Life 08 (Jul 10 - Sep 10)

[winston]

What is the most important lesson the scriptures teach us?

The scriptures direct and counsel everyone. People yield to delusion and become one with the darkness caused by false values and attachment to the unreal - the “me” and “mine”.

But scripture is the mother; she does not give up. She persists and pursues; she reminds people of their goal in order to ensure that they will be saved.

One need not drink the entire ocean to know its taste; placing just one drop on the tongue is enough. Similarly, it is impossible to understand all the contents of the scriptures.

It is enough if one grasps the important lesson that is elaborated therein and puts that lesson into practice. The lesson is: Constant thought of the Divine.

Source: radiosai.org

[winston]

What a strange thing is loneliness

What a strange thing is loneliness, and how frightening it is!

We never allow ourselves to get too close to it; and if by chance we do, we quickly run away from it.

We will do anything to escape from loneliness, to cover it up. Our conscious and unconscious preoccupation seems to be to avoid it or to overcome it.

Avoiding and overcoming loneliness are equally futile; though suppressed or neglected, the pain, the problem, is still there.

You may lose yourself in a crowd, and yet be utterly lonely; you may be intensely active, but loneliness silently creeps upon you; put the book down, and it is there.

Amusements and drinks cannot drown loneliness; you may temporarily evade it, but when the laughter and the effects of alcohol are over, the fear of loneliness returns.

You may be ambitious and successful, you may have vast power over others, you may be rich in knowledge, you may worship and forget yourself in the rigmarole of rituals; but do what you will, the ache of loneliness continues.

You may exist only for your son, for the Master, for the expression of your talent; but like the darkness, loneliness covers you.

You may love or hate, escape from it according to your temperament and psychological demands; but loneliness is there, waiting and watching, withdrawing only to approach again.

- Commentaries on Living Series I, Loneliness

Source: jkrishnamurthi.com

[winston]

What is the barometer of a good human being?

Keep the mind and the intellect serene and sacred, free from dirt.

When thoughts and feelings are impure and agitated, you cannot be calm and happy. When the mind is polluted, so are our reactions.

To keep the mind clean, you must analyse sympathetically situations involving others and their activities, and then decide on how to react to them.

You should not rush to draw conclusions. Adopting the reactions of others is certainly not desirable. You must resolve on any action only after intelligent discrimination and inquiry.

“Some course of action is being followed by someone; so, we shall follow that course ourselves” - this attitude is mean and demeaning, it is a sign of weakness.

It is the consequence of basic ignorance. Only sheeps behave in that manner.

Source: radiosai.org

[winston]

What is the most desirable of all?

It is an arduous process for people to become aware of the One that is their core.

People are of the essence of food. The gross body is the product of the food consumed. But within everyone there is a subtler force, an inner vibration named Vital Air.

The mind within is subtler still, and deeper and subtler than the mind is the Intellect.

Beyond the intellect, people have in them the subtlest sheath of Spiritual Bliss.

When people delve into this region of Spiritual Bliss, they can experience the reality, the Divinity. That Divine awareness is indeed the most desirable.


Source: radiosai.org

[behappyalways]

I found this song suitable for this topic ^^....Hope Winston don't move it elsewhere



許冠傑 - 浪子心聲 2002

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-EQBNLm1EI

[winston]

Can we live for what we actually are?

So, can you and I, live with what we actually are?

Being dull, envious, fearful,thinking that we have tremendous affection when we have not, getting easily hurt, flattered, bored, can we live with these actualities, neither accepting nor denying, but observing, living with them without becoming morbid, depressed or elated?

Then you will find that one of the major reasons for fear is that we don't want to live with what we are.

- Saanen, 5th Public Talk 18th July 1967

Source: jkrishnamurthi.com

[winston]

Why should we not mirror others' behaviour when we get hurt?

The ideas and pronouncements of others may often be personal, or may induce feelings of hatred between people.

