[ words believed, and love, dept. ]
As a retired, partly reformed wordsmith and erstwhile photographer, my ‘world’ came crashing down when I happened across this pix of an old abandoned library. 😉 Not really. But it was a nice surprise to somewhat revel in this fine visual metaphor of words wearily withering; the faded fallen leaves under the weight of time; the records of legions of yesterday’s thoughtful men, women and children who read, pondered and passed…
But what really was deeply evoked by the picture is the materiality of words; how words, believed, gain the power to shape and personalize experience. The ‘me’ and other than ‘me’.
Words, believed, could be said to describe the way we live the life we believe we know; the life one is culturally conditioned to believe is good or bad, right or wrong, etc. It’s altogether a mind-made world. We pour over books looking for things to think about, to amuse, to describe, to escape and dance off with in sundry dreams day and night.. that’s until, it seems, we don’t. 🙂
“Can the mind be free from conformity to the past? You are the past. You have memories, you remember certain things, pleasant or unpleasant. You are living in your youth, in yesterday, in all the memories, pleasures and fears of yesterday.”
~ J Krishnamurti
There comes a timeless instant when one is variously pushed and prodded beyond all words, feelings and meanings; beyond accumulated knowledge posing as wisdom, beyond the person and the personal, beyond imagined desires, fears and the burdens of acquired status or infamy. Beyond the mind’s ideas and ideals about what it thinks and believes is so. Beyond belief.
“We all want deeper, wider, nobler, vaster experiences. That is our craving. Everybody wants a transcendental marvelous experience because our own life, the daily life, is so petty, so small, so shallow, so meaningless. You want deep experiences but when you do experience something, unless you recognize it as an [old] experience, it has no validity to you. The moment you recognize it, it is already the old, so it is not an experience in freedom.” [JK]
THE FRESHNESS OF NOW.
There’s a wonderful discovering of reality, of a thoughtless, unlabeled and intimately experienced freshness of being life itself; a constantly changeful experiencing of what is, exactly as it is, like it or not. What is remains unknown. In fact whatever is now presenting itself to awareness is amazingly unknown, potent and alive, living and dying, fully, paradoxically, mysteriously, happening. And believe it or not, you are it, totally. In aware living, one knows that one is and does not know what one is. Let’s call it – as K does, love: 🙂
“This state, without the word, without thought, is the expanse of mind that has no boundaries, no frontiers within which the I and the not-I can exist. Don’t think this is imagination, or some flight of fancy, or some desired mystical experience; it is not. It is as actual as the bee on that flower, or the little girl on her bicycle, or the man going up a ladder to paint the house – the whole conflict of the mind in its separation has come to an end. You look without the look of the observer; you look without the value of the word and the measurement of yesterday. The look of love is different from the look of thought. One leads in a direction where thought cannot follow, and the other leads to separation, conflict, and sorrow.”
~Excerpt from J Krishnamurti: The Only Revolution
