listening

Krishnamurti: Out of Silence Look and Listen

~ Tom Das ~ Leave a comment

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Continuing the series of Krishnamurti posts this week, the following is written by Jiddu Krishnamurti, taken from BULLETIN 4, 1969:

Out of silence look and listen. Silence is not the ending of noise; the incessant clamour of the mind and heart does not end in silence; it is not a product, a result of desire, nor is it put together by will.

The whole of consciousness is a restless, noisy movement within the borders of its own making. Within this border silence or stillness is but the momentary ending of the chatter; it is the silence touched by time. Time is memory and to it silence is short or long; it can measure. Give to it space and continuity, and then it becomes another toy.

But this is not silence. Everything put together by thought is within the area of noise, and thought in no way can make itself still. It can build an image of silence and conform to it, worshipping it, as it does with so many other images it has made, but its formula of silence is the very negation of it; its symbols are the very denial of reality.

Thought itself must be still for silence to be. Silence is always now, as thought is not. Thought, always being old, cannot possibly enter into that silence which is always new. The new becomes the old when thought touches it.

Out of this silence, look and talk.

The true anonymity is out of this silence and there is no other humility. The vain are always vain, though they put on the garment of humility, which makes them harsh and brittle.

But out of this silence the word ‘love’ has a wholly different meaning. This silence is not out there but it is where the noise of the total observer is not.

J. Krishnamurti: The beauty of listening

~ Tom Das ~ Leave a comment

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‘The beauty of listening lies in being highly sensitive to everything about you: to the ugliness, to the dirt, to the squalor, to the poverty about you, and also to the dirt, to the disorder, to the poverty of one’s own being.
When you are aware of both, then there is no effort, that is, when there is an awareness which is without choice, then there is no effort.’
Jiddu Krishnamurti, The Collected Works, Vol. XV, page 61 ‘Choiceless Awareness’

Tom’s Comments:
Not trying to avoid the bad and ugly, not striving to reach the good and beautiful, the ego is no longer at play. We come into contact with things as they are, reality, the living truth. We are no longer afraid of what is, we are no longer trying to escape ourselves.

Then we can see that which already is, and always has been. How can this be put into words? Try it and see for yourself, then you too will be beyond the need for these pathetic words.

J. Krishnamurti: How to truly listen

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‘I hope that you will listen, but not with the memory of what you already know; and this is very difficult to do. You listen to something, and your mind immediately reacts with its knowledge, its conclusions, its opinions, its past memories. It listens, inquiring for a future understanding.

Just observe yourself, how you are listening, and you will see that this is what is taking place. Either you are listening with a conclusion, with knowledge, with certain memories, experiences, or you want an answer, and you are impatient. You want to know what it is all about, what life is all about, the extraordinary complexity of life. You are not actually listening at all.

…you are listening with a conclusion, with knowledge…you want an answer, and you are impatient…You are not actually listening at all.

You can only listen when the mind is quiet, when the mind doesn’t react immediately, when there is an interval between your reaction and what is being said. Then, in that interval there is a quietness, there is a silence in which alone there is a comprehension which is not intellectual understanding.

You can only listen when the mind is quiet, when the mind doesn’t react immediately, when there is an interval between your reaction and what is being said.

If there is a gap between what is said and your own reaction to what is said, in that interval, whether you prolong it indefinitely, for a long period or for a few seconds – in that interval, if you observe, there comes clarity. It is the interval that is the new brain. The immediate reaction is the old brain, and the old brain functions in its own traditional, accepted, reactionary, animalistic sense.

When there is an abeyance of that, when the reaction is suspended, when there is an interval, then you will find that the new brain acts, and it is only the new brain that can understand, not the old brain’

Jiddu Krishnamurti, The Book of Life, October 21st

J. Krishnamurti: If you listen completely, there is no listener

~ Tom Das ~ 3 Comments

Krishnamurti young

Listen to those crows. Do listen. If you listen completely, is there a centre from which you are listening? Your ears are listening. There is the noise, there is the vibration and all the rest of it, but there is no centre from which you are listening. There is attention.
Therefore if you listen completely, there is no listener; there is only the fact of that noise. To listen completely you must be silent, and that silence is not something in thought, created by thought.
When you listen to that crow that is making the noise before it goes to sleep, so completely that there is no listener, you will see that there is no entity that says, ‘I am listening.’
Jiddu Krishnamurti, The Collected Works, Vol. XVI, p.59 ‘Choiceless Awareness’ Bombay 1966

 

Tom’s Comments:

Listening is the same as seeing. It goes to the heart of the teachings, it is a complete teaching in itself. If this one teaching is fully understood, penetrated through and through, then that is the entire teaching.

When you truly listen, you are simple seeing things as they actually are, not as you project or interpret them to be. Without the verbiage of your mind with all its opinions and judgements, you see life as it truly is.

This is the living truth. And in that truth it can be seen there is no doer or thinker. The entity that we take ourselves to be can be directly seen to be false – it never existed apart from in our thoughts and imagination.

Bulldozer spirituality

~ Tom Das ~ 3 Comments

malet egg

To verbally espouse and preach spiritual things can be deeply inappropriate:
Do you tell someone who is suicidal,
That their problems are due to a false notion of self?
Or that all phenomena are insubstantial, formless and everchanging?
Or that like the desert mirage, life and its problems are a dream?

It would be like telling someone who is choking that ‘ALL IS ONE‘. Continue reading →