With Ramana and Krishnamurti (3) on the Coastal Path

Returning to an earlier time – August 1991, and my first Pwllderi holiday:  meditations on Ramana and Krishnamurti, their dialogue in my inner life, within the coastal landscape.  This post concludes with my meeting with AJ and what was to become the Ramana Foundation.

I was born with Sun in Capricorn and full-Moon in Cancer into a family of travelers along that spiritual coastal path.   The coastal path is Sadhana.  Capricorn is land and Cancer is the tide where ocean meets the land;  the songs of old age and infancy in humanity.

**

Pebbles

20 August 1991

Last week I took my old canvas tent, two old sleeping bags and my bike to the Pembrokeshire coast, to explore a beckoning terrain.  The sun shone, the breeze blew, and one day a great gust of sea-mist rolled in and tumbled everywhere among the rocks.  I pitched base at Pwllderi Youth Hostel on the high cliff of a bay whose arms embrace the setting sun.

There is a way of life to explore, when tired and climbing a steep path, or pushing my heavy bike up the long hill above Fishguard.  What is it?

“Lean back into the present moment, into the Now.”

An exhausting dissipation of energy otherwise, strives ahead.  This instruction made me smile.  I carried quite a lot of luggage – my house – on the bike.  So I could lean back on that quite literally, while riding.  To lean back metaphysically, slows down, even halts time.  When I strive and struggle, I ache, I become blind, I want it to be over – I am immured in the toils of competitive pain.  But when I rest into the NOW, what is there?

The relationship of foot to earth, yielding.  The perfume of stones, peat and flowers.  An alertness to maintain – the value of life;  indulgent smile at my body’s efforts, aches and pains, giving due praise for small successes, encouraging her to the next enticing horizon … a dialogue develops.

You need not try so hard.  A way is found, over and into the steepness of that path, which flows and rests into itself.   Thus, my legs taking the brunt of sudden and continuous strenuous exercise ached, complained and wobbled, but I was hardly ever out of breath.

I met a guy right at the end of the great Dinosaur headland.  He had ventured down onto rocks I considered to be my own domain, and he complimented me on my “daring”.  This appreciative audience inspired me to bound up the cliff like a goat – all systems, all rhythms suddenly connect.  The greatest stimulant is display.

To lean back into the present moment.  Into Now?

**

Vesica

Similarly, whenever necessary to bring the bodymind to heel (continually!) from various futile, complaint-filled and absent wanderings of her own – COME BACK, MIND!  Come into “Here”.   Lean into, sink into Here.   It is like being poured into a vessel.   Falling from her normal absent musings, feature articles and defiant or sad political lobbyings into silent perception of the landscape around – a flower begins to open.  Yes:  a silvery light of being from within, dewy and infinite.

A drop of water, a bud to open, a lens – the vesica in the overlap of two circles expands or contracts with the degree of focus.   It is hidden but real.  This path leads through heather and grey stones over a high volcanic tump that rises out of the sea.   Strumble Lighthouse will soon appear from behind another.  The air is bright with the sound of stone-chat birds that dart black and white, from fence post to furze.  The heather here is intense magenta violet;  never have I seen it so bright – shocking pink, sprinkled with the gold-dust perfume of gorse in flower in a dark-green prickly carpet.   What a garden!

Let it “collapse” inward …

Self-enquiry:  who is this dewy, infinite seeing space?  What travels over the rocky place of colour and the wide, blue sky?  A column of light?  Or an I? – what wordless query, collapsing inward to the silver space flowing outward, dwells in the marrow, you bony goat?

Vesica pisces

My body is a shell, the thin and ruinous walls of the citadel around this elusive essence of …

only one conduit, among a myriad other forms, for Spirit like a source of spring of water in the hillside … loving as a goat does, this rocky path of life, which absorbs an immensity of sky, sea and sunlight.   In the immensity, there sleep – for the sea is mirror calm today – a titanic display of rounded cliffs in pillow-lava, like the paws of a lion.  The tide plays slackly around those furled, slumbering claws.   The air is breathlessly still, mirror-still.  The Spirit which my fragmentary citadel carries more or less gamely, through varying degrees of obscurity and up and down, is a little puzzled.  She hopes for some stormy weather to lift the crests to play with.  She wonders also at the mighty quiescence, the glory of heather with gorse in flower, and smiles in fraternal greeting with other sun-burned toilers on the coastal path.  We travel under our burdens the way a snail transports its shell … in as straight a line as possible.

And here, lying across the path upon a quick descent to investigate an enormous crag of violet sandstone that rose from the sea further south, suddenly – a snake, coiled in a petrified quiver of attention.   It heard the questing thunder of my feet.  What kind of snake?  I stepped to one side and stood.   A viper?  Is that a V on its head?   It is quite large – the colour of bracken, golden and brown.  We wait in silence.   Suddenly the coil of the snake is ended.  It flows into the heather in a most admirable and gleaming ripple of straightness.   Like an arrow.

It is very difficult for me to let it all collapse inward … to a reality which soars, which flows an unworded totality of attention like the eagle;  like the snake;  thought as one uncostumed movement, a ripple into that land.  For I am taken with the beauty of the Scorpionic symbol – the concentrated water of life, its hidden “sting”.   The water in the well is still.   Eagle and snake converged spontaneously!

When I come to where land meets sea, and climb along the penumbra, I meet myself, and it is turbulent.  When the inner weather is really heavy and I can’t find my moorings, I get out Ramana Maharshi’s Forty Verses from my bum-bag, like sips of water along the trail.

Sacred geometry

**

Before I came here, to my holiday on the coastal path, I was very busy writing a long story about my encounter with Krishnamurti in 1974.   This led me to read, fascinated, Mary Lutyens’ biography of him.  There was so much about him, and thence about my father and my upbringing, that I didn’t know or understand.  I can now see and make peace with it all.

“Truth,” he said, “is a pathless land.”

This statement rings like a trumpet, through the cliffs and sea.

He was dissolving the ropes that tied him to the Theosophist Movement and expectation, which protected his body and the secret, sacred chamber of himself as a messenger, during his formative years.   The groomed Messiah turns into truth.  The ropes holding the boat from the open sea, were being dissolved by that very Sea in which they lay immersed.   They were old rope, old bondage.  The struggle of K’s “speaker” for freedom, was formative for that timbre.

What is K doing?  He is opening the egg from within, each instant.

It goes much deeper than cracking the shell of Mama Besant.  It applies to the evolving consciousness of the age.  Between the world wars, he was doing it.   It is flame and sword, but there is a lot of talking.   It is also protected by an angel or force of direction that has no name.  From the Theosophist Movement, heavy with description and dripping seaweed, it becomes the movement of itself.   The boat travels loose and free in the world.  The eagle sees through every film or mask laid over the unending question.

Movement is in and of the River.  It has no beginning nor end.  It is not for capture.  Truth is a pathless land.  It has no Master(s).

 

There is a photo of the young K dissolving the Order of the Star.  He looks as if he is cutting a rope to launch a ship.  It is also umbilical – the pain, the cleansing, the opening.   His “process” afflicted him periodically, through life.   It was a fire in the spine to prepare the ways.  It looks like the clearing of fog from capillaries and nervous ganglia for the increment of a potent “blood” – the cosmic dimension.  K was classically, a “channel”.   He didn’t stop being one;  he had some conflict with it.  It was his nature, his training, and the way he spoke.  His “process” is the dying agony of every moment to be born.   And thus into beauty.

It is interesting that K, when due to have an operation, gave a pint of two of his own blood first, in case he should need a transfusion! I am intensely moved by K’s real story, and his being.   He springs to life from the ambiguous authoritarian iconoclast in my childhood.

I see too, that with K there is so much talking;  and with Ramana there is so much silence.   If I put them on the Tree of Life, K is the warrior and Ramana the merciful of Self-enquiry.

It was essential for K to let go every hand that guided him, and never name the Source that channeled him – knowing simply that it is “sacred … beyond line or shape.   But Ramana remained close to the well of Advaita (non-duality) as to the old and sacred hill Arunachala, within whose caves he is born and flows like a stream.   He had no quarrel with the traditions or with his culture.

**

Krishnamurti at Saanen

K traveled over land and sea – a lover of mountains, rivers, flowers and wild creatures all over the world.  In the valleys, he founded schools.  He is a very young child, with the sword of sunrise.   He sits when old, on the floor with children at one of his schools, listening to the school play.  He is very little, empty and touchingly attentive.  His white hair spirals obediently around his crown.

Ramana’s features spread wide, a kindly, craggy land of innocence as the sun sets over a mountain into the cup of the sea. The unfathomable imp of the Self, the I, looks out limpid through the windows, the caves of brown earth in the hills of these two beings – the hard sharp one, and the gentle one.

I wonder what their conversation might have been.

**

Ramana Maharshi

“Truth,” K said “is a pathless land.”   In the pathless, unconditioned terrain, the snake I saw above the violet rock, travels unerringly straight over all of it, like the curve of water.

K’s seems like a young soul like a lofty summit, born into an empty cup without Earth’s long memory.   Ramana’s is an ancient, rounded hill.   He was born under the sign of the Goat:  Krishnamurti under that of the Bull.   This brings a lot of “sky” into Earth, during a dark age.  The Goat climbs and grazes.  The Bull endures the flies and grazes.   The Goat is passing through the ultimate door.  The Bull tastes beauty and is deeply sensuous, deeply keyed to sacrifice.   They represent all the generations of the Twentieth century and beyond.

**

Flying over rocks

The morning after I got home from my holiday, a dream came to me, quite early, after sleeping.

“Consider,” it said “a landscape of good rock, mother-naked glorious, to scramble and clamber among.”

Yes, I can see it, I am there.  It is like the cascade of “organ pipes” that falls diagonally over the southern flank of the Dinosaur, but a lot more of it.

“Those innumerable rocky citadels are formed, as your own body is, from the coagulate of a ripple or tendency of thought along the etheric plane.  Every one of those citadels and rock fortresses is a thought, a device that hardened of itself, to conceal and forget the infinite distillate of the dew it arises from.   Remember the snake?   the way its coil, dense and watchful, slips suddenly away into an arrow, like water?

“Love laughs at locksmiths.  It is free.

“Now.  Listen carefully.  The major weapon of the Devil – in the Tarot his intellectual prick, pride, genital mercury … mind, you see! – is Doubt.”

“….?”  I say.

“Thus, the Devil besieges his customer with Certainty!”

Yes, I’ve got that.  (Blearily writing it down in the dark, before the words slip away for ever.  I hate having to prop my body into wakefulness during the night.)  The apparent Certainty of the people, the houses, the ideas around me.

So what then, is Truth?   What is truth, if not a kind of certainty?

