Monday, May 30, 2011

This is It

Liberation is not about abandoning attachment to life, pleasures of the senses and fleeting experience, nor about being free from physicality and the limitations of this physical body. Nor is it frowning upon the necessity for pragmatism, personal ambition and living in comfort. It's about accepting quite simply that this life is all there ever is, and we are here eternally without exit. There truly is no need to transcend the wheel of endless birth, death and rebirth... Why should we?

My spin on Eastern Philosophy and beliefs about rebirth and immortality goes something like this.. There are no higher or lower realms, human consciousness is the highest (and lowest) evolutionary state, with heaven and hell (and everywhere in between) existing solely in the minds of men. There exists no real evidence of sentient life anywhere but on Planet Earth, thus we eternally return here and continue to work on getting it right, till there is peace and harmony, love and compassion, and all that is holy, sacred, ruling over the Earth.

JDZ

Saturday, May 21, 2011

Going Beyond Words

To understand each other, I think it is necessary that we should not be caught in words; because, a word like God, for example, may have a particular meaning for you, while for me it may represent a totally different formulation, or no formulation at all. So it is almost impossible to communicate with each other unless both of us have the intention of understanding and going beyond mere words.

The word freedom generally implies being free from something, does it not? It ordinarily means being free from greed, from envy, from nationalism, from anger, from this or that. Whereas, freedom may have quite another meaning, which is a sense of being free; and I think it is very important to understand this meaning. After all, the mind is made up of words, amongst other things. Now, can the mind be free of the word envy? Experiment with this and you will see that words like God, truth, hate, envy, have a profound effect on the mind. And can the mind be both neurologically and psychologically free of these words?

If it is not free of them, it is incapable of facing the fact of envy. When the mind can look directly at the fact which it calls 'envy,' then the fact itself acts much more swiftly than the mind's endeavor to do something about the fact. As long as the mind is thinking of getting rid of envy through the ideal of non-envy, and so on, it is distracted, it is not facing the fact; and the very word envy is a distraction from the fact. The process of recognition is through the word; and the moment I recognize the feeling through the word, I give continuity to that feeling.

J.Krishnamurti - The Book of Life