[ the eye that beholds, dept. ]
There’s nothing good or bad in nature, taken in the whole. There is a need though, to directly see facts without personal, attitudinal bias. Duality. In fine, in awareness, facts are only actually seen if there is no person; no mind-made ‘opinion’ that’s personally conceived and believed. In aware living, there’s no person who believes; there’s one seamless, living reality which choicelessly includes all that’s apparently happening. Well, I’m off to gently hike the woods again; what is seen from aware emptiness – empty of the person – is immensely rich and diverse and beautiful. And totally fresh, new and unknown. Some call it love. 😊
[ a longer weekend read, dept. ]
DYING EVERY DAY IS LIVING
“You have to die to all things to be aware of beauty.” I was deeply moved when I read this statement from “Krishnamurti’s Notebook”, and am similarly moved to explore what he said and perhaps uncover not what K might have meant, so much as the direction of his pointing; to dive a little deeper into what does or does not die, and what it – death – really is. Not physically, but psychologically. Let’s start at the root with beauty: what is it?
THINKING IS A WAY TO MAP BUT NOT TO KNOW, THE TERRITORY
Well, in truth we don’t know what dying is unless and until, we directly know the Self. For some of us, that kind of existential growing and out-growing is simply recognized as necessary. That’s the pull of real beauty. Indeed, there’s beauty in growth and decay. It is necessary. Real. Not a belief. In fully, freely knowing the SELF we know what beauty is – that which we also call love, peace, joy.
That which we (spirit) infinitely are does not pass, ie die, is not limited to the body/mind senses of thought and experience which together constitute this so-called ‘me’. The ‘me’ and ‘we’ that conjures a ‘you’ and ‘them’. The personal egoic mind that insists on being and becoming an entity with identity; that persists in self-centered achieving, gaining, getting and gripping the preferred world it wants to believe in and securely depend upon to produce the happiness it proposes – even though, all the while, it keeps changing and slip sliding away.
Indeed, the mind is occupied, head down with personal motives, inclinations, fears, desires and demands….until it isn’t. Until we stop, look and listen; until we look inside at our secret garden and attentively prune those new shoots of love that are strangely appearing, budding and flowering there. That happens when there’s a turning away from the content of our experience – beautiful or not so much – to That which is experiencing the content.
In fact for most of us, content is king. And Life is what happens while we’re busy with superficial – even esthetic – personal beauty, cultivated pleasures and sundry experiences, diversions, dalliances and obsessions …we’re full of thoughts about beauty, talking about it, feeling about it, et al without contemplating the contemplator itself.
Meanwhile, somehow and everywhere, life itself is living and moving free as a breeze totally without any conceptual “you” or ‘me’ or ‘others’.
Life itself makes no distinctions, but is likewise discerning. Aware living involves a wise discerning that’s choicelessly, fully – always lovingly – alertly watching and not judging, determining, controlling, risking, playing the games ego instigates and perpetuates. Indeed, real life includes our born beginnings and endings AND that imminent and immense never-ending Unborn which we infinitely are. In this abundant here/now, we’re all that life (consciousness) is – seemingly real or imagined: its pain and sorrow, pleasures and betrayals, imaginings and conditioned assumptions about what life and the beauty of it, is.
BEAUTY IS NOT AN EXPERIENCE, IT’S WHAT WE ARE
We are That – that vast, borderless, edgeless BEING, silently loving all its creation, all of itSelf. Beauty is an invitation to look a little closer, to delight in discovering and uncovering the Self; to look lovingly upon all experience from the inside out. It’s only there, when we’re open and opening, that the oneness we are is – paradoxically – known and unknown. In fact, there’s no inside, no outside; that’s the beauty of aware living in and as, love. 🙂
LIVING IN ACTIVE PRESENCE IS A FULLNESS THAT’S EMPTY OF SELF
Let’s end this little exploration where we began, with this jewel from J Krishnamurti:
“There must be no ‘you’…You live but it isn’t ‘you’ who lives. Living is entirely a different thing, a movement without measure, an ecstasy that no thought or feeling could ever capture.”
Love fully in fact, and let life live freely. 🙂