This huge landscape of sensitive rock is making me nervous.

The True is … somehow “the Sword of truth is a gleaming, choiceless point of its Self along not just one place but everywhere(like light, like sun sparkling the sea) in every rock.  You have no choice.”

That is the pathless land.  The Reality is everywhere, like the light on the sea.  The shimmering web dances up into the vivid radiance of its own Tree.   I know in that instant, that there is no need to follow any one path of this light, for it is an all-pervading sparkle from crystal to crystal.  It plays from depth unto depth.  It is the lattice of Solomon.

Whence is my crusading belief?  This line of rock is good, in front, but so are those ones here, and to each side and beyond – as good, as diverse and as firm.   The tenor of Reality is good.   No choice or prejudice can form.  “Truth is a pathless, choiceless land.” To see this, safeguards me for ever, from limiting it to the “Certainty” (and fatigue) of any theological system.

**

Coil

When my dream spoke of the Devil, I was scared.

Fear. Entrapment, illusion … seductions, horrors, histories and tales of woe.   Then I saw what to do.  The abundance of the vein of vision is its own protection against the seeds of fear … and against all prejudice.   Infinity within as without all manifestation, is the heart of the matter.  To know this inner fact, plainly and impartially, like the face of the rocks, means I can never again be brainwashed.   I shall not be persuaded into the shape of false coverings.  All that is finished.   See things as they are:  it does not matter where I am.   “I” is you, and everybody else, and we but die for short spells within the I… I.  The clarity is received.

The truth is simple and wide.  It needs no psychic adornment; there is no measure to its height, depth and breadth, when an outer garment formed of beliefs and patterns of words begins to cave in.

It collapses inward.  Into its Self,

**

Serpent egg 87

There are coves just south of the Dinosaur headland, where the ground falls suddenly away in a cataclysm of folded, broken cliff into a pool of violet pebbles and whispering sea, very far below.  At the rim of one of the coves, a small deserted quarry into the rock becomes furred with lichens and new grass.  Here above the sea, someone laid out in a spiral like a snail’s shell, a graded sequence of small rocks, flint and sandstone.  They begin as a drystone wall, and fade smaller and smaller towards the centre – a few feet across.   Its creator turned into the Quarry … Self enquiry.  I recognized it, knowing already, that to descend into the depth, the violet pebbles and whispering sea is to dive into the Heart.

There is a pathway down.  It is invisible till your feet are on it.  It steeply yet safely descends a sheer precipice of couch-grass along the slanting strata of a grey Vulcan slab.   Near the bottom, a landslide extinguishes it;  but by then you are close enough to the pebble beach, to jump.   And then you look up!

Behold, a vast cirque of the geologic record entangles dark igneous extrusions with glittering sandstone bookshelves alive and golden, in cataclysmic dialogue.  Shattered cascades, dark grey and russet, of parents, children, angels and towns, are sculpted in midfall.  The sacred quarry for titan architects reaches hundreds of feet to the blue sky.   Near the top of the cliffs is another bulging efflorescence of that strange, soft purple rock.  When I biked to St David’s Cathedral a day or two later, I discovered it is built of this purple sandstone, whose changing tints move me deeply.  Nothing in sacred architecture antecedes the carving of the sea, and of the fire within the earth.

**

King Canute 87

While writing this, something wishes to clarify within me, the pathless land.  What is its meaning, in the everyday clambering of life?

Face, and enter all that arises, without psychological comment.  Receive the affronts of grief, mental error, external sounds like that buzz-saw trimming and wounding the trees, openly.   Be here: let it be;  do not flinch.

The attempt to run away, categorize or “fix” pain, causes pain to arise.  It is a cyst of nervous alienation.   I am ashamed of my painfulness, my pain-body, but an adventure opens, if I allow it to exist without fear … or description.

K’s teaching is an IMPARTIAL LAND.  “Get out of the field!”  Let every moment step out of the polarized “field” of chosen labels.  Every step the field encloses, is blind.  Every step out of it is Seeing.

“Get out of the field!”  An individual carries like flame – impartially – the world Consciousness.  He or she, stepping out of the field, influences and is the Whole.   He or she, beginning that departure, is no longer an enclosed, imaginary province, but an opening flow into mankind:  a droplet to the sea.  It is not renunciation, death or hermitage.   It is – paradoxically – the unconditional entry:  the core, the living Self of the field.

Then the field is like a boundary or membrane which isolates each member of it until he or she sees and IS the field!

The practice of opening the gate into tendencies of pain, is to enquire of them steadily – “who is – who am I?”  “The realized one,” says Ramana Maharshi “sends out waves of spiritual influence, which draw many people towards him.  Yet he may sit in a cave and maintain complete silence.”   Water diviners let their sensitive rods lead them to the Source.

Who made that spiral of broken stones in the little quarry over the sea?   Thank you!  It  transmits to me like a beacon.  It seems now to glow in a blue dusk on the cliff top.

Harbour 87

**

I actually found this cove a couple of days earlier.  From the base of a promontory near the Dinosaur, I’d clambered gingerly into it along a rotten rock traverse above the tide.  The view overhead unfolded a dramatic collision of geologies, first one appearing and then the other.  They were talking, like the late Quartets of Beethoven.  One of the voices is rock solid – Must it be?  The other is crumbling – “It must be!”  They question and fuse sometimes in counterpoint.  I passed through the remnant of a perfect “Norman” arch.  A giant curve of uplifted flints supported Nature’s masonry.  It seemed, broken off, to continue into the sky, like the open egg shells of Glastonbury Abbey.

Creeping along strange up-ended strata like the bunched leaves of wet books set perpendicular to the sea, I knew I am “home”.  The Hartland coast of North Devon has those same spectacular cliffs of buckled sandstone, and great round boulders along which to run and jump;  the sweat of sun-heat burning, the smell salt and tart of the sea’s music, the flora in tidal pools – I eat it all;  a chamber, a FIELD of the sacred art.

In the ruined labyrinth of the Bishop’s House by St Davids Cathedral next day, I found little spiral stairways up through stone towers.  They are built in an ascending spiral of flints, like the setting of feathers;  like the teachings – the Hard Sharp one and the Soft one – in the natural ampitheatre.

The spiral is a mandala, produced into three dimensions through space and therefore time.

The spiral stairways are wings of a bird set in stone.

I met in the Bishop’s Palace, a sculptor working on the circular movement of the wings of a bird in flight.  He had carved one in soft stone, and was now having a go in harder stone. He would like to leave the form of the bird just semi-released from the block of stone into which he carved.  “That is so suggestive, like resurrection of spirit from material,” I said … or the feeling of climbing a steep hill.

Several artists worked in the Bishop’s Palace.  A woman carved a tree into a seated dryad.  I was invited to sit in her with my arms upon hers gently, for she was a chair, a goddess, and through her flowed dramatically, the grain and great splits in the wood.  She was a spirit of arresting awareness.   She sat, golden and brown with sap in a chamber of stone, open to the sky.  I thought she was glorious.  The sculptress began to carve into and around her back some dryadic leaves, flowers and fruit.  The grounds of the Bishop’s Palace were dun-coloured gravel and green grass.  In medieval times it was very busy with artists and learning, kitchens, spits and dungeons.  After wandering through it, and up and down its towers, I came again to the violet face of the Cathedral, the proportion around its great West door.   I was moved inexplicably to tears, by such beauty.

This Celtic Cathedral – the smallest in Britain – is moored carefully like a great grey boat to a hollow in the land.  The land around here is a green and golden undulant, like the sea.  It is harvest time.  The square tower is shy to show itself above the fields.  I saw somewhere a postcard of it, peeping above a meadow of scarlet poppies.

**

Seeking a way out of the cove where Vulcan lava and sandstone combine and dance – for I didn’t want to risk again the ruined traverse – I was blocked by a gigantic purple pillar that stood upright in the sea.  I hoped to embark a daring and attractive route up another contour alongside it, but it was too dangerous;  there is joy no longer, and my cautious creature loses tone and balance.  At last I tackled the grassy precipice direct, flowing three-point feet to hands over its tough tufts.  Nearly halfway I came upon the miraculous hidden diagonal route, and walked up the rest.   Perhaps it was once a wreckers path?

**

**

Life on the cliff path, dipping into shadowed pools of sunlight in the coves, clambering out and over and down into the next, is a life of enquiry and often forgetting, on the wave.  The prana floats, and casts my writers’ moorings.  The deep water is rather overpowering, and frightens me.  I am vaguely seasick.  What should I really be facing?

Alas!  Easy it is to declare – “This is MY cove, my secret place, it belongs to my homeland, my childhood” and capture it into the web of sentiment and woe.  I’m a visitor only to its body and teachings.  There is no place for a patriotic conqueror, planting a flag and planning a speech about the splendid baptismal swim I had there.  You see, I didn’t swim there.   I wish that I did, so as to “have” it more fully!   Fool!

If I possess it, I begin to forget what it is, and to become heavy, lonely and sad.  It is easy to lose the key.  The magic happens when it is new, when it surprises and fills my eye, my hands and feet.

But I brought home some stones from that chamber.  In them I see the Cathedral.  They are dark violet, grey and veiny white.  One little flecked paler purplish one is smooth and looks translucent, like a bird’s egg.  When I picked it up, it was alive and warm with the heat of the sun.

**

Ramana light and shade

**

23 August 1991             MEET RAMANA FOUNDATION UK

The smile in Ramana’s eyes is the land and the sea.  I have a picture of him now, which I framed and put in my living room.  When I got back from my holiday, I went to make contact with Ramana’s “people”.   I’ve been getting to know his ways intermittently, by myself, for just a year.  The Self in his eyes guides me, often lost, often found.   In Hampstead village, a slim man with big hands was working on the roof of his house.   He came down the ladder, went to put on a shirt, and asked if I would like a glass of orangeade. He made it rather strong, and we sat in a long cottage room, cool and dark like a cave.

He told me it is like coming home.  One climbs a step and here at last one is.  He is gentle, rather droll and very British.  There are meetings for meditation, discussion and friendship once a month, in London.  The Ashram at Arunachala in southern India, is lively and discreet with Self enquiry, and doesn’t try to convert people.  He gave me a spare picture of Ramana, and a copy of their journal The Mountain Path – this summer’s issue.  I am delighted, amused and touched, to find this issue is devoted to discussing the teachings of Krishnamurti and Ramana.  So many seekers, it seems, come to the one through the other.   It is full of pictures that make me laugh, of these two white-heads, the one so very naked, the other so neatly dressed.  Each asks the same question in his own inimitable gesture.

