Tag Archives: Krishnamurti’s Notebook
aloneness
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“… a state of awareness
in which receiving
and adjustment
have ceased.”
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“There must be alertness, without choice, an awareness in which all receiving and adjustment have ceased.”
Krishnamurti’s Notebook PDF p. 63
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the unknown existence
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There is in me an urge from deep within to drop all past impressions and live in the awareness of this new moment, free from all residue. Here are some clues.
“We Move in the Space We Create As We Move”
one thought
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To hold on to one thought (aham) to the exclusion of all others is to exit the current of fragmented consciousness, of vrittis (see this article). The stream of your true being is totality and stillness, but not a void. It is the essence of all forms, of all thoughts. Aham is the language symbol of the humming of creation-destruction: it is emanating as all forms, all of life. It rises up inside you and outside you and tears you apart and all other thoughts are lifeless and meaningless. They only take on meaning as this Essence fills them. They are the shells and containers of this Immensity. They have no substance of themselves. This continual swirling into vrittis is the nature of Existence: it is spontaneous and, one could say, ‘whimsical’. All dreams and scenarios are of no substance: they are NOT.
Upon exiting the entanglement of the stream of vrittis there is the stream of unconditioned consciousness. It is an expression of the Absolute.
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Krishnamurti’s Notebook:
But the road became gentle and lazily wound
around to a different valley. The clouds were gathering in now and
it was pleasant not to have a strong sun. The road became almost
flat, if a mountain road can be flat; it went on past a dark pinecovered
hill and there in front were the enormous, overpowering
mountains, rocks and snow, green fields and waterfalls, small
wooden huts and the sweeping, curving lines of the mountain.One could hardly believe what the eyes saw, the overpowering dignity
of those shaped rocks, the treeless mountain covered with snow,
and crag after crag of endless rock, and right up to them were the
green meadows, all held together in a vast embrace of a mountain.It was really quite incredible; there was beauty, love, destruction
and the immensity of creation, not those rocks, not those fields, not
those tiny huts; it wasn’t in them or part of them. It was far beyond
and above them. It was there with the majesty, with a roar that no
eyes or ears could see or hear; it was there with such totality and
stillness that the brain with its thoughts became as nothing as those
dead leaves in the woods. It was there with such abundance, such
strength that the world, the trees and the earth came to an end. It
was love, creation and destruction. And there was nothing else.There was the essence of depth. The essence of thought is that
state when thought is not. However deeply and widely thought is
pursued, thought will always remain shallow, superficial. The
ending of thought is the beginning of that essence. The ending of
thought is negation and what is negative has no positive way; there
is no method, no system to end thought. The method, the system is
a positive approach to negation and thus thought can never find the
essence of itself. It must cease for the essence to be. The essence of
being is non-being, and to “see” the depth of non-being, there must
be freedom from becoming.There is no freedom if there is continuity
and that which has continuity is time-bound. Every
experience is binding thought to time and a mind that’s in a state of
non-experiencing is aware of all essence. This state in which all
experiencing has come to an end is not the paralysis of the mind;
on the contrary, it’s the additive mind, the mind that’s
accumulating, that is withering away.For accumulation is mechanical, a repetition; the denial to acquire and mere acquisition are both repetitive and imitative. The mind that destroys totally this accumulative and defensive mechanism is free and so experiencing has lost its significance.
Then there’s only the fact and not the experiencing of the fact;
the opinion of the fact, the evaluation of it, the beauty and nonbeauty
of it is the experiencing of the fact. The experiencing of the
fact is to deny it, to escape from it. The experiencing of a fact
without thought or feeling is a profound event.
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explosive in its immensity
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Krishnamurti:
The symbol becomes more important than reality. The symbol
gives a shelter; it is easy to take comfort in its shelter. You can do
what you will with it, it will never contradict, it will never change;
it can be covered with garlands or ashes. There’s an extraordinary
satisfaction in a dead thing, in a picture, in a conclusion, in a word.
They are dead, past all recalling and there is pleasure in the many
smells of yesterday. The brain is always the yesterday, and today is
the shadow of yesterday, and tomorrow is the continuation of that
shadow, somewhat changed but it still smells of yesterday. So the
brain lives and has its being in shadows; it is safer, more
comforting.Consciousness is always receiving, accumulating, and from
what it has gathered, interpreting; receiving through all its pores;
storing up, experiencing from what it has gathered, judging,
compiling, modifying. It looks, not only through the eyes, through
the brain but through this background. Consciousness goes out to
receive and in receiving, it exists. In its hidden depths, it has stored
what it has received through centuries, the instincts, the memories,
the safeguard, adding, adding, only to take away to add further.
