Daily Quote, Sunday August 30, 2009.

Good morning,

The rain just stopped so it seemed like the right moment to get up!

Here is today's quote:

When are you conscious of being the 'me'?

What is it to be self-centred? When are you conscious of being the 'me'? As I have suggested often during these talks, don't merely listen to me verbally, but use the words as a mirror in which you see your own mind in operation. If you merely listen to my words, then you are very superficial, and your reactions will be very superficial.

But if you can listen, not to understand me or what I am saying, but to see yourself in the mirror of my words, if you use me as a mirror in which you discover your own activity, then it will have a tremendous and profound effect. But if you merely listen as in political or any other talks, then I am afraid you will miss the whole implication of the discovery for yourself of that truth which dissolves the centre of the 'me'.

The Collected Works, Vol. VI - 321

Here are my reflections.

It's very interesting to look at how you approach reading Krishnamurti. Many of us in the study group may have approached his teachings a mystery to unravel, a system to decode, or as a network of ideas to master. I think I did this when I first read him. It was the same with reading Derrida: it was only sometime much later that it started to be something more that a skill I had learned.

In other words, it's easy to think that Krishnamurti's teachings are all "out there" and beyond us and that it is knowledge we have to obtain before we can "apply" Krishnamurti. Isn't this such a traditional way of learning about something or someone? The idea here is that we don't know about his ideas and that we have to raise ourselves up?

When we just try to know what he's saying isn't there a distance between us and the words? What we are looking for is real understanding, not knowledge, and this can only come when the words are taken into us and used as a mirror. When we just want to remember what he says so that the knowledge lasts, then there is a big problem.

To really listen to or read Krishnamurti is to feel those words you hear or read on the page in the light of your own self-awareness. I often say this in my yoga classes: just take what I'm saying about inquiry into your own muscles and joints, and in that feeling-sense forget what I'm saying, and just observe your reaction to that feeling - the motives, uncertainties and ambitions that you bring into it. Then the words disolve.

Best wishes

Robert