seeing with the totality of your mind and heart
A selection from the writings of J Krishnamurti.
The earth was the heavens and the heavens the earth. Everything was alive and bursting with colour and colour was god, not the god of man. The hills became transparent, every rock and boulder was without weight, floating in colour and the distant hills were blue, the blue of all the seas and the sky of every clime. The ripening rice fields were intense pink and green, a stretch of immediate attention. And the road that crossed the valley was purple and white, so alive that it was one of the rays that raced across the sky. You were of that light, burning, furious, exploding, without shadow, without root and word. And as the sun went further down, every colour became more violent, more intense and you were completely lost, past all recalling. It was an evening that had no memory.
– Krishnamurti’s Notebook
We were saying the other day how very important it is to observe. It is quite an art to which one must give a great deal of attention. We only see very partially, we never see anything completely, with the totality of our mind, or with the fullness of our heart. And unless we learn this extraordinary art, it seems to me that we shall be functioning, living, through as very small part of our mind, through a small segment of the brain. We never see anything completely, for various reasons, because we are so concerned with our own problems, or we are so conditioned, so heavily burdened with belief, with tradition, with the past, that this actually prevents us from seeing or listening.
We never see a tree, we see the tree through the image that we have of it, the concept of the tree; but the concept, the knowledge, the experience, is entirely different from the actual tree. Here one is surrounded by a great many trees, fortunately, and if you look around you, as the speaker is going on with the subject of seeing, if you actually look at it, you will find how extraordinarily difficult it is to see it all, so that no image, no screen, comes between the seeing and the actual fact. Please do this, don’t watch me – look at the tree, find out whether you can see it completely. By completely I mean with the totality of your mind and heart, not a fragment of it …
– Krishnamurti To Himself
Early in the morning when the sun was not yet up and the dew [was] on the grass, still in bed, lying quietly, without any thought or movement, there was a seeing, not the superficial seeing with the eyes but seeing through the eyes from behind the head. The eyes and from behind the head were only the instrument through which the immeasurable past was seeing into the immeasurable space that had no time. And later, still in bed, there was a seeing in which all life seemed to be contained.
– Krishnamurti’s Notebook
We never look deeply into the quality of the tree; we never really touch it, feel its solidity, its rough bark and hear the sound that is part of the tree. Not the sound of wind through the leaves, not the breeze of a morning that flutters the leaves, but its own sound, the sound of the truck and the silent sound of the roots. You must be extraordinarily sensitive to hear the sound. This sound is not the noise of the world, nor the noise of the chattering of the mind, not the vulgarity of human quarrels and human warfare but sound as part of the universe.
– Krishnamurti To Himself
There was, as one woke up this morning early, a flash of ‘seeing’, ‘looking’, that seems to be going on and on for ever. It started nowhere and went nowhere, but in that seeing all sight was included and all things. It was a sight that went beyond the streams, the hills, the mountains, past the earth and the horizon and the people. In this seeing, there was penetrating light and incredible swiftness. The brain could not follow it nor could the mind contain it. It was pure light and a swiftness that knew no resistance.
– Krishnamurti’s Notebook
Krishnamurti’s Notebook
– J Krishnamurti
The act of seeing is the only truth.
– J Krishnamurti
Photograph: Tree, Lake District, by Friedrich Grohe
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