I prefer something which is wrong but vivid, to anything right but dead

In my quest to still my inner prompting, I came across Helena Blavatsky when I was 22.

Although rather confusingly written, her book Isis Unveiled gave me some clues, which then corresponded with my worldview…

Now… She is the founder of The Teosophical Movement. Although very popular in those days, many considered Helena Blavatsky a counterfeit.

Was she a fraud…or not?… Who cares after all?…- as long as this movement has directly or indirectly brought forth or influenced such great spirits like Kandinsky – who took inspiration in his abstract painting from Leadbeater’s books -, than another giant, Russian composer Alexander Scriabin, who was highly impacted by Blavatsky’s ideas, not to mention Jiddu Krishnamurti – one of the greatest thinkers of the last century who died in 1981 – who was found and educated by Alice Bailey and Leadbeater.

So again…fraud or not, there must have been something very powerful and fruitful in this teaching to have spawned such magnificent talents like the above mentioned.

So I´d rather prefer a vivid sham, a warped truth, so to say, to a pertinent but still-born academical thesis, which engenders nothing but despondency and doldrums…- like art and contemporary music today.

It’s not healthy to uncritically adjust to a sick society

The problem with man today is that he loves so much his sickness – no wonder, disease is his safety – inasmuch as he not only repudiates Sanity, but violently thwarts it.

Wonderful world:

Unless you consent to be sick, you become a misfit.

The moment you are free

you obviously become a danger to society, to organized religion, to all the rotten things that exist about you.

It is only the free mind that will find out what is true, it is only the free mind that can be creative; and it is essential, in a culture of this kind, that importance be given, not to the following of a pattern, a doctrine, or a tradition, but to allowing the mind to be creative. But the mind can be creative only when it is free from conditioning, and such freedom is not easily come by; you have to work extraordinarily hard for it.

J. Krishnamurti

 

You´ll never truly be aware, as long as you are preoccupied with your own importance

The basis of our thinking is craving, which creates the self, and thought expresses itself in worldliness, in possessive love, and in the belief of self-continuity.

What happens to a mind that is occupied with itself and its expressions, consciously or unconsciously? It will limit itself and so give importance to itself. Thought, thus occupied, must engender confusion, conflict, sorrow. Being caught in its own net, it tries to escape into the future or into those activities that assure immediate forgetfulness, the so-called social service, worship of state or person, racial and social antagonism, and so on. Thus thought gets more and more entangled in the net of its own desires and escapes.

As long as thought is preoccupied with its own personal importance and continuity, it is incapable of becoming aware of its own process.

J. Krishnamurti

Memory Negates Love

Is it possible to love without thinking?

What do I mean by thinking? Thinking is a response to memories of pain or pleasure. There is no thinking without the residue which incomplete experience leaves.

Love is different from emotion and feeling. Love cannot be brought into the field of thought; whereas feeling and emotion can be brought. Love is a flame without smoke, ever fresh, creative, joyous.

Such love is dangerous to society, to relationship.

So, thought steps in, modifies, guides it, legalizes it, puts it out of danger; then one can live with it. Do you not know that when you love someone, you love the whole of mankind? Do you not know how dangerous it is to love man? Then, there is no barrier, no nationality; then, there is no craving for power and position, and things assume their values.

Such a man is a danger to society.

For the being of love, the process of memory must come to an end. Memory comes into being only when experience is not fully, completely understood. Memory is only the residue of experience; it is the result of a challenge which is not fully comprehended. Life is a process of challenge and response. Challenge is always new but the response is ever old. This response, which is conditioning, which is the result of the past, must be understood and not disciplined or condemned away. It means living each day anew, fully and completely. This complete living is possible only when there is love, when your heart is full, not with the words nor with the things made by the mind. Only where there is love, memory ceases; then every movement is a rebirth.

 J. Krishnamurti, The Book of Life

Action in relation to time breeds conflict

Only Love – which is not a slave to time – is action with no conflict.

J. Krishnamurti

Freedom from the desire of an answer is essential to the understanding of a problem

J. Krishnamurti

Godless Science and Organized Religion have crushed man´s soul

I am, what may be considered, a mystic.

If you are not acquainted with what mysticism is about, a mystic is essentially a person who has a direct understanding beyond the normally man-invented religions. Mysticism is the conscious awareness of the ultimate reality, divinity, or God, through direct experience, intuition, instinct or insight.

I was raised in the Christian Orthodox faith. But I don´t take this or any other creed for granted. I question every religious allegiance.

I definitely don´t ascribe any meaning to any dogma – the exoteric sense of every religion
is to me totally futile.

Now…I have pondered deeply over all these years.

I believe in Christ but not in Christianity. Intuitively I would totally discard this faith if it wasn´t for certain mystics like Meister Eckhart, Teresa of Avila or John of the Cross.

I am rather intimate with their writings and have found
meaningful answers in their words.

But throughout all these years, in the worst moments of crisis, none of them have been
of any real avail.
I had to face darkness on my own. The Christian precepts couldn´t save me. Only Zen, and above all Krishnamurti, have been my trustworthy companions in this dark night of the soul which – imagine – has been going on since I was 21.

First now, at 50, I am slowly coming out of it.

However, when I think of the Cathedral in Chartres, or, for that matter, other magnificent achievements in art or music in Europe ever since, I cannot possibly dismiss the very fact that the great spiritual legacy of Europe has directly derived from the Christian faith.

Undeniably, Europe and its culture is directly connected with Christianity.

Yet Christianity – I mean the very breath of it – is dead. Had it been alive, I wouldn´t have encountered this harsh darkness in my soul all these years.

Despite living in the “modern world”, never renouncing it, I somehow lived like a recluse, and God knows how I made it through. As I said, there was no one there to guide me.

Now, Faith is nothing you word about. It is a vivid breath, an ineffable emanation of sorts.
A presence…

And here I come to what I want to point out:

I saw this documentary about a Russian woman living by herself in the wilderness of Siberia. It is overwhelming: her simplicity, her strength and endurance, her otherworldly smile, depth and wisdom…Really, it was staggering, I have never somehow seen this kind of Light anywhere…except maybe in certain paintings of the grand masters.

To quote her: “The godless science which has crushed man´s soul“…

She is a vivid evidence that Christianity, beyond its dogmatic flaws, is not
some kind of superstitious concoct, but something very “real”.

And it is here that I come to bluntly disagree with Krishnamurti who claims that man has invented churches, rituals and gods, as being nonsense.

The deep essence of Christianity is indeed no figment of some deluded minds, even if,
more often than not, it appears to be that way.

The most difficult task is to dig so deep back to the sources, into its primordial “breath” without turning into a hermit.
Living in the world, but not being of this world… – inhumanly precarious predicament.

 

For the ones interested to watch the documentary:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tt2AYafET68

In total Attention, there is no place for concepts, formulas, or memories.

J. Krishnamurti

WE ARE AFRAID TO LIVE

…that´s why the Past, in the form of ideas has become so utterly important.