When this consciousness looks out, it is to weigh, to balance and to
receive. And when it looks within, its look is still the outer look, to
weigh, to balance and to receive; the inward stripping is another
form of adding. This time-binding process goes on and on with an
ache, with fleeting joy and sorrow.But to look, to see, to listen, without this consciousness – an
outgoing in which there is no receiving, is the total movement of
freedom. This outgoing has no centre, a point, small or extensive,
from which it moves; thus it moves in all directions, without the
barrier of time-space. Its listening is total, its look is total. This
outgoing is the essence of attention. In attention, all distractions
are, for there are no distractions. Only concentration knows the
conflict of distraction. All consciousness is thought, expressed or
unexpressed, verbal or seeking the word; thought as feeling,
feeling as thought. Thought is never still; reaction expressing itself
is thought and thought further increases responses. Beauty is the
feeling which thought expresses. Love is still within the field of
thought. Is there love and beauty within the enclosure of thought?
Is there beauty when thought is? The beauty, the love that thought
knows is the opposite of ugliness and hate. Beauty has no opposite
nor has love.Seeing without thought, without the word, without the response
of memory is wholly different from seeing with thought and
feeling. What you see with thought is superficial; then seeing is
only partial; this is not seeing at all. Seeing without thought is total
seeing. Seeing a cloud over a mountain, without thought and its
responses, is the miracle of the new; it’s not “beautiful”, it’s
explosive in its immensity; it is something that has never been and
never will be. To see, to listen, consciousness in its entirety must
be still for the destructive creation to be. It is the totality of life and
not the fragment of all thought. There is no beauty but only a cloud
over the mountain; it is creation.source: Krishnamurti’s Notebook PDF pp. 55 – 58
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timeless and spaceless Being
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“Apart, from us where is time and where is space? If we are bodies, we are involved in time and space, but are we? We are one and identical now, then, and forever, here, and everywhere. Therefore we, timeless, and spaceless Being, alone are.”
Forty Verses on Reality – Ramana – Verse 16
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My Comment:
We are so heavily addicted to rational thinking that it seems at times almost impossible to open up to a direct realization of what Ramana is talking about. Of course we should be able to get a felt sense of this Fact that is all around us, in our face and completely obvious – but that is not the case. Most of our waking hours and in our dream experiences we move through a card-house made of living images that are ephemeral, fleeting and passing.
What we call happiness are experiences within this card-house and they do not satisfy that deep longing inside for HOME that is the bed-rock of Existence rather than the shifting sands of the content of our consciousness.
The following statements express some views as to ‘how’ we can access our Natural State.
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Krishnamurti:
How easy it is to deceive oneself, to project desirable states which are actually experienced, especially when they are pleasure. There’s no illusion, no deception, when there’s no desire, conscious or unconscious, for any experience of any kind, when one’s wholly indifferent to the coming and going of all experience, when one’s not asking for anything.
Why be mean when there are soaring mountains and flashing streams?
Krishnamurti Notebook July 26, 1961
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Nisargadatta:
Here you will get to know what is, not what you expect to hear. Duality arises when consciousness arises. I am present and I know that I am present – that is duality. I am and I am not conscious of being present – that is unicity. There is only one, ‘but when this conscious presence is there, then there is a sense of duality.
Questioner: Is a Realized person aware of everything?
N. Actually no one is realized, there is only pure knowledge (the sense of I Am). It is only for reasons of communication that we say a person is realized. The knowledge has realized that it is knowledge; that is all that has happened. I am not the body, I am not the words; when knowledge recognizes this it is called Self-Realization.
Q: The knowledge Maharaj is giving is for jnanis (awakened ones). What happens to the very simple man who is not able to comprehend this?
N: Bhajans (devotional songs) and meditation. By meditation the knowledge which is immature will gradually grow into maturity.
Q. A thousand years ago people were primitive. They could not have understood this. It is only for developed minds.
N. Whether primitive or civilized, people can understand this. Even in those days there must have been some to whom this knowledge did appear and they instinctively understood.
This knowledge is not new; it has always been in existence. People came to know instinctively.
Q. Why is it that India seems to be the cradle of this knowledge? No other country seems to have this knowledge.
N: That is not so. This manifestation is the expression of the Absolute, and the manifestation may take various forms in various countries. Where it takes what kind of expression is immaterial; basically all is the manifestation of the Absolute. There is no cause and effect, no reason why one thing should be in one place and something else in another.
