Daily Quote, Friday August 14, 2009.

Good morning everyone,

After some absence, the blog is back. It's great to be back too.

Here are my reflections on todays quote and then the quote itself is underneath.

I'm going to stay with Krishnamurti's teachings for a while on the blog, so if you keep dropping back every morning you'll see the ideas develop.

Feel free to ask questions if you'd like me to expand a little on anything that catches your interest. Just leave a comment on the blog.

Best wishes

Robert

Krishnamurti uses the phrase, 'the mirror of relationship' and the technqiue of negative inquiry, to identify what is necessary if we are to live at peace. Surprisingly for many people, perhaps, it is not to imagine some peaceful ideal and plan for this; Krishnamurti exposes this as just the creation of thought as memory. This ideal is the path of postiive inquiry, which is simply an avoidance of ourself in our violence and conflict. Peace begins by asking ourselves, why am I looking at this person - with whom I am in relationship - the way I am?; seeing your lack of impartiality, the possibility of just looking and being fully present with them is revealed.

Today's Quote:

The world of relationship.

Now, there is a different way of working, which is to inquire into ourselves and to know exactly what is going on within the field of the mind, not in order to gain some reward, but for the very simple reason that there can obviously be no end to misery in the world as long as the mind does not understand itself.

And, after all, the world in which we live is not the enormous world of political activities, of scientific research, and so on; it is the little world of the family, the world of relationship between two people at home or in the office, between husband and wife, parents and children, teacher and pupil, lawyer and client, policeman and citizen.

That is the little world we all live in, but we want to escape from that world of relationship and go out into an extraordinary world which we have imagined and which does not really exist at all. If we do not understand the world of relationship and bring about a fundamental transformation there, we cannot possibly create a new culture, a different civilization, a peaceful world. So it must start with ourselves.

The world demands an immense, a radical change, but it must begin with you and me; and we cannot bring about a real change in ourselves if we do not know the totality of our world of thoughts, of feelings, of actions, if we are not aware of ourselves from moment to moment. And you will see, if you are so aware, that the mind begins to free itself from all influences of the past.

After all, the mind is now the result of the past, and all thinking is a projection of the past, it is simply a response of the past to challenge, so merely to think of creating a new world will never bring a new world into being.

The Collected Works, Vol. X - 253