Death - J. Krishnamurti

Questioner: The fact that death stares everybody in the face,
yet its mystery is never solved.  Must it always be so?

Krishnamurti:  Why is there fear of death?
When we cling to continuity, there is the fear of death.

There is fear of death as long there is the desire for
continuity [of the] character, in action, in capacity, in the
name, and so on.  As long as there is action seeking a result,
there must be the thinker who is seeking continuity.  Fear comes
into being when this continuity is threatened through death.

So, there is fear of death as long as there is the desire for
continuity.

Death, the state of non-continuity, the state of rebirth, is the
unknown.  Death is the unknown.  The mind, which is the
result of continuity, cannot know the unknown.  It can only know
the known.  It can only act and have its being in the known,
which is continuous.  So the known is in fear of the unknown. 
The known can never know the unknown, and so death
remains the mystery.

Immortality is not the continuation of "me."  The me is of time,
the result of action towards an end.  So there is no relationship
between the me and that which is immortal, timeless.  We would
like to think there is a relationship, but this is an illusion.  That
which is immeasurable cannot be caught in the net of time. 

J. Krishnamurti
excerpt from a talk in Bombay in March 1948

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

Who Really Sees - J. Krishnamurti

Who sees exactly what is taking place in the world,
and who really wants to find out if God, truth, is
an actuality or merely a clever invention of the priest?

And there must be individual human beings who have
completely broken away from the collective, from society,
who are free from conditioning, not in layers or spots,
but totally, for it is only such individuals who can find
out what truth or God is -

Not the man of tradition, not the man who does japa,
rings bells, quotes the Gita, and goes to the temple
every day.  It is the irreligious people who do that.

But the man who really wants to find out what this
extraordinary movement of living is must not only
understand the process of his own conditioning, but
be able to go beyond it.

Because, the mind can find out what is true only when
it is free from all conditioning, not when it merely
repeats certain words or quotes sacred books.
Such a mind is not free.

J. Krishnamurti

From - Collected Works

via - The Beauty We Love

Personal note:  I recognize that I am so far from this - but this *is* what "I" wants - the complete "recognition" of ItSelf - the True Self - whatever one knows that to be in themselves that is beyond conditioning of who we *think* we are...   Each of us will come to that in our own way...  Namaste...

My friend, I am not what I seem.
Seeming is but a garment I wear -

The "I" in me, my friend, dwells in the house of Silence.
and therein it shall remain for ever more...

My path is not thy path,
yet together we walk, hand in hand...

Kahlil Gibran

Excerpt from:" I am not what I seem"

Bee-lief - J.Krishnamurti & Adyashanti

You believe in God, and another does not believe in God,
so your beliefs separate you from each other.

Belief throughout the world is organized as [Religion],
and so it divides man from man.  We are confused, and we
think that through belief we shall clear the confusion; that is,
belief is superimposed on the confusion, and we hope that
confusion will thereby be cleared away.

But belief is merely an escape from the fact of confusion;
it [belief] does not help us to face and to understand the fact
but to run away from the confusion in which we are.

To understand the confusion, belief is not necessary, and
belief only acts as a screen between ourselves and our
problems.  So, religion, which is organized belief, becomes
a means of escape from what is, from the fact of confusion.

J. Krishnamurti

~

All barriers are conceptual - made of ideas, beliefs and opinions.
Outside of concepts and beliefs there is no barrier. Belief is what
the mind does to fill up emptiness, to give it something to look at,
to play with, to hide behind...

So let us understand that Reality transcends all of our notions [beliefs]
about reality.  Reality is neither Christian, Hindu, Jewish, Advaita
Vedanta, nor Buddhist.  It is neither dualistic nor non-dualistic,
neither spiritual nor nonspiritual.  We should come to know that there
is more reality and sacredness in a blade of grass than in all of our
thoughts and ideas about reality.  When we perceive from an undivided
consciousness, we will find the sacred in every expression of life.
...we must let ourselves be led by the inner thread of Silence into
the unknown, beyond where all paths end, to that place where we
go innocently or not at all....

