Open the Door

 Our daily life – going to work, coming back home, sex, quarrels, anxiety, competition – is rather superficial and empty. We are discontented, and out of this discontent we escape or do things to become contented. So our life is a very superficial, light affair. We can carry on like this until we die, and most people do, accumulating a little property, a car or two, and so on. When you see that, you say, ‘It’s all right, but it isn’t good enough.’ There is music, paintings, the mountains, the rivers, the trees, the squalor, the splendour of the sky and so on, and we say, ‘Yes, it’s all right, up to a certain point.’ Don’t you feel that you want to open a door that will give a new freshness, a new vitality, a new energy, a new beauty, a tremendous view to the whole of existence?

From Public Discussion 6, Saanen, 9 August 1964

Jiddu Krishnamurti

Thich Nhat Hanh - Depend on Your Innermost Being Alone

Beyond Buddhist ideas on interdependence, as everyday ordinary humans, we come to the essential spiritual teachings and practice. A refreshingly different perspective conversely claiming “I am indeed an island unto myself”, yet inseparable from the great ocean surrounding myself and all islands; and here I am divinely connected and take ultimate refuge. 

JDZ

2/5/22

Count Your Inner Blessings

What we call ‘pessimistic’ is often in fact just realism in response to that which is outside of our control and subject to an endless battle of will, individual and collective. It could be argued that Schopenhauer was the first philosopher in the Western world to fully grasp and teach Eastern ways. Getting back to the basics and re-learning the lost art of simple contentment with life as it is, here now.

Jdz

The Great Work of your Life

Discovering your Dharma and creating the right daily conditions to “show up” every day. The Bhagavad Gita serves as an essential guide to knowing and acting upon your highest spiritual-earthly purpose. 

“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you”.

The Gospel of Thomas 

JDZ

To Thine Own Self Be True

 

Excerpts on self-actualization according to Soren Kierkegaard, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and Abraham Maslow. 

The Pathless Path

Brilliant incorporation and illustration of various Eastern Wisdom teachings that point to primordial Awareness, and Unity of the All-Inclusive Consciousness. “Be still and know, be in motion and know”. 

Practice in self-deconstruction and deliberate practice is essential, beyond merely witnessing and understanding this film on Samadhi.

“Wisdom says I AM nothing, Love says I AM everything, and in between these my life flows”

Nisargadatta Maharaj

To ‘Die’ Freely is to Live Fully

Have you found out what you are? What are you? You are the property, the bank account, the furniture, the carpet, ideas, quarrels, pleasures, despairs, the agony of one’s own life, the contradiction, revolt, discontent, longing for something beautiful to happen. It is a life so lonely, isolated, in which there is no relationship at all, in which there is no love, no beauty, no vastness, no space. That is what you are, and you want that to go on, and you will go on if you think it is worthwhile. What is immortality then, and what is innocence? Can the mind that goes on in routine, weariness, despair, loneliness, with all the misery and confusion, be innocent? Can such a mind be immortal? Is mortality only in the field of memory? The immortal is a state in which time is not. But we are of time – all the pleasures and the pains of youth, the memories of middle age and old age, and the agony of disease and pain. All that is you, and you want that to go on and be made immortal. See the sorrow of it, a mind that is wanting to go on. Only when there is an ending is there a new beginning. Die every day to everything – and we mean to everything, to every pleasure and pain, to all the bitterness and cynicism – to die freely, happily to the past every day, which means never to accumulate. Then the mind is free. Such a mind then is aware of the immortal. From Public Talk 5 in Amsterdam, 14 May 1969 J.Krishnamurti