Tag Archives: Krishnamurti

another one bites the dust

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It’s taken some getting used to – for a silver-haired ex educator for whom utterances of the public variety used to be carefully crafted and justifiable – not to mention purposeful – but I can now happily admit that I haven’t a clue why words get posted when they do, or why they wish to be expressed.  I have learned to live with helpless hopeless unknowingness and what’s more, to trust it totally.  So when I wrote about compassion and big sticks I was curious to know what that was all about.

Compassion.  The concept can be, like love, a loaded gun smoking with fluffy, sentimental do-good notions.  That’s why Buddhists spend a great deal of time clarifying its ruthless qualities.  I’m not a Buddhist (or anything else) but I do appreciate that the most compassionate action is probably that which helps to unstitch non-negotiable stories that are unhelpful and cause suffering for sentient beings.  This was the context in which HH the Dalai Lama spoke of the big stick at Krishnamurti’s memorial service, for K could be very uncompromising when it came to outing our largely unconscious and heavily guarded conditioning.

I confess to a kind of exhilaration these days when Life shines its Light straight into a dusty corner of the archive and reveals a well-wrapped story that hasn’t been opened up for scrutiny.  The stick needs to be at-hand, for I know that unpicking the threads will be no facile matter – one is, after all, unpicking the fabric of the wee-me.  I also know it will be the most compassionate thing that I can do for myself – and most importantly, I know that I’m not doing a darned thing.  Life ITself is meeting and welcoming ITs own creations in mind, and airing out the cupboard, so to speak.

I wonder if you have ever had the experience of enduring a long-standing health problem, perhaps involving much discomfort and pain, and in spite of it all, resisting a form of treatment because of a negative story being held in the mind – and usually affirmed by one’s N&D?  Have you stubbornly stuck to notions that you ought to be able to heal yourself ‘naturally’ (as if anything in Creation could ultimately be un-natural), that if you just buy more remedies, change your diet and lifestyle you’ll get the better of it?  I wonder if you’ve lived with the subtle guilt that comes from long-term ill health and the feeling that your friends wish you’d get over it?  I wonder if you’ve had a story running that if you could just change your story the problem would vanish?  Any, maybe all, of these approaches can provide effective relief with time.  But the big stick of compassion doesn’t tolerate time.

Compassion wants to act in the instant, when your symptoms are so unbearable that you don’t even want to know about tomorrow.  Compassion is ultimate loving kindness towards beloved Life in this moment without regard for consequence.  Compassion is Life saving ITself in the only moment it knows.  The Present.

The big stick stirred up a story here this last week.  Poked its eyes out.  Returned it to Emptiness.

The details are irrelevant; the dynamics are universal.  Person ails but resists the remedy.  Person has story running about the nasty remedy.  Person’s condition worsens.  Person won’t take the medicine.  Person’s condition becomes critical, unbearable.  Person is on knees begging for help.  Compassion hands out the medicine.  Person grabs it, takes it.  Lives.  Heals.  Person is grateful beyond expression.  Compassion smiles that smile, the one where you know you are Loved beyond measure.  Person suddenly notices the label on the little pill:  Beloved.

– miriam louisa

to surrender to the truth of yourself, is to surrender to love

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My title is stolen from Gangaji, with respectful thanks.

I’ve had an interesting few days since the last post. Interesting as in wondrous, as in OMG, and as in “what am I gonna do with this?”

(The last post. Crikey – isn’t that what they play at funerals?)

In this case it was a poem by Mary Oliver about Buddha’s last instruction imploring his friends and followers to “Make of yourself a light.”

Make of yourself a light. My beloved teacher Krishnamurti issued the same urgent invitation – “Be a Light unto yourself!” – and if anyone was a stand-up example of a being who put everything – even godhood – behind him to be his own Light, it was K.

Make of yourself a light. Be a Light unto yourself. I’ve been sitting with this and I confess it no longer makes sense to me. How can I be a Light unto ‘myself’ when what I am cannot be separated from the Light of Beingness? Clearly both K and the Buddha were speaking to the individual. But this Light that ‘I’ is, has no experienced beginning or end and is indivisible and changeless and inescapable. It’s meaningless to imagine that I am separate from it and need to make myself one with it. No disrespect to my teachers, but … why didn’t they come upfront and say something like “Be the changeless Light that you are?”

A Light. A Light that knows all other light as its shadow. This is the truth of what I am and I cannot argue with it. I can only dive deeper and deeper into it, to “surrender to it” as Gangaji writes.

And what a strange synchronicity: at the same time I have been becoming acutely, painfully aware that the bottom line for me now is Love. It’s the only thing that really, truly, interests me – Divine Love. Paradoxically, it seems to be most intimately known by its absence.

In the mix of moving and settling and re-establishing relationships I have been neglecting the Beloved. The zafu has been waiting, the Gap has been beckoning. To the extent that I have procrastinated I have felt the subtle ache of estrangement. Finally it could no longer be tolerated and I pinched my nose, held my breath and dropped into Point Zero – Zafuland.

Beloved Lover was there; lovingness and lightness and laughter were there.

No buts, no maybe’s. Love lies awaiting when ‘I’  make the turn – when Unlit Light makes the turn. There were tears. There was contrition. Lover simply laughs: “No big deal babe!”

Love is like good bread – it must be baked fresh every day.

Krishnamurti used to say “Enlightenment is a Light that is continually lighting itself.”

Yes. I go forth with a massive box of matches …

~ miriam louisa

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