Adyashanti

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

Conflict - David Skitt

A Commentary on Krishnamurti's POV on the world

Conflict and violence Krishnamurti sees as issues of basic concern...
But in his view history shows there has been a repeated failure
of education, science, politics and organized religion to end them.
What is needed in our time therefore is to own up to that failure,
to make a clean sweep of all these past, defective endeavors,
and to adopt an entirely new approach.  It is hard to imagine taking
a more radical position than this: Put aside everything you have
 learned from others, ever read, and start your own inquiry into
what life is about, what really matters.  Stand on your own two
feet.  Stop being a second-hand human being.

He proposes that this means looking at what is actually
happening in life and in our consciousness - 'what is, not what
should be' - without condemning or justifying, without resisting
or wanting to change it, holding it instead 'like a precious jewel.'
In doing so, he says, we are looking at human consciousness,
not just our own.

A constant source of human confusion, in Krishnamurti's view,
is our rooted tendency to make images of ourselves, others, and
of life and death that are put together by thought based on memory,
on past experiences or hearsay.  Instead of looking afresh at what is
new in the now, being open to the unknown, and unpredictable, we
'translate the present into the past.'  He sees such images are
inevitably conflictual because they are time-bound and therefore
partial and inadequate.  Yet we frequently act as though we are
programmed by them.

Krishnamurti maintains that we fail to make the most of our
mind and our life while subject to latent or manifest anger and fear.
Also, our sense of self is usually experienced as inherently [separate]
from another's, whereas all human beings share far more
psychologically than separates them.  Not to see that is a huge error
of perception, because our sense of shared humanity is lost. This
feeling of psychological [separateness] breeds a fear of isolation
that leads, among other things, to a spurious sense of safety in
numbers, which is then, unfortunately and divisively, carried to
excess in nationalism, political ideology, and religious [fanaticism].
These provide a false cohesion held together by fear that there
are those 'outside' who threaten us and are in some way not as fully
human as we are.

Seeing the problems in our personal life and in the world with a
mind free from the dictates of the past, from faith, belief,
stereotyping, and fantasy, is to see that what goes wrong in the
world outside reflects what goes wrong in one's own mind.  This
is the share of all men, of all humanity, unless we all change,
each one of us, change to something that is not projected by thought.
Where there is insight into that, Krishnamurti says, there is a wholly
different way of living, in which an awakened awareness of what
causes human suffering also brings with it greater sensitivity to the
beauty and immensity of life.

David Skitt

KFT.org

via - No Mind's Land

Violence - J. Krishnamurti

We are trying to understand violence as a fact,
not as an idea, as a fact which exists in the human being,
and the human being is myself.  And to go into the
problem I must be completely vulnerable, open, to it.
I must expose myself to myself - not necessarily
expose myself to you because you may not be interested -
but I must be in a state of mind that demands to see this thing
right to the end...

Now it must be obvious to me that I am a violent human being.
I have experienced violence in anger, violence in hatred, creating
enmity, violence in jealousy and so on - I have experienced it, I
have known it, and I say to myself 'I want to understand this whole
 problem, not just one fragment of it expressed in war, but this
aggression in man that also exists in animals, of which I am a part.

Violence is not merely killing another.  It is violence when we use
a sharp word, when we make a gesture to brush away a person, when
we obey because of fear.  So violence isn't merely organized butchery
in the name of God, in the name of society or country.  Violence is
much more subtle, much deeper...

When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a
European, or anything else, you are being violent.  Do you see why
it is violent?  Because you are separating yourself from the rest of
mankind.  When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality,
by tradition, it breeds violence.  So a man who is seeking to
understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion,
to any political party or system; he is concerned with the
total understanding of mankind.

The moment you protect a belief, an idea, a dogma, the thing that
you demand or that you hold, that very protection indicates anger.
So can you look at anger without any explanation or justification...
Can you look at anger completely objectively?

To go beyond violence I cannot suppress it, I cannot deny it...
I have to look at it.  I must become intimate with it.  You have
to learn how to look at anger...  You have to learn why you are not
objective, why you condemn or justify.  You have to learn that you
condemn and justify because it is part of the social structure you live
in, your conditioning as a German or an Indian or a Negro
 or an American or whatever you happen to have been born with,
 all the dulling of the mind that this conditioning results in.