If one goes to Arunachala in winter – he said – it is like summer here, mosquitoes are not a problem.  One can stay as long as one likes.  The food is very good indeed, as Ramana was the chef.  One of Ramana’s very few instructions is that Vegetarian is better, for quieting the mind.  The other is the seat of the “Heart” for meditation, surrender and Self enquiry, on the right side of the chest, two fingers from the centre sternum.

I have been trying this.  It is helpful.  It centres and opens.  The focusing of the Self here (as good as anywhere) pulls the ego or thought into it, to be eventually consumed – like the stick that stirs the fire.

I felt once, for a few minutes, a spillage into a sense of tallness and straight living … an intimation of peace, that way of resting.  “It is worth following Ramana’s very few rules to the letter, because he is not Tom, Dick or Harry.  This is a safe way.  It allows for personal rates of progress, because the Inner Ruler directs it.“

This was very interesting, coming so soon after my dream about all that rock, so sound and good, upon whose threshold I stood.

What a careful little goat I am, really.

**

The conversation included some ways of Kabbalah, Hermes Trismegistos, Buddha, an ancient link of Brahman with Ain Sof, and other familiar landscapes.  They all arise from and lead to the cosmic Rome.  My hero Mouni Sadhu is indeed by now dead, having been one of the original great devotees – “did you read ‘In Days of Great Peace’?”  The older generation has passed on, the new one rises – Ramana’s children.  How interesting it is, to meet ourselves.

The shyness.  Slender hesitancy, and no judgement.  He says he struggles with The Wandering Perverted Mind.  And then, over about an hour of meeting, the common language and commitment found, and taking hold:  the delight of this.  I meet the Egregor –  the children of the Master – evolving a life of its own. A big quiet cave of a living room, like an untidy rose, cool in the summer, full of books;  a Star of Solomon in aura colours upon a desk signals Yes to me;  and Ramana’s portrait unobtrusively, here or there.

Chewing gum is offered.  “Oh yes, I gave up smoking too, last year.  Wasn’t it dreadful!”  “I used Nicorette.”  “I did it cold turkey, Allen Carr’s book The Easy Way to Stop Smoking.  It was terrible.  But I got through.”  More fruit juice to drink.

**

What might hold us all together?  Love for and with that friendly Ramana, within those eyes,  a mountain.  Love yes, a private, common ground.   The pulse of love ever rises from within the well of the world.  The Self is boundless.  How often do I remember to look for and see the hidden well, whether I move or am still?  A sage whose life is that transcendent well, is quintessential after he is dead.  Love generated from all directions to him there, to that “I” creates his smile like the blink of sky over sea.  I can see pilgrims gathering.  The sage was a shape around the Self.  The Self is ever alive, I to I, as clear, quiet water.

**

Krishnamurti: “Be the disciple of your own understanding…   Good is that of which you are not afraid, evil is that which you fear.  So if you destroy fear, you are spiritually fulfilled.”

Many feel that K closes the door as you come to it, making it very difficult …

Wiped clean of “knowledge”, does he address the “ignorant”?

**

Krishnamurti at Rishi Valley School

**

My adventure invites fellow travellers.  I am a poet, an artist and a seer.  I welcome conversation among the PHILO SOFIA, the lovers of wisdom.

This blog is  a vehicle to promote my published work – The Sacred India Tarot (with Rohit Arya, Yogi Impressions Books) and The Dreamer in the Dream – a collection of short stories (0 Books) – along with many other creations in house.  

I write, illustrate, design and print my books.   Watch this space.

Tom’s Torch of Time – an Olympic Relay alchemy

Children of the World 2007 – a drawing done for the Human Rights Aid Foundation

**

Here is the Olympic Flame during the Games.  204 children, one child accompanying each nation’s team, carried a bronze petal towards the  creation of the complete torch flame.   The petals when lit, lay as a great mandala over the ground.  As national diversities emerged into unity –  like stamens of a flower – the mandala rose to form the Olympic torch.

Here is the flame from within it, looking up.

My earlier post, Reflections on the Grand Cross (22^nd June) touched on the Cardinal Crossroads (17 July) of Pluto in Capricorn, Moon in Cancer, Mars in Libra, Uranus in Aries:  tensions and responses through the antipodeal frame of solstice and equinox.  Many astrologers and seers speak of a profound tipping point;  the relay-release of the old Mayan Great Circle, or frame of time, into the “new” Aquarian Great Circle.  They see violent interactions, and all kind of things.

Our projection onto 2012, when boiled down to essentials, may amount to the handing over of the Torch of Time, through time and space: through the dream.

Four seasons electron figure-eight

Intense pressure is suffered in a myriad different ways, collectively and individually, as human conscience passes the midpoint of a cosmic “8” – the figure of infinity;  itself a crossing-point of the unbroken Circle.   The dawn of “something new” has no adequate prediction.   The dawn of “something new” is through the neck of the hourglass.  It reflects the old, yet differently.   A young gangster kid may be inspired to break through into athletic training and fellowship – a local quantum leap.  These things happen.

Few of us have the “dancer’s training” to bend and yield and flow with it.   Yet truth is found when we look within ourselves, rather than outward onto the shifting persuasion.  This inner truth is sometimes surprising.  It is like having a view from above, rather than from inside the street’s canyon – to see all the streets, all the connections, the city and its fields.

And … for instance … a TV camera inside a helicopter records a hand-over of the Olympic torch down there in a London street …  or a village …  or a coastal path or remote, rainy field.  The place is lined with flags and inaudible cheering;  a small white clad figure approaches another in the rain;  there is a pause while the flame is stabilized, then off goes the new white clad figure, her arms uplift with joy, her hair down her back;  she seems to float, she is heavy and yet she flies.  She runs like an early Picasso Grecian dancer;  and the ancient happiness punches up into the sky.

I was moved, by something deep and archetypal.  Till then I was “an Olympic sceptic” – I saw chiefly, an extravagance far beyond the British purse, its one heritage being the “greening” of an industrial desert – a reclamation of toxic soils.

Torch bearer (1955)

**

Every carrier of the flame was stirred, carried into an unexpected dimension, and so were the watchers, along its 8,000 miles.  (Or was it 80,000 …?)

Astrologers view the Grand Cross and London’s exact alignment with it, with traditional pessimism.   Yet I also perceived the coming of all the nations together in an estwhile centre of the Common Wealth:  Greenwich meridian 0.  There is a civil vulnerability;  Isn’t there also the potential for a progressive release;  a different gesture?   Alignment with whatever the stress, converts it to an asset, and flows.   It is an art of life.  The forces which move us are so much deeper than we know.

Leda & Swan (1957)

The euphoria of the Olympic award in July 2005, was swiftly followed by the bombings.  The wake gathered in Trafalgar Square to say “we shall not be defeated, and nor shall we hate.”  In all our minds is that vigilance with the shadow which accompanies the light.   Yet in the passing of anniversaries, the replay of patterns, history “reverberates” beyond our fears.   In the bigger picture of the cycles, there is so little that we actually see.  What we think we see is feudally enclosed by our conditioning.

All we can be sure of, is that we cross again these points, but with a turn of the spiral, rather than a closed circuit.  Thus is Nature and the growth of trees.   The spiral is tight with our history and apprehension;  yet still it is the Great Spring – a planetary kundalini Yantra.   Watch the world, and turn inward;  see “the point of intersection, time with timeless:  an occupation for the saint.”

 

Draw a Yantra

**

A Kabbalistic meditation this week:  the PRESENT.  The present.   A Present, like a gift – here in this room with its pictures and things, in this block of flats, the noise of cars and trains going by each side, in this neighbourhood … within the event of the Olympic Games in London.  Mostly, this Present is the busy, tiny, teeming moment’s turmoil.   Sometimes this Present is an entire aeon, or aeon of aeons … the Buddha’s breath … NOW.   Into NOW, the tiny things melt for a moment.

What different clocks!   And we can go anywhere.  We can go to before the big bang, behind where all this began …  nothing.   No thing.   Silence.   Space.   Conscious.   The focus of an emanation which is Light – a point – expands.   Let there be Light, and all that becomes.  The tsim tsum is this beginning of the whirlings, gilgalem, the polarized pulse of atomic gravities, so tiny, which turns – the great wheel of the Milky Way – in one of its spiraling arms voyages our little Solar System.   The Vedic gods I realize, with their many arms, are GALAXIES!

 

Cosmic egg and wood grain

Then a trip through history, geologic and human, evolving through NOW, always now, to the re-absorbed aeons of ions into the point:  no thing.   Kalpa, the Great Breath.  And open your eyes into this room.   Thou art God.   TAT TWAM ASI.  AHIH ASHER AHIH.   And make the tea!

Time is multi-directional, and also inward.   Time is a petalling flower – each petal is a local clock, and they grow and fall away, and new ones come;   each petal is an electron circuit, a planetary orbit around the stamens of the Sun.

This brings me to Tom’s Torch … and its hundreds of bronze petals.

Thomas Heatherwick, the architect of the Olympic cauldron, is the grandson of Elisabeth Tomalin, who died aged 99, this year.  Elisabeth carried in her tiny, intense, twig-like frame, a century’s history:

http://www.thecnj.com/review/2009/102909/feature102909_01.html

Herself a Jewish refugee from world war 1, Dresden and the Holocaust, she met Jung in Switzerland and made her home in England when she was young.  She worked as a fabric designer for Marks & Spencer, then trained as an art therapist, and returned to Germany in the 1960s, where she pioneered her work among students whose parents had been Nazis, to heal their soul.  She released their creativity through dream interpretation, using water and sand.  In one of her visions, she inherited the link in an unbroken tradition of doctors, whose root was in Israel – this was a comfort to her.   Her story is extraordinary, as the above link shows.   Here is one of her last embroideries which she gave me.  Her hands could not control a brush, but could still sew.   Embroidery, for Elisabeth, was a tapestry of the soul, the colours of lifetimes, in and out:  the flowering landscape of the inner thread.

Figure of Eight, by Elisabeth Tomalin

**

Elisabeth’s burning quest for connectivity, and the wholeness of the soul, made her a difficult companion, to herself and to all her friends.  In her daughter Stefany, her grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, that powerful river of the lineage survives and flows.  Her grandson’s imagination is prolific, since childhood.   He is the architect of the Seed Cathedral in the Shanghai Expo, and of holistic buildings patterned on the flow of wood and water, in Britain and all over the world.   He and she were close.

Tom Heatherwicks Seed Cathedral

The Great Work of Alchemy is stealthy, and many of its hands do not know what they do.  Time’s great petals are brought to form a mandala, each is dipped to combine an Olympic flame.   Young persons and athletes without celebrity, brought Tom’s bronze petal-buds each to each.  It is beautiful to remember how the flame traveled around the land, from the Giants Causeway to Trafalgar … villages, lanes and towns, by horse, by boat, by wheelchair, by abseil and by bike.  It atavistically moved people, one didn’t know why, culminating in the great, converging relay.  It is ancient, as the beacons on hills, the messengers along ley lines who carry fire in nests:  the elder earth energy.   It woke something.   Until I saw it, I had no idea what all the fuss was about.