Why should we accept them as ours and mould our feelings accordingly?

We should not try to shape our feelings and patterns of behaviour to conform to those of others. We must not relinquish our faith, our experience and our innate holiness.

Born as human beings, moving about as educated persons, yet foolishly following others as sheep do and polluting the minds with ideas borrowed from others are things to be avoided.

Source: radiosai.org

[winston]

The observer is the observed

Don't deal with sorrow as your particular precious stuff. It is shared by all humanity. Deal with it not as your particular sorrow, your private quiet sorrow, but as the sorrow of all human beings, whether you are a man or a woman, rich or poor, sophisticated or at the height of your excellence.

Please don't deal with all these factors like fear, pleasure, sorrow, love, and so on as something separate from each other. You must approach this whole thing wholly, not fragmentarily.

If you approach it fragmentarily, you will never solve it. So, look at greed, pain, sorrow, as a whole movement of life, not something different from life. This is our daily life.

To find whether there is an end to all this - to misery, to conflict, pain, sorrow and fear -one must be able to perceive them, one must be able to be aware of them.

We must understand what is perception, how to look. Is the observer who looks at all this - the poverty, the loneliness, the anxiety, the uncertainty, the suffering different from all that or is the observer all that? I will explain this.

We have separated the `me', who is the observer, from that which he is observing. I say I am suffering and I say to myself that suffering must end, and to end it, I must suppress it, I must escape from it, I must follow a certain system.

So, I am different from fear, from pleasure, from pain, sorrow. Are you different from all that? Or you may think that there is something in you which is totally different from all that.

If you think that, it is part of your thought, and therefore there is nothing sacred there. So, is the observer different from the observed? When you are angry, envious, brutal, violent, are you not all that? The meditator is the meditation. Please sir, think about it.

The observer is the observed. See the importance of this. Before, we have divided the observer from the observed. That means there is a division between that and the other. So, there was conflict.

You could then control it, suppress it, fight it, but if you are that, if you are sorrow, if you are fear, if you are pleasure, you are the conglomeration of all this.

To realize that fact is a tremendous reality; therefore, there is no division, and therefore there is no conflict; the observer is the observed.

Then a totally different action takes place, a totally different chemical action takes place.

- Talks in Bombay 3rd Public Talk 29th January, 1983

Source: jkrishnamurthi.com

[winston]

Attachment

We are the things we possess, we are that to which we are attached.

Attachment has no nobility. Attachment to knowledge is not different from any other gratifying addiction.

Attachment is self-absorption, whether at the lowest or at the highest level. Attachment is self-deception, it is an escape from the hollowness of the self.

The things to which we are attached - property, people, ideas - become all important, for without the many things which fill its emptiness, the self is not.

The fear of not being makes for possession; and fear breeds illusion, the bondage to conclusions. Conclusions, material or ideational, prevent the fruition of intelligence, the freedom in which alone reality can come into being; and without this freedom, cunning is taken for intelligence.

The ways of cunning are always complex and destructive. It is this self-protective cunning that makes for attachment; and when attachment causes pain, it is this same cunning that seeks detachment and finds pleasure in the pride and vanity of renunciation.

The understanding of the ways of cunning, the ways of the self, is the beginning of intelligence.

- Commentaries on Living Series I Chapter 45


Source: jkrishnamurthi.com

[winston]

Love is not something to be used

You may hide emptiness under the word "love," but when the object of your love is no longer there or does not respond, then you are aware of emptiness, you are frustrated.

We use the word "love" as a means of escaping from ourselves, from our own insufficiency. We cling to the one we love, we are jealous, we miss him when he is not there and are utterly lost when he dies; and then we seek comfort in some other form, in some belief, in some substitute.

Is all this love? Love is not an idea, the result of association; love is not something to be used as an escape from our own wretchedness and when we do so use it, we make problems which have no solutions.

- Commentaries on Living Series I Chapter 42 Loneliness

Source: MarketFN.com