Daily Quote, Thursday May 28, 2009.

Good foggy morning from Halifax!

K uses a great analogy here to get across the idea of a meditative mind. Through constant self-awareness there is a constant revolution in the mind. Every moment is a total movement. There is no moment of Becoming, just an almost permanent state of Being as everything that makes for non-Being is flushed through the mind in the flow of continual attention.

This sounds easy because it has a nice logic to it but the actual practice is a different matter. Most practices like Yoga advocate something a little different. Arguing that Being is within us as the Atman/Purusha, Yoga uses practice to become what we already are but can't see right now. There is a certain gradualness to Yoga that is not present in K, who says that a state of Being can come immediately through negative inquiry, which is another way of talking about attention to the activity of the mind. So K has a much narrower idea of practice that the yogis and so it's not really practice as practice has in some ways an idea of progess behind it.

Have to get on now. Myabe tomorrow's quote will bring us back to consider this again.

K once described his own mind as a mill pond, so that if a thought gets thrown in to create a temporary disturbance, the ripples quickly move out from that point but then settle again quickly. Most people's minds are constantly churning like the mill! This came from Ravi Ravindra's book on Krishnamurti, 'Two Birds in One Tree', which is definitely worth reading.

You actually have to die to everything you know.

You actually have to die to everything you know - to your memories, to your miseries, to your pleasures. And, when there is no jealousy, no envy, no greed, no torture of despair, then you will know what love is and you will come upon that which may be called sacred; therefore, sacredness is the essence of religion. You know, a great river may become polluted as it flows past a town, but if the pollution isn't too great, the river cleanses itself as it goes along and within a few miles it is again clean, fresh, pure. Similarly, when once the mind comes upon this sacredness, then every act is a cleansing act; through its very movement the mind is making itself innocent and, therefore, it is not accumulating.

A mind that has discovered this sacredness is in constant revolution - not economic or social revolution, but an inner revolution through which it is endlessly purifying itself. Its action is not based on some idea or formula. As the river, with a tremendous volume of water behind it, cleanses itself as it flows, so does the mind cleanse itself when once it has come upon this religious sacredness.

Collected Works, Vol. XV - 244