JOY IN AWARE LIVING – NOW.
“Pleasure is the product of thought; joy is not. Pleasure is sustained, built up by thought. The mind has an experience, and that experience is thought about. If that experience has a certain form of pleasure, delight, amusement; thought begins to think about it and therefore sustains that pleasure by thinking about it..[ ]
One hears, ‘Die to everything you know,’ and one asks, ‘What have I left?’ But if one has really gone into it deeply, what one has left is joy, real joy of living – seeing a beautiful tree, a beautiful face, the movement of water, the bird – living..To die to the past immediately requires a great deal of attention, a great deal of inquiry, a great deal of inward apprehension. Not apprehension in the sense fear, but inward awareness. Then out of that, there is a different kind of life altogether. Therefore there is no fear of death because you are dying every day to everything you have gathered. So your mind becomes extraordinarily alert, fresh, young and – if I may use that word which is so laden – innocent. It is only the innocent mind that can live, not this jaded mind.”
~ J Krishnamurti
* We each ‘meet’ JK differently it seems; he speaks about awareness, love and death to sundry and various understandings. The commentary below is not an attempt to interpret him, to contrast and compare. Indeed, it’s a “fools errand” to endeavour to word the wordless here, but one can lovingly try.. 😉 We meet not so much in the field of mind-to-mind as awareness-to-awareness, to further enjoy, explore and perhaps clarify and grow in simply being. Indeed, “a clear mind is a light unto itself.”
~ One of the wonders of aware living in the unknown is that there’s a constant ‘finding out’, a discovering or uncovering of what is apparently happening here and now, only as it happens. In fine, in awareness, one never knows when, if or how one may relate and respond in time to this timeless movement, to what is. 🙂
The above quote from K is delighting and inspiring one to write these words about it now; there’s a wandering reflection, an enjoyed wondering, and just now, an attentive yet tentative picking of words on the keyboard that slowly present themselves to – at least for now – indicate, describe or point toward the underlying freedom and joy in this savoring of living that K tells us about so eloquently.
One of our major missed-understandings in living well and truly lies in all the confusion the mind generates thru its supposed passions; its beliefs that ‘me and mine’ is central to being happy; that ‘my’ self-serving psychological needs (beyond instinctive and essential food, clothing and shelter.. and let’s add ‘love’) are now, or will be, achieved, managed and secured with efforts; with enough thought and cunning, aka ‘skillful means’, and hopefully ‘a little luck!’
Living beyond belief
Absent beliefs, there is no believer, no desperate need to control life which is innately uncontrollable; no ‘person’ who suffers his or her fleeting pleasures and attendant pains of living a preferred vs. feared, conditioned and imaginary, life – a life chock full of personalized experience with all its baked-in conflicts and contentions and confusions – all of which combine to – when believed – produce our streaming anxiety day and night, night and day.
In truth, the only way out is in; in the non-judgemental, loving watching of the inner parade of the mind and feelings. That which is watching all experience now, is awareness. In fact, that’s all there is – all one is. Only awareness is aware – all else is illusion. 🙂
~ You are invited to Zoom in to the Aware Living Cafe hosted by James Waite and participant JC Tefft; to enjoy and contribute to a six-part series exploring K’s Book Of Life, beginning Saturday, January 6, 2024 at 10am to 11:30, Victoria, BC (PCT) More details and to simply register: https://krishnamurti-canada.ca/…/aware-living-cafe-2…/