Tom’s Torch – the Miracle

The mandala of the petals of the flame lay on the ground and glowed.  Then every stamen was raised up, like a carousel on stalks, till the One Torch merged, flowed and burned for the world:   Tom’s torch of Time.

The horizontal yantra rose into the vertical stem.

Torch bearer (1954)

**

A Summer Grand Crossroads brings many, many nations together in a world city, to compete, befriend and celebrate;  to pass through each other, and begin to transcend the little cult of the individual – through stretching individual capacity beyond the barriers.  There are problems, furies and triumphs.  We are villagers.

The weatherman on TV last night, announced with relish:  “The weather is improving.  This weekend, for the closing Ceremony, we may look forward to a Bright Gold Medal in the sky!”

Crossroads are places of meeting.  In their centre may be planted a tree, a seat, a garden, a gossip, a conflict, or even a sacred space.

What is my Crossroads?   What is your Crossroads?

How does the river flow and feel?

Even if we in the British economy, suffer “an Olympic Hangover”, this too, shall pass, and is part of our character. Likewise, we chuckle at Danny Boyle’s opening Ceremony, a radical departure from the tradition of the host country to boast about itself.

It is important to recall the  surprise of the revealed Symbol, signifying yet something other, always.

 

Sunflower

**

Relay – Centaur, Athene and Child (1987)

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Solomon’s Seal:  Flower of Life

**

The fire of our Sun creates the light of the world.  The seed creates the form within the Mother Consciousness.  Here, the children return the Flame to its source.

In the seed and the flame is the essence of our humanity. They light the Tree of Life.

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Snowdrop:  In touch, across the Seas (1988)

**

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My adventure invites fellow travellers.  I am a poet, an artist and a seer.  I welcome conversation among the PHILO SOFIA, the lovers of wisdom.

This blog is  a vehicle to promote my published work – The Sacred India Tarot (with Rohit Arya, Yogi Impressions Books) and The Dreamer in the Dream – a collection of short stories (0 Books) – along with many other creations in house.  

I write, illustrate, design and print my books.   Watch this space.

Today with Krishnamurti

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K in 1925

Now Krishnamurti’s Notebook reminds me – with him – of the infinite, drifting yet rooted, abundant and alive Consciousness un-furnished … the Presence everywhere, which takes him, he wakes into, all through the night … Lotus.

This actually subsumes and permeates ANYTHING that curdles itself into a delusion on the surface.   Never is it not HERE and EVERYWHERE.   Always.   Whatever I – or anyone else – am doing.

I am not sleeping well;  so I relax when I can, with this space – the living humanity, without thoughts …  for up to half a minute, a minute, maybe;  then it becomes a thought, goes stale, gives birth to thought and multiplies, and has to be re-discovered.   But I know it is never, cannot possibly be absent.  The Silence holds the alchemy of anything that troubles me.   Learn to watch and be, without engaging.  Let it unfold.  The Holy One knows what s/he is doing.

I AM a bad feeling today.  Relax into its fluid Now, don’t quarrel it:  it flows and alters.   Just like K saying “I AM anger”.   I learned things very profoundly with K.   They take a lifetime to mature.

The cover photo on Krishnamurti’s Notebook – does he, do we leave one or two pairs of footprints in the sand? … as in this story:

 

To “I AM” the bad feeling … takes responsibility for it, whomever it attaches to.   Here it is, in my breath as space, and I centre it.   Its nature changes, and it begins to look like a Sri Chakra yantra.

It isn’t judged as “bad” any more, it loses tension.   Those attributes lose strength and melt as soon as seen, like the way Consciousness melts back into a tiny I-thought capture.   So truly the Real Life is a river, a flame.

Not only do the single footprints in the sand accommodate the Teacher and my burden:  they suggest taking responsibility – coming home – no projection.   Sometimes they are two pairs of footprints in the sand, then they elide again.   Thus is life … the watery crescents.

Soul

I watched the tide coming in at Kilve … the brown Bristol channel, with faraway Wales and an enormous sky,  the push and power of small ripples swelling together over stones and rocky channels – the miniature tsunamis, the end-game of the ocean wave, wind and moon, as it rises and fills, rises and fills countless fractal neighbourhoods – the occupying power of mind.   All is mind.   There is no conflict in the abundance and withdrawal of the tide;  the circle of the breath, in and out.

The beach is a capillary.  My body is a capillary.   The cosmos is a capillary to its Self.

**

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**

My adventure invites fellow travellers.  I am a poet, an artist and a seer.  I welcome conversation among the PHILO SOFIA, the lovers of wisdom.

This blog is  a vehicle to promote my published work – The Sacred India Tarot (with Rohit Arya, Yogi Impressions Books) and The Dreamer in the Dream – a collection of short stories (0 Books) – along with many other creations in house.  

I write, illustrate, design and print my books.   Watch this space.

Alchemy: the Work

**

 

Girl, 1954

A few days before I went to the Brockwood gathering in 1974, I read and copied out in précis, this chapter about Alchemy in Jacques Pauwels and Louis Bergier’s book The Dawn of Magic.   It influenced me profoundly, in combination with the Krishnamurti awakening.   It describes in essence, a Sadhana, or way of truth in life – whatever form this takes:

**

“The Philosophers’ Stone thus represents the first rung on the ladder that helps man to ascend towards the Absolute.  Beyond, the mystery begins.  On this side, there is no mystery, no esotericism, no other shadows than those projected by our desires and, above all, by our pride.

“But just as it is easier to content oneself with ideas and words than to do something with one’s hands in suffering and weariness, in silence and solitude, so is it also more convenient to seek refuge in what is called ‘pure’ thought, than to struggle single handed against the dead weight and darkness of the world of matter.

“Alchemy forbids her disciples to indulge in any escapism of this kind, and leaves them face to face with the great Enigma … She guarantees nothing except that, if we fight to the end to deliver ourselves from ignorance, truth itself will fight for us, and in the end will conquer everything.  This perhaps will be the beginning of true metaphysics.

 

Ribbed sands of the sea:  Eigg

**

“The alchemist, working over many, many years, maybe a lifetime, and endlessly repeating each stage of his experiments so that it be open to cosmic combinations of rays and magnetism (sacred patience and the slow condensation of the universal spirit) mixes in a mortar three ingredients, an ore, a metal and an acid.  He then heats in a crucible this mixture for ten days or so, slowly, and then dissolves it in an acid under reflected (polarized) light (sun or moon) – then evaporates, then re-calcines the mixture.

“After the first phase, perhaps several years, an oxidizing agent is added, maybe potassium nitrate, and continues the endlessly repeated operation of dissolving and re-heating, waiting for a sign.  Which appears at the moment of melting, and may appear in the form of star shaped crystals on the surface, or in a layer of surface oxide which forms and breaks up, revealing the luminous metal in which can be seen a reflection in miniature of the Milky Way perhaps, or some of the constellations.

 

Universe

**

“He removes the mixture from the crucible, allows it to ripen, protected from air and damp until Spring, when he resumes what is now ‘the preparation of darkness’.  He puts it in a receptacle of rock crystal hermetically sealed, and heats, regulating temperature and conditions minutely to bring the mixture of sulphur, carbon and nitrates to a certain degree of incandescence, but without exploding.  The mixture contains enormous energy.

 

Sky in October

**

“He continues heating and cooling for many years to procure thereby, an essence, the Raven’s Wing, the darkness.  The liquid is fluorescent.  Then he opens it in the dark, and the liquid solidifies and breaks up, forming new elements. 

“He washes the dregs in the receptacle with triple-distilled water – the water of Life – for several months.  The water of Life, the Elixir, is thought to eliminate ‘heavy water’ in the organism which ages it.

 

View of Rhum, from Eigg

**

“He next starts to combine the new unknown elements that have formed, grinding them and melting them at low temperatures with catalysers.  He can thus produce alchemic silver, copper and gold, and at length the philosophers’ Stone, a substance which dropped into melted glass, turns it ruby red, and gives off a mauve or pale violet fluorescence.  This Stone or ‘projection powder’ of itself can bring about transmutations in base metals to precious stones.

 

Jewel

**

“The most important aspect of the Alchemist’s pilgrimage is his own transmutation, within his soul.  His endlessly repeated small operations engender what is perhaps partly a state of profound meditation, and partly the imprint upon his psyche of the transmuting matter itself.

“He establishes a new relationship between his own mind which from now on is illuminated, and the universal Mind, eternally deepening its concentration.”

Precis on Alchemy from “The Dawn of Magic” by Pauwels & Bergier.

See also my earlier post in this blog – Alchemy & Self Enquiry.

**

 

Flora 1956 – copied from Botticelli’s Primavera

**

**

 

 

My adventure invites fellow travellers.  I am a poet, an artist and a seer.  I welcome conversation among the PHILO SOFIA, the lovers of wisdom.

This blog is  a vehicle to promote my published work – The Sacred India Tarot (with Rohit Arya, Yogi Impressions Books) and The Dreamer in the Dream – a collection of short stories (0 Books) – along with many other creations in house.  

I write, illustrate, design and print my books.   Watch this space.

Watching Krishnamurti (2) – Brockwood 1974 Continued: Part Three

I attended the Brockwood gatherings of September 1974, the year of a great storm, with my sway-backed childhood tent and a thin groundsheet.  There was so much mud and rain.  The wind shouted in the trees.  The sweet chill of the sodden grass and earth shocked my bare feet.  Fires were made on the ground, and people sat around them to dry out their blankets, and made love in the tents.  In the big marquee, K, pungently perfumed, small and brown, sat on his hands until they fluttered out in front, and talked in his dancing way about our relationships, about the way our awareness is not limited, but draws on the common stock, and about the root of fear.

His teaching at that time, is central to my life’s effort to come close to the ‘fact of my fear’ – to stand under the waterfall.

Aurobindo and Krishnamurti

**

“It is part of our conditioning to admit division between the observer and the observed.  The thinker and the thought.   The experiencer and the experience.   But when you see that the observer is the observed,  which is the truth,  then that conditioning is broken down.   You understand all this? (pleads).   That instant it is gone.   Therefore the mind has freed itself from this eternal conflict between what is and what should be, which is the duality between good and bad —  this eternal conflict between ‘me’ and ‘you’.    I wonder if you see this?    Therefore from that arising,  can the mind which has been conditioned heavily through education, culture, religious doctrines, immoral attitudes,  and all that —  can all that be INSTANTLY wiped away?