What is to be found out is what one is, by oneself.
Q. Can the Guru give a push toward that knowledge?
N. You think that you are one individual and the Guru is another individual but that is not so. Guru is the knower of this consciousness, which is temporary.
Understand this curious situation: while I am talking to you there is unbearable pain in the body (cancer).
I have understood firmly that there are no individuals separate from one another, no knowledge separate as worldly knowledge and spiritual knowledge. There is no Guru and no disciple, there is no God and no devotee. There are no opposites – they are a polaristic duality, not two separate parts, but two parts of the same one. I am convinced of that and yet I am talking to you. You accept it as knowledge and I give it as knowledge. Understand this amusing factor.
The talks emanate spontaneously out of me; prior to the emanation of the words there is no meaning fabricated inside. There is no part played by the mind. It is direct spontaneity.
Q. What is the definition of consciousness as used by Maharaj?
N. Consciousness, as it is used here, is this sense of being alive, of being present, the sense of existence. It is the love of being that is the source and cause of all desires.
source: Prior to Consciousness, December 9, 1980
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We Move in the Space We Create As We Move – Krishnamurti
“We Move in the Space We Create As We Move”
This is a statement by Krishnamurti that I picked up way back in the 70’s and I repeated it to my yoga teacher, Rajo, who had introduced me to Krishnamurti. Rajo then replied that if we can understand that one statement, that is the whole philosophy. I don’t know exactly where that came from except that at that time I was studying “Freedom from the Known”, I think. Did he really say it? That may not be so very important, as he is no authority (something Krishnamurti impressed upon his listeners time and time again), but my memory back then was pretty good so the probability of me having correctly remembered is high. Especially since I have since then repeated that statement to many, many people over the years since that first time.
I came across another such (for me) seminal statement in his Notebook just recently, during one of the phases of great intensity of ‘the process’ that he described: “… there was no continuity but only being” (July 9, 1961). Which means to me that there is no multiplicity moving from one state into the next state, but only one state that moves as itself as a whole.
Therefore it follows that whatever state I am in now is the state within which I “move”. So he also says “Can you explode from the center?” – to say each of us creates out of ourselves without any pre-condition in every moment. If we can deeply see this, then the known in ended and not brought forward into the next moment. We are free to be fresh out of ourself in every moment divorced from “what was”. The known is not ‘ended’ because ‘we’ end it – but simply because it is seen that existence is fresh and new in every moment, unless we carry over some impression from a previous movement of existence into this present movement of existence. We, therefore, give some previous form of existence a ‘new‘ form (similar to a former form) in this new moment by carrying it over from our memory impression into NOW.
Therefore, we need not ‘do’ anything to ‘end’ the known, but only to refrain from giving it form again by our focusing on it repeatedly. If we were strongly enough in inner awareness to allow every expression of existence to ‘end’, or ‘die’, then we would truly be in an ‘unknown’ new existence from moment to moment, free from all that is ‘known’.
A useful metaphor is the following:
In a dark room I light a torch and swirl my outstretched arm in front of me describing a large circle with the flame of the torch. The fact is the burning flame of the torch. It is at one single point of the circle at any given time. However, the eye sees a complete circle of fire. One could say that the circle is an illusion, created by the eye holding on to the impression of the path of the flame through space in the dark room. Similarly our way of perceiving creates continuity of the movement of the Life Force, whereas in actuality there is only the burning flame of Life’s Energy in the one eternal NOW moment, which is always new and fresh our of itself. That is way some have said the Big Bang is happening now and always. Only when we create an illusory center from which we record the path of this flame of life and store these impressions, are we able to conjure them up before our mind’s eye and let them run like the frames of a film to show a movie, or connected story-line.
There is no problem with that as long as we are aware with our Inner Awareness (which overrides the illusion) that it is WE who are creating the seeming continuity. As long as we are aware of this being our own creation, we are free to NOT MAKE SENSE and to create in each moment free from all supposed ‘predetermined conditions’. Does this makes sense? 😉
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a movement that came from nowhere and was going nowhere – Krishnamurti
The following is selection of Krishnamurti’s descriptions of his perceptions during the intense phases of the condition he called the “process“, which went on for many years up to the end of his life. He described these experiences in notebook entries which he made over nine months from June 1961 in Los Angeles with the last one entered in Bombay, March 1962.
These descriptions are from the entries over seven days (Switzerland, July 23rd – 29th, 1961):
a movement that came from nowhere and was going nowhere
this immense flame of power
destructive in its creation
New Earth Heartbeat 