To live completely, fully, in the moment is to live with what is,
including the anger...  The face of violence is not only outside
you but inside you...

J. Krishnamurti
excerpt from: Freedom from the Known

via - The Beauty We Love

~

All violence begins with disconnection [a sense of separation].
All outward violence begins as inner loneliness [a sense of not belonging].

[We must] break the code of disconnection...

Glenn Doyle Melton

From the article:
One Teacher's Brilliant Strategy to Stop Future School Shootings

Culture of Fear - Krishnamurti

We have broken up the earth as yours and mine -
your nation, your flag and his flag,
this particular religion and
the religion of the distant man.
And for it we fight and wrangle,
and the politicians exult in their power
to maintain this division,
never looking at the world as a whole.
They haven't gotten the global mind.
They never feel nor perceive the immense
possibility of having no nationality,
no division...
They maintain the tribal attitude
towards life.
They do not have a mind that
steps beyond the division of race,
culture, and the religions
that man has invented.

We carry on like machines with our
tiresome daily routine.
How eagerly the mind accepts a
pattern of existence,
and how tenaciously it clings to it!
As by a driven nail, the mind is
held together by idea,
and around that idea it lives
and has its being.
The mind is never free,
for it is always anchored
within the radius
of its own center.
It is lost in fear...

Fear is not of the unknown,
but of the loss of the known.

One wonders how long it will take
for man to learn to live on this earth
without wrangles, rows, wars and conflict.
Man has created the conflict by his division
of the earth, linguistically, culturally, superficially.
One wonders how long man,
who has evolved through so many centuries of
pain and grief, anxiety and pleasure,
fear and conflict,
will take to live a different way of life.

J. Krishnamurti

(his words, my format)

This is a newspaper clipping from the Boston Globe from the late 1960's
It reads:

There is no mind more open or
heart more willing to love than
that of a young child.
But teach a child hatred and
prejudice and the mind begins to
close, the heart to harden. Until
finally, a bigot is born.
Sometimes what we don't teach
our children is more important
that what we do.

Learning to Live Together.
The Unfinished Task.

My Grandmother's Mandala...

I have many memories of my grandmother crocheting
doilies and table cloths with fine cotton threads.
  She taught me, but mine never came out like hers.
 I have many of the ones she made.
  This one I have on my little meditation table.

As I was lighting the candle and striking the bowl the other day, I noticed it underneath, although it has been there all along, and saw how it was really like a mandala – made of interwoven threads.  I remembered the movement of my grandmother’s small, gentle hands and how the crochet hook would dip and pull each loop of thread through so quickly and easily.  I remembered the soft, contented look on her face as she crocheted, following an unending rhythm.  It was easy to be in her presence – connecting in the silence of our hearts.  The crocheted “mandala” also reminded me of how intricately woven her wheel of life was, of which I was only a thread.  Her wrinkle in time lasted 93 years. 

We wrote letters back and forth to each other when I was a teenager and young adult, when she moved to Maine and then Southern California; sharing a special bond.  Her ripple in time was absorbed back into the Ocean of Being nearly 15 years ago. 

~*~

“The Silence which is not the silence of the ending…
is only a beginning.
It is like going through a small hole
to an enormous,
wide expansive ocean,
to an immeasurable, timeless state…”

J. Krishnamurti

“Death is only for the imagined separate self.
…..for who you truly are there is no death.”

Jeff Foster

Read the whole article:
 “Why there is no death”

~*~

Top Photo - Color Invert
Gives the affect of the Ocean
behind the doilie,
which is actually the
grain of the wood…

See Beyond the Facade...

“We are here to awaken
from the illusion of our separateness…”

Thich Nhat Hanh

“Darkness does not become light,
for there is only light…

You are Life ItSelf undivided
from the power that moves the planets.”

Jeff Foster

“Only when the mind is completely free
from yesterday,
and is therefore not using the present
as a means to the future,
is it capable of receiving
the eternal…”

Jiddu Krishnamurti

“…behind this outer façade,
another life is going on in you.”

John O’Donohue

Photos during snow fall Friday night…
Top two photos are of a street light...
And what looks like a building in those photos
is a reflection on the glass of a wall hanging -
an illusion of a building...