 “We say it can!   It can be done only when the observer realises he is not separate from the observed.   He eliminates conflict altogether,  and therefore he has energy to go beyond..  You got it?

 “So action is not an adjustment to an idea.   Action is not approximating itself to an ideal.  I wonder if you see this?   Therefore action is always in the living present.   Action then is the movement of the fact,  not what you think the fact should be.  

 “Now this is art!   which is sanity.   Art means — doesn’t it also? —  ‘to fit’.   To fit every thing in its right place —  that is art —  not merely painting a picture or writing a poem or doing a sculpture ;   putting every thing in its right place –  not right according to ‘you’,  but right according to the facts.   The fact is always out of time.    One has to deal with the fact all the time –  not with the ideas.   To deal with the fact,  the mind must be free of every form of image that you have built about yourself and others.    From this comes complete action,  in which there is no regret, no sorrow,  no sense of ‘not having done the thing wholly’.

 “You see sir,  there is a problem,  a question here.   We are educated to pursue pleasure,  right?   We are educated to conform morally,  ethically,  religiously,  to the pattern of personal or collective pleasure.   Have you not noticed how our mind pursues this constant desire for pleasure?   You don’t have to admit it –  it is a fact.   The two principles in our life are fear and pleasure.   Again, when one observes,  the pursuit of pleasure ‘tomorrow’ is the root of time.   ‘I have had pleasure yesterday.   I MUST have it tomorrow.   I am working for that pleasure for tomorrow –  sexually, intellectually,  in so many ways.’    So pleasure implies the continuity of time.   

 “Not that there ‘is not pleasure’ –  that’s not the point —  but the demand,  the pursuit of pleasure –  do you follow?   So can the mind – please look at – investigate this with me! –  can the mind finish each day totally and enter next day afresh?   Do you understand my question?  When we see the fallacy of time as a means of change,  every day must end and not psychologically carry over the next day!   

J.Krishnamurti, Brockwood 1974

 **

Through one fear, K said, trace the root of all fear.  When you are THAT, there is no problem, no conflict.  The central fact of fear, he says, is (of) the non-existence of the observer, of ‘me’.  Myself in isolation is a form of resistance, or exclusion.  “The content of your consciousness is that of the world.  Can your consciousness undergo a radical change?  Only when the central fact – that conflict is not separate from you, you are that conflict – is SEEN, does all division and conflict come to an end.”  On the tape, you can hear the rain drumming on the tent roof, louder than his words:  he grimaces and laughs.  “In true meditation, you are not going away from yourself or following a practice.  I wonder if you SEE THIS?”

I never became a Krishnamurti disciple.  There had been enough of that in my childhood.  But many years later when I started to read about him and how he had grown up, I was inspired by two of his remarks:  one was “Be the disciple of your understanding”.   In the other, he said (concerning angers and anxieties) that the tidal movement of the sea, going in and out, has no end, no conflict with itself.  Truth is the tide, it is without beginning or end, it is not for capturing.  The essence of conflict is truth, which is peace.

Truth is a pathless land.  It has no Master.  K’s “process” in his spine is the dying agony of every moment to be born.  The sacred, beyond line or shape, permeates the worn down toothbrush and the Saville Row tailoring of three-dimensioned space.

It is fashionable not to understand him.  “Get out of the field!”   The field of the world is the tide, carrying back and forth the baggage of time and political priorities.  But what he really means is get into the field, un-judging and therefore un-separate from the pathless movement which is truth.

Obviously, those September days of the storm – a great tree blew down at Brockwood – pinpointed my major problem, directed me to seek out an arena where I should find it, and augured a time, for me, of extraordinary focus.

 

Down to the sea

**

At the gathering, I made a new friend;  his name was Daniel.  (See part one & part two.) He came up with an umbrella to see what I was drawing.  He was on his way to Israel;  his dark eyes were quiet, still and searching.  He demonstrated for me how grace flows into restraint:  the exquisite restraint invokes grace.  But he was very young, and so was I.   Our encounter those two weekends haunted my dreams at night for many years.   When we parted, he gave me Kazantzakis’ Travels in Greece, which he had marked in many places.  Here are some more of these passages, and then my reflections on returning home:  being cooked over a slow turning point in my life.

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KAZANTZAKIS

“Can you never cast off from you, your miserable, earthen existence?  Destroy it!  Set someone free within you!”

“A wind, a song, flits through the human reeds…”

 .

“A nun with a trowel was caulking the walls, and two young helpers, bent over and silent, scraped away at the plaster with religious attention, laboring to uncover the hands, the beard, the calm eyes of some saint beneath the whitewash.”

 .

“… she said , Wait,  I too am waiting.  I touched her hand as if wanting to thank her.  Her hand began to quiver in my grasp, to give itself like a body.  I felt the stern faced merciless law descend again between man and woman.  Ancient mysteries, Christian loves, the orgies of Astarte – the entire mystic identity of God and animal leaped up and came to life within my ephemeral palm, as it led on the woman.  How involuntarily, I thought, does Word become flesh in a woman’s breast!  As the spirit touches her, it takes root like a seed.  For a woman, the spirit is not a winged immaterial power, as it can be for a man;  for a woman it is the primal wingless plastic essence which contains all matter.  It does not have wings but roots.

“At that instant the limpid fervid voice of a child sounded behind us, singing with precocious passion, unknowing still of woman – The earth gnaws at my feet, the wind gnaws my hair, and a little dark haired one is nibbling deep inside me!

“We held our breath.  Suddenly the entire pathway seemed to sparkle, as though the rocks themselves had blossomed.  We held our breath, following the voice as it moved away, to vanish among the trees.

“Ah the song, I said softly.  The essence of creation, the voice of God!

“And for me, murmured my companion, pity for that child flooded over me, pity for myself, for all the world.”

 .

“… the heart is a peculiar torrent which flows uphill, contrary to nature.  Nowhere can a proud soul find more abundant nourishment than amid the wreckage of the world … …  I sat amid the ruins and rejoiced to hear such a voice rising from the stones of Monemvasia.  And for a long time I looked straight down, watching three goats with gleaming black hair climbing the red rock, directly above the sea.”

 “Spiritual purity and intellectual dislocation … …  No one understands their ancestors less well than the descendents.”

 .

“Let all we’ve said be salt and water, I said.  Forget it.  Don’t be glum, don’t dig about too deeply, abandon the theories.  Otherwise you’ll risk studying the Problem without experiencing it.  And only he who lives such problems can solve them.  Don’t suffer that which they tell to mock the learned Germans:  If they see two doors, on the one written ‘Paradise’ and on the other ‘Lecture about Paradise’, they’ll all rush for the second door.”

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I don’t have anything, if I don’t have silence of mind.

Travels in Greece

 

Red horse dream

4 August 2012

These passages touch me strangely, especially the one with the elemental difference between men and women.  How often do we pause with each other, to contemplate this?

Taking youthful experiences from the cupboard, is therapeutic.  It gives me rest, release and a feeling of moving onward, into a garden or field.

I have a beast of a mind.  This I accepted, as my mother and I saw wild flowers by the sea yesterday – a pageant of them this year, along the low shale-y cliffs at Kilve in Somerset.  Only writing quiets my mind – or mind is quiet when writing/receiving.  The curse of artists and poets, now I am older, doesn’t bother me now.  My mind is like the shape of my nose.  She’s there, prone to conflict and distraction, and to worry about the world and other people;  but so is the quiet creative exercise which opens the skies.

At 25, fuelled by the sex drive of youth, she was impossible to master.  I adventured with her, learned to ride, got thrown off many times, and eventually respected her.  Self enquiry and other spiritual exercises are long-term attritions and refinements.  They uncover yet more wealth for mind to prance around with.  Being built empty, open for the sea, explodes the atom into birth.  In everyday life then, accept her grumbling ways as a landscape.  Thus it is, to be human.   But I call her “The Mare”.

**

Flowers at Kilve

September 1974

Nothing and nobody is mine.  The feeling is of having nothing.  But why have anything?  What of the unfading flower Krishnamurti spoke of?  If I have something, I – meaning the flower – am not.

Is it wise to write?  Do I write so as to possess and preserve an event like fruit in the jar, or to clarify?  Writing is my emotional bolster and raison d’etre.  I do it so as to retain insights and people I cannot otherwise remember.  On the other hand, if I wish to continue writing – and it is a way of dialogue other than the turmoil in my head – let it be straight and to the point.  Let it be the happening as it occurs.  Finish.

**

This is a tough vigil.  And there’s no carrot at the end, though I keep trying to make one.  Having trouble with my superduperego.

When I listened to K., at the end of his talking I experienced an extreme reluctance, which was either for going out into the thing itself naked – a real terror – or sad regret that my mind had been too noisy and too anxious to listen to him.

There is nobody to see or hear or look critically over my shoulder.  On a desert island nothing can be heard, for there is no ear.  Just silence.  Bruised silence.  A nowhere.  Unknown.

“Meditation,” said K “is like going to a well the waters of which are inexhaustible, with a pitcher that is always empty.  The pitcher can never be filled.  What is important is the drinking of the water, not how full the pitcher is.  The pitcher must be broken to drink the water.  The pitcher is the centre which is always seeking.  And so it can never find.”

 **

As long as I carry around with me the concept of time – in the deeper subtle sense, not as surface activity where as a tool it is necessary – I am preoccupied with tomorrow, yesterday, progress and past.  It all tastes of the night before.  And it is all boring and hard work and going nowhere.

But if I am quite still in this place, there is no time and not repetition.

Deep down I am aware of time passing.  I’m aware of impending rescue and termination of this inactivity – when Akiva has finished getting his visa forms checked at the Greek embassy (he’s going to India overland), where I wait for him in a cloud of foreign languages and cigarette smoke.  I am therefore still “safe”.

But in reality there is no safety.

From time to time, up come tears of neglect, frustration, loneliness, whatever.  I see their pretentious ballast and they are gone.  I have to be more selective with music, because a lot of it is cacophony.   The “seeing” of a problem is its perdition.   I create it anew in idleness, and again it is “seen”.  Perhaps thus in stages, the mind is gently coerced from its condition, like a boat from its mooring.

Boat sea

“If one has a problem in relationship —  and most problems are in relationship —  to carry that problem over into the next day,  implies a continuity of the problem which is becoming more and more complex, more and more difficult;   the mind then accepts the problem inevitably,  and lives with the problem,  and the mind becomes more and more dull.   When you understand the nature of time,  as we have tried to explain earlier,  then that problem must be resolved TODAY,  not carried over the next day.    You understand?   Can you,  can the mind resolve the problem of relationship between human beings,  as it arises,  end it?    Can this be done? —  not as a theory,  but as an actuality?   

 “You see, unless we lay the foundation for all this,  meditation and the enquiry into reality,  into whether there is something beyond thought,  becomes utterly meaningless —  unless you have done all this.   You can go to Japan and sit for years meditating in certain Zen monasteries,  or you can go to India —  I don’t know why people go to any of these countries to learn meditation,  you can do it at home.  You don’t have to go abroad.   It’s a waste of money;  but perhaps you like to play the tourist.   Now, unless you lay the foundation for all this,  and the mind be totally free from conflict, and therefore,  from psychological problems,  unless you have done that,  you cannot possibly go beyond.  What you try to achieve then becomes an illusion,  an unreality,  it has no meaning.   So it is very important to understand that every human problem that arises —  and human problems are in relationship between you and another,  between you and your wife, husband, girl, boy,  all the rest of it — unless in that relationship there is no conflict,   whenever any problem arises in that relation,   to end it INSTANTLY is our question.   You have understood my question?

K, Brockwood 1974

**

There are two problems, which involve not Daniel but my concept and use of him.  They are the old ones.  Firstly I imagine he is with me where I go – to see me, preening, false and desirable.  Secondly I wonder what I shall say when I write to him.  The sound of all those rolling phrases echoes around and around my mind all day long, like prisoners at exercise.

The old pattern prepares me for the worst – for total rejection, and with it, infantile longing for something which then has no life.

Well no, that’s not quite it.

But yes, for the longing, the desire, is not for him but for my idea of him which I recognize as groundless and gutless.  It’s the idea of myself.  Wanting him precludes loving.  To love is on the moment, when you are able to be there – on all levels.  There is no permanence:  only renewal.

He is my cloak to shield me from the strangeness of other human beings so that I can write them off as being boring.

There’s no real joy in pleasure, for pleasure is pending, it is a tension.  Pleasure, the kind I seek – not the good sensations the waking day embraces – is a cop out.  This difference between joy and pleasure!  Joy is total, like sunrise.  Pleasure is conditional.  There is no joy to see a man whom I have made into the fixed building of my mind.  There is more “pleasure” in what is “all in the mind”.

**

You are not to be owned, even within the recesses of memory!  nobody owns you.  You own no body.

The spirit may be willing to give up a person, but is reluctant to part with a painting – truly its own work!

To make a painting is to listen to what is already there, and interfere with it as little as possible.

Please, I want to change, learn to change my position in the boat from the back (with all the illusions ahead) to the front (with the real sea to navigate) – to be with you who lead me.  Not to try, which implies failure, but to learn.    “It is easier to accept a ritual than to gain access to knowledge, easier to invent gods than to understand techniques.”  (The Dawn of Magic)

This IS a matter of life and death.

Breathing like waves of the sea.  Comes sometimes a long swell, and sometimes a short one.

 **

I Ching – “Advance slowly with joyfulness.”  Do not, in fighting, sharpen the assets of the imagined enemy.  The lake rises to heaven.

The I Ching is a guide among psychic currents, landscape and forest, to the awakening of my responsibility.

**

Marina at night

“Fear.  The most absurd fears and the most tragic fears – can the mind be free of all that?  How do you investigate ‘I’m afraid’? … the observer is part of, not different from, that fear.  The observer is the observed;  and my anger or fear is part of me, not something separate.  What am I ‘to do’ with that anger?  I AM anger!”

K went on to propose – “listen carefully!” – that we now expose the whole structure of our fear and anger;  of ‘me’.  These remarks irresistibly challenge my soul’s most reckless element.  My attention sharpens.  There is a passionate longing to be clear, and to live and speak without decoys.

“Each response recognizes a previous anger or fear, which it reinforces.  Can the mind observe anger or fear without this re-cognition?  Deeply, we are violent beings.  The observer himself is part of the violence.  The idea that I must separate or go beyond it, is CONFLICT.  My structure of ‘me’ is violent.  So what takes place?  What actually takes place, with no desire to overcome it or suppress it? – (those are wastage of energy!)  Only energy can take place, can go beyond itself-which-is-violence.  And only fragments can create violence.  The observer is the observed!  No escape, no interpretation – THE THING IS!”

“Can you be aware of your fear,” K went on, “as of the colour of the jersey next to you?  … see that there is only one central fear with many branches, which wither away … and can you look at that root now, can you invite it?   Whatever you fear among the many of them, each one is still the root of all fear.  The observer is the observed.  If the idea is not, if the ME is not, where then is fear?  Please, please, are you following this?”  His voice breaks.

Pebbles in Devon

I wonder what the sadness is.  Nights asleep I am so busy in many different places, that I wake worn out.  I dream and dream and can’t let go.  Rock climbing last night with my father.  And losing my bag with all its precious contents, including this story.  What a strange thing, to “have”.  How curiously hard to relinquish.

What is the sadness?

Is it Akiva going off on Saturday, three or four days time, to India?  Does this parting go deeper than I knew?  Or is it a distillation of four years we spent together?  There is here, till Saturday, a small chaos of packing.  Perhaps it is I who wish to go to India myself, thus grief?  I tidied places this morning, and threw out years of accumulated rubbish.  Afterwards I’m going to – I want to rearrange things, the furniture here.  I know how it’ll be, I will move the bed back to the end of the room by the gramophone and the books, I’ll put the table where the bed is now, in the alcove, and pull the sofa at a slant along the big bay-window, and focus it all with the big green plant, and then there will be great space, oh SPACE, in the room, all over the grey carpet, to dance and play in, and have people to visit, full of that lovely view of the gardens that comes in with the birdsong.  This is Greencroft Gardens.

Akiva is doing Turkey, Afghanistan, Ceylon, Nepal by overland bus.  I am left here.  But mine is no less of an adventure … to the end of my nose!   We’ve been sharing various gargantuan feasts with all our friends and been to the pictures to see The Last Tango again.  Room filled with light, and soon to be mine alone.

I’m tired out, I don’t feel like eating.  I’m pale, thin, supple with the yoga asanas that Daniel showed me, voice feels a little deeper, can sing as well as dance.  And started a painting of me, it is called ‘Question’.  In it, I wear my long green and blue Indian gown.  And sent off ever such a long letter to Daniel, together with the K drawing I’d promised to give him, and which I rescued more or less from its state of desperate confusion.  I miss Daniel.  I need the feel of him in my mind.

I walk around in a bog of Akiva and my whole trip together.  I want to clean the slate and start a clean drawing.  I want to curl up and sleep somewhere, and not undertake anything.  Daniel’s Kazantzakis book has a lot of him because he gave it to me, and because of where he marked it, so I turn the pages in blind exploration, rather dazzled, not knowing what to expect next in this slow movement forward.

Love has no expectations.  How to be open and naked enough to let there be love?  It is in the here and now.  The frantic running away in the dark to cinemas of the soul, a buzz to be occupied and filled with some nice story of myself … and the realizing, the seeing, the stilling of those urgent and stinging surface waters.  Stay empty … the darkness, the nowhere … until it gives no longer torment, but peace.  Dive then, dive down through the stinging water, immerse.  The torment is self taught.  But peace needs no teaching.

**

Vera Moore (see also  http://www.myspace.com/lipatti/blog/245826085)

Sleep and dreams again the whole night long … of mens’ delighted embraces, of me arriving in places to paint, but too apathetic to do so, of driving a gigantic combine-harvester to reap ripe standing wheat in rows of a tremulous order, which became a painting of a paddock and trees never to be finished … and of Vera Moore and my closed-up piano (playing).  She was my teacher in Paris when I was fifteen.  She opened up so much music to me, and I haven’t played for years … and of a disorder everywhere, a pile of I Ching stalks, a bacchanalian bedroom feast with others, and losing all my clothes.

So do I run about here and there.  The pool parts reluctantly with its storms.

**

The I Ching gives tongue to the intuition.  It is a contemplation deep and unhurried as the days pass, for within the intuition is sprung from timeless source, the surface turbulence that preoccupies me.  So don’t consult too often.  The lesson must be given time to unfold its flower.

Wisdom is unhurried.  Wisdom is heard not in haste, but in the slow unravelment of the voices of the mind, in the way the waters become calm.  In this stillness lives no longer desire for what is not there.  It is rest.  Do not run to a “contemplative” refuge.  Simply SEE that the suffering cannot be.

question

Plotinus:  “This universe is a unique animal that contains within itself all other animals … without coming into contact, things occur and are bound to produce an effect at a distance … the world is a unique animal and that is why it must of necessity be in sympathy with itself.  There is no such thing as chance in life, but only a harmony and an order which governs everything … events on the Earth are in sympathetic relationship with celestial things.”

There is an inscrutable harmony behind all the events of life, if I but listen and hear.  In levity I have for years, called it “The Divine Regulator”.  My Divine Regulator is a recognition that all things experienced, no matter how tough or painful, work out for the best in the end, according to some fundamental Law of growth or expediency or tuition – even totally frivolous things, like a missed train, or a disappointment.

Even Krishnamurti dwells in a mobile ivory tower, with his inner ring of devoted old trouts, who organize, protect, clothe and broadcast him.

Brockwood, with its extraordinary clarity, compactness and intensity of light, is like a monastery.  People find there a retreat, where their concern with aspects of being alive can be brought into high relief.  It looks like a hospital.  For some, it extends their game of chess.

As K says, meditation is something for which there is no specified time or place.  It happens as well riding in a bus, as sitting under one of those ancient lofty, singing trees in a park of purity.

 portrait, circa 1974

**

Daniel … I could use your help.  I am silting up a little.

Akiva and I saw The Sting last night at the pictures, at which I greatly enjoyed the movements of Redford & Newman outwitting Shaw.  What a fine ballet.  Before that, we had Akiva’s elderly friend Dr de Silva for supper.  He then took us to the Hampstead Cricket Club for drinks.  Akiva cannot stop singing Dr de Silva’s praises, the brotherhood of man, what a marvelous person and all that.  He is a pleasant and rather lugubrious old gentleman whose loquacious cadences of speech are endlessly predictable.  I knew the Cricket Club would be an ordeal.  In a place of no stimulus, my mind faced with her own BLANK, devises phantom stimuli chatterboxing from the future, and it’s such a battle, and it depresses me so.  I am trying to be Just Here, but I don’t like it Here.  When we came out at last into the smokeless starry night, I thought No more Latin, no more French!  No more polite mediocre places which Akiva appears to enjoy but I DON’T!

There is the doubtful pain of growing, this desire for refuge, to run into the male who’ll protect me and occupy my fantasies.  Trouble is, if he occupies my fantasies, how can he ever occupy me?

No!  This is a time, a valuable time, to be out on the limb of the tree, and stay there.  To stop postponing.

**

My period came as the lovely blood cleansing of a whole period, a loving, a pain, an impulse.  I don’t mean only in the purgative sense.  I mean the way it washes away with inexorable lunar rhythm, the built-up tide or lining of the dark womb, and clears it completely for what comes next.  If there is no period, the consequences remain in you physically, for ever.  The making of love becomes the embryo of a lifetime.

Even in these days on the Pill, where I don’t have to worry about conceiving, the onset of bleeding carries an inner and secret renewal.  Blood is like tears, but these are tears of tenderness.  The womb weeps, aches, with a kind of compassion, joyful, unhurried and liberating, all of it running out from the contracting sponge.  That sponge in the inner dark – how like the two plump sides of a seed it looks;  and then the seed lets itself go.  We could learn from this a thing or two.  I AM this movement of my body, and these movements are not my spectacle but my truth.

**

Balsa boat (made for my grandmother in 1962)

**

**

My adventure invites fellow travellers.  I am a poet, an artist and a seer.  I welcome conversation among the PHILO SOFIA, the lovers of wisdom.

This blog is  a vehicle to promote my published work – The Sacred India Tarot (with Rohit Arya, Yogi Impressions Books) and The Dreamer in the Dream – a collection of short stories (0 Books) – along with many other creations in house.  

I write, illustrate, design and print my books.   Watch this space.

Watching Krishnamurti (2): Brockwood ’74 Continued – Part Two

Perhaps few of us would tackle spiritual Reality, were it not for its underside – the pain when we are unable to be in relationship now:  with what is.  The passion of “the speaker” illumined for an instant, the blindingly obvious.   Then we must find it for ourselves, chipping away beyond thought.  Only life can do that:  life and the chisel of decades from within.   For a young person with insight, this is peculiarly painful.  We are a work that is incomplete.

I find it valuable here, to honour the pain.  We all know it.   It is as crucial to spiritual growth as “the understanding” and “the creativity” when the sun comes out.  Some of us wail into our notebooks;  wisdom may come to this focus, as to any;  here is a little of my workshop of the wailing.   What follows is, in essence, a fairly typical “ashram” or guru-bhakti story:

**

Krishnamurti portrait, 2^nd version

“Can the mind remain with sorrow,  AS SORROW,  not rationalise or run away from it?   Can it remain motionless with this feeling we call sorrow?   I hope you are doing this as the speaker is talking about it;  otherwise it is no fun at all.

 “Is there an action which is not based on an action?   Action based on an idea is time.   There is an inadequacy,  a lack of complete identification,  and therefore a conflict between the idea and the action.   What is seeing?   The act of looking brings its own order.   Looking at the fact of sorrow.   Look at that feeling,  without a single image about yourself,  or interpretation.   This requires tremendous attention, concern,  discipline.   This seeing then,  is the acting in which there is no time.   The moment there is time,  there is conflict.

 “If I act according to an idea or ideal,  I am insane!   Of course I am!   Real action at any level of our life is not the future according to an idea,  but seeing,  without the image of oneself.   That is instant action.   If you listen,  that very act of listening itself,  is an entire action.

 “Our entire moral structure is based on our pleasure and fear,  which is immoral …

J.Krisnamurti, Brockwood gathering, September 1974

**

September 1974

Today is the back slipping of my heart.  Don’t know what to do with it, this body.  All cells a-dancing in a question mark of wanting.   (But started a painting of Krish. which is very like him, and re-drew the portraits of two lads from Yorkshire.  Hungry, and now listening to Liszt …

Tomorrow, to Brockwood again for a second weekend.  Shall I see Daniel again there?  “Shall we meet in London this week?” he asked.  “No,” I said, “I’ve got things to do.”  Truth was that, and also how to manage seeing him with regards Akiva;  and in any case there was that “there’s all the time in the world” feeling, even though he’s off to Israel in ten days.  I feel at such times, almost bewildered, contained, basking in and trying to digest the present, no plans to be made.   But oh, on Tuesday night, I cried.  And still it rains, with an endless wet whisper.

A gust of wind rocks all the people on the platform back like a wave.  In South London the train rides among the chimneys.  I love the way he cleaves me with that deep tender thrust of his, and fills me up, sweet pain.

Doing my best to steer away, with the company of other people, thoughts of this human being, whom I don’t want to load with my ludicrous heart-storm.  Heart-storm destroys the ability to relate to him, or be friends.   What a lot of insane energy is spent, trying to materialize things in the mind.

I don’t want to be addicted to his comings and goings.  I want to enjoy the full tapestry, all the people, all my self.  When there is no thinking, there’s no problem, like when you wake from sleep.

And desperately anxious about hypothetical exchanges with Asher, re my going away again this weekend – we are still living together, right up till the time he goes off to India – what if he wants to come too?

As I keep trying to grasp, there is no problem until the problem is invented.  There is in truth, no problem anywhere – just situations.

Tree conference, Brittany 1987

**

It is Friday morning, and the sun is out.  Night of dreams.  Phone rang and it was Daniel.  We arrange to meet at the Theosophical bookshop … but we don’t know at what time, because the pips ran out and he had to catch a train!

Today or tomorrow?  Both are aspects of eternity.  There is a terrific discipline with Daniel, like clear waters.  Dreamed last night about Yorkshire and my father, and curious drifting creeks of land and sea.  And dreamed I was kissing Daniel who was in his sleeping bag, and he was very vague as to if or when we would ever meet again, and I was trying to keep my cool.

**

So strange a thought pierces sometimes the clouds.  It is about Krishnamurti giving talks at Brockwood, and sleeping in the house.  Around him coasts a profusion of individual dramas – pain and personal turning points – of which my own is but one flighty little cell of anguish, among it all.  Rather macabre!  Why does K attract all that, like a magnet?   What happens around him stings.  “The observer is the observed.”  How far does that go?  That phrase reverberates from my childhood, from the searching of my father’s path.

WHAT, through the dim opening in my clouds … observes?  “Whom” does it observe?   Krishnamurti is the hub of a wheel turning around him.

I only grasped for a moment, that I suffer a fragment of what preoccupies all and everyone on a revolution of that wheel.  There was some comfort seeing this.  But such comfort was immediately removed from my hand and I “see” it no more.

Every individual at Brockwood is the messenger of his or her absorbent and urgent tapestry of life;  each alone, and insoluble.   Poor K – sitting in the middle of all those bees – would-be’s – that buzz around him!   “If only one could just concentrate on Krish…”  – on the entirety of the garden, the open walks in the wet windy woods.  What a feast is lost through fear and anxiety and the complicated management of this.

Buoyant boats, Brittany 1987

**

“What is the problem in relationship?    (Thunder outside – tent rattles)   Attachment?  detachment?  and so on.   Attachment to WHAT?   Do, please go with me!   Attachment to what?   I’m attached to YOU –  my wife, my father, my mother, my sister, my – wife,  my girlfriend -whatever it is.   God, I’m glad I haven’t got any of those.    Thank God!   (laughter)   Sorry!    Don’t impose them on me please!   Heh!

 “Attached to what?   Dominating what?   Jealous of what?    Attached to what?

“Attached to the image that I have built about her and she has built about me,  out of her loneliness,  out of –  whatever it is.   You follow all this?   Please,  watch it!   because we are going to –  we are showing that a problem that arises in human relations can be dissolved INSTANTLY.   Not carried over.   The carrying over is the INSANITY.

 “What is the mind attached to,  when it says “I am attached to my wife”?   “my house” – whatever –  attached?   (Thunder)   Attached to the image I have built about her?   Am I attached to HER –  please listen! –  or to HIM?   or to the IMAGE I have built about her or him?    Obviously,  to the image!   I can’t be attached to the person,  because the person is living!   moving!   has its own desires,  its own ambitions,  its own problems,  its own – pettiness,  its own –  shallowness,  its own –  emptiness.   But I am attached to the image that I have built about her.   And that image becomes MUCH more important than her.  (Croaks)

 “Can my mind be free from building images?   You understand?  (Pleads)   because then I’ve ended the problem.   Are you moving with me?    Can the mind empty its images about her?   She’s hurt me,  by word, by gesture,  by some – act.   The hurt is to the image I have about myself.   And I am attached to that image and to the hurt.   And that is non-relationship –  which is insanity!   I am living according to an image I have built about her,  about myself.   An IMAGE –  you understand? –  which is an idea ;   and therefore has nothing whatever to do with relationship.  

 “So can the mind never build an image?   Which means —  be aware at the moment of hurt.  

“If you have no image,  you won’t be hurt.   It’s only when I have an image about myself that I can do something about it,  kick it around.   But if I have no image about myself,  you can’t kick it around.   So can the mind be free of image building –  which is the ideation?   which is the same thing in other words –  so that everything that the man or the woman does is instantly perceived and dissolved,  so that there is no image at all,  which means every incident is over for the next moment, and the mind is young,  fresh  and innocent.”

K, Brockwood 1974

**

Brockwood.  Hearing Krishnamurti speak again, I dived into my little capsule of pain, and have only just climbed out.  Capsule is all it is.  It exists, but it isn’t ALL, unless you choose to have it so.

DON’T RUN AWAY TO I-DON’T-KNOW!

Squall approaches, Brittany 1986

**

It is a bit of a cult around here.  Daniel and his friends bubble around the hot pot of Krishnamurti talk and Krishnamurti tapes (so do I at times, just to keep with it) like a gang of schoolboys.  I’ll go home tomorrow.  As to Daniel – I haven’t said an honest word to him all day.  End of affair.  Too much romanticism and starry nights on my part.  All bullshit.  He’s more than a fraction “precious”.  I mistrust every word I say.  Must learn not to invest emotions, or imagine what our kids could look like.   Leave him be.

There is no fact in suffering.  The fact is a circumstance that causes suffering, but the suffering itself is phantom!  a mind storm!   To cling to what happened, and declare it responsible for what I am feeling now, is to live in unreality.  So what do I bloody well do about what I’m feeling now?  If there is just the fact, there is no pain.  Pain’s a waste of time – to rub sand into a wound, just to exist.

The quality of open attention which is living, is fouled up by the intrusion of my injured self, its smallness, the way it picks away at all the idiotic, tense and embarrassing things I have said and been, and at every nuance of rejection.   That little injured self … is all I know;  that is what is meant by having to die to oneself!   I’m not afraid of my body dying.  I’m afraid of the death of my state of consciousness which in all its labyrinth is so essential to me, but so meaningless when applied to being with others;  to the world, in short.

Recognise no authority.  No person.  Become aware of the moment, the total pulse, and put the other thing away, the thing which through its hurt, recognizes my existence … and what is that false flat existence but a dream?  There are only the facts – as I heard over and over again as a child.  They are plain enough to see.  But I do not find it interesting enough just to see them, I cling to this Hollywood drama about them.   One has to be so tuned in, to recognize and strip bare without comment or commentary all those fleeting escape runs back to fantasy and what-if – within the quick of their instant.

Don’t-run-away-to-i-don’t-know!

And it isn’t a goal to seek to achieve.  If it is, it sends me right back into the falsehood.  It has to be the right action by WHAT IS.  To act as NOW, shrivels the monstrous shadows my memory prompts from the stage wings.

Keep the door open!  (Daniel said.)   “Keep the door open!”

There is in fact, no door.

The reality I want is health.  I want an active, not a passive condition.

See it, when the phantom comes billowing like a huge wave, a monster of importance with black patches all over it, just let it come, and SEE it.  It cannot withstand those Medusa eyes of truth.  It is no longer there.  And the future isn’t even here yet!

And there’s no value either in glorifying the insight which helped me to see.

The cross is no longer with us.  There is but one Way.

**

“Now,  without stress or strain,  can you be aware of yourself?   Can you watch yourself?   Can you watch the content of your own mind —  the beliefs, the national feeling,  the pettiness,  the shallowness,  the desires,  the anxieties,  fears —  all that is a part of your consciousness —  identification with a country,  with a name,  with a property, and so on,  so on.   And the hurts which one has received from childhood.   Now.   Are you aware of all this content?   And content makes up consciousness.   Without the content there is no so called consciousness!   Right?    Let me put it briefly.   Meditation is the emptying of the mind of its content,  as its consciousness,  and going beyond.   We will discuss and talk about meditation some other time.”

K, Brockwood 1974

 

A Meadow in West Hampstead

**

I have so strong an urge to keep him with me, by whatever means.  The state of “in-love” is a self engendered state of fear.  At the beginning it is not there.  There is encounter, the ebb and flow.  It develops through absence and threat of ‘losing’.  I make of him an emotional possession though nobody owns him.  From that point on, the relationship is false.

He, seeing this, will not be drawn into even a compassionate involvement.  Owning and being owned by no one, he is clear.  Friend to not just one, but everyone, he has no frontiers.  It is worthless to give time, company, body, talk, into a vacuum.  There is no filling, ever, of my vacuum “from outside”.

I went through many gates of anger, bitterness.  Every time I saw Daniel around the grounds of the house, it was agony.  He has time, space for everybody.  He is deeply and humanely involved in the Krishnamurti set-up and all its relationships, questions and internecine events.  Why shut himself away with one sorrow, from the tapestry?   Ah … but what I am seeing, and this breaks my heart, is what I wanted to be, when I first came here.  I wanted to be a free agent, a celebrant at the feast.

Then I am robbed of my self.  I stand outside the window, I am lost.  It is no longer my garden.  I spent the day alone, and very hurt.   Krishnamurti talked about suffering, this morning.

I went off afterwards and cried at the senseless conundrum of it all.  Towards the end of the day, I understood it was my craving and dishonesty which made relationship with Daniel impossible.  So I sought him no more.  No more did I clamber around fields and through woodlands and strain my eyes through knots of people.  Finis.

Cloud fortress

**

I spent the evening sitting in the crowd around the bright fire near the kitchen tent.  Out in the wind, which still blew great gusts, sparks flew in the intense darkness, and the flames lit up our faces as we tried to warm ourselves for the night.  I knew an extraordinary articulacy and fluidity with the people of that moment – a superficial skating, a temporary reprieve from the blow.  Perhaps my dreams of flying are pain relief?

I know this. When I suffer, but have decided to bed the pain into the embers, the words flow.  Always.  Talking.  Writing.  Manic perceptions and comedy.  Like blood.

Why is The Speaker such a talker?  Why is there this tremendous sound and activity around him?  Why, he is fire, fire, fire.

Something burns him.

I come face to face with the deep, unutterable shame of my personal being.  I become alien:  the Outside, looking in.  It lacerates whatever form it takes – right up through the core.  It is because Daniel is joy and I am not.  We are camped among scruffy trees and bushes.

I did not know whether or not to expect him in my tent that night.  When I went in, I found his sleeping bag there, with mine.  Earlier I decided to sever all connection, but then this seemed just a pose, and I decided to accept whatever happened.  At about 11.30 he arrived, I was in bed and still feeling cold.  We talked unsuccessfully, and had sex even more unsuccessfully, from the communication point of view.  At last there was no more pretence or theatre.   I took the lid off and let him see what went on, not just its noise, but my actual unspeakable problem.  He gave to this an attention which was total and uncompromisingly loving, his arms around me, listening.

Since then, when we talked – moments snatched from the river in which he flowed – he reiterated this attention, the urgency of “now” – to “stay with this thing no more!  Keep the door open and always go through it – do not close it round yourself.  When you feel it shutting, even just a bit, put your foot in it, your hand in it, push it, push on and through, that same door is habit when it closes, and truth when it opens, but you must work at it, every moment.   This is emergency!   NOTHING is more important than to open the egg.  Nothing to defend!  Keep watch.  Listen.  What is it?”

Sky, Brittany

Daniel is very young, younger even than me.  Various entanglements of wine, woman and song, which I needn’t talk about here, advised him to steer his course clear of the romantic monogamous envelope, and from the pollution of possessing.  His wing is down also.  He is very young, with the ruthlessness of a growing tree.

You smile with the no-nonsense joy that is verily your own.  When I am with you, I am self-critical.  But I don’t want to be.  At moments, a terrific pulse connected us, and other moments disconnected it;  and other moments still – like now – we lay together talking.  There’s a light in your eyes, in the night’s damp pallor;  and you held me to you with much warmth in the morning, and there was no need for me to try to flop about and try to kiss you, try to be a seductive siren.

But I wanted to stay in his arms – fact or figuratively – all day. Only on the face of it, could I accept he must come and go.  As soon as we left the tent, the old grief flooded back, winding its envelope around me – the senseless, paralytic jealousy whenever I saw him with someone else.  Do you know why?  It’s because he looks like an insider;  and I want to be one of “them”.

I want to be seen by everyone he knows, being cherished and claimed.  This is the pathos of my snobbery to this imaginary prince.

Knowing there is no other way.

To go around with Daniel all day, would be having him.  And what is the having of that gentle beauty and hard truth for my own, to separate from the rest of the garden?   Illusion!  Illusion and therefore rot.   He has the clarity to stay out of the scenario, even when, as he said, there were times during the day when I looked so lost and empty he wanted to go up and hug and comfort me, and almost did.  We had agreed on something.

And once when I’d been walking everywhere looking for him, I came back from somewhere and found him, he’d been looking for me too, because someone was going to take a photograph of us all together, the inner circle of this camp, and he couldn’t find me, so I wasn’t in it, and I could have been.  Perhaps … when the next Krishnamurti bulletin comes out, it’ll have the photo in it, and I shall be able to see Daniel in it, among the people?

Something to hold.

Two boats, seascape

I never knew what to say to his eyes.  My mouth was nervous.  And in a dark place, a barn perhaps, sheltering from the rain with some others, I looked at him and thought, “you’re not so handsome really.  Your arms are under developed.  You’re not really manly …” and other nit picking things.   He was off to France that evening, and then to Israel.  Were it to continue, there could be no truth.  Michelle – the woman with whom he shares the tent and some travelling – and I, we spoke sometimes in a brittle way, and I watched her closely.  I sensed in her a feeling which was worn out, but maybe that was me.  She’s his travelling companion.  My jealousy, what’s it like for her?  She has a son, Louis, in his early teens.  She has shaggy hair, and she lives in the warmth of Daniel’s world.  I went up to London on the train with her, Louis, Daniel and several other people from the field.   Daniel and I shared more insights.  He was committed to bathe our encounter in as healing a light as he could summon up – which stripped me further of my hopes and left me humble and lame.    The lameness and exhaustion brought back in its turn more of that false hope in him as my comforter.  He told me I am too sexually self-conscious.  “It’s the way you put your eyes on me and dwell on it, just like that.  You know, you’re just FULL of feminine wiles and devices, you are!   What am I to do?”

He stood for a long time as I found my way through the ticket machines, seeing me off with love, or whatever it is that shines steadily in his eyes.  He gave me a book he carried with him for a long time – Kazantzakis’ Travels in Greece.  He said it could be a portrait of himself – he has a way of being a hero – and he chuckles disparagingly with his own weaknesses, flinging them often away as the ruthless young sapling does, to grow, to wander and be alive.  “Write to me,” he said “the address in Israel, it’ll find me.  Write me lots of letters!”

That is the way he comforts, and it is genuine, it is Consciousness to Life.  Life is devastated by the increment of Consciousness.

Does Michelle look weary?  Has she been through all this – was she still …? Yes … so he told me earlier, how much she too wants to hold him with her, some ligaments of their own hold them close, he cannot leave her, but nor is he “with” her only.  “With her, you see,” he had told me “it is a little different.  She has a son of her own.  She needs a kind of protecting, Louis needs it, I need it, I suppose.”

For that night, for him, Michelle and Louis, the boat, the crossing, the luggage, the trains, the clash and confusion of conveyences.  For me … home to face Asher as if nothing had happened.

In the Kazantzakis book are many passages he marked.  I turn the pages, a little dazed. Here are a few:

**

“Whoever has a field, says Buddha, thinks of the field, dreams of the field, becomes the field.  Only he who has nothing can be free.”

“The sternest emotion, the most daring fantasy in order to live – or better still, in order to be born –requires a body.  The creator discovers the body only by looking about him, how the light plays, how the mountains stand immobile … The quality and resistance of matter – marble or granite or mud – determine not only his methods but his heart as well.  There is no closed impassable barrier between artist and landscape.  The landscape penetrates the artist’s body through its five portals and fashions his senses;  and as it fashions them, a likeness is formed in their image.”

 .

“Only through struggle and selection would some few bodies achieve the lofty victory of the flower.”

“We have no more than a single instant at our disposal;  let us make eternity of that instant – there is no other immortality.”

 .

“The timeless Greek landscape, cut to the measure of men, flooded with light.  At each instant, it is slightly altered, even while remaining the same;  it shimmers, flourishing its beauty, regenerates itself, and so does not tire you.”

 .

“Auntie Lenio, he said, died day before yesterday.  Our hearts constricted.  We sensed that a word had perished;  perished, and now no one could place it in a verse and render it immortal.”

. 

“Socrates would never go fishing for the soul in today’s gymnasiums.”

 “Quickly I left, mocking my heart, which was ready once more to break.”

**

Harbour ‘86

**

**

My adventure invites fellow travellers.  I am a poet, an artist and a seer.  I welcome conversation among the PHILO SOFIA, the lovers of wisdom.

This blog is  a vehicle to promote my published work – The Sacred India Tarot (with Rohit Arya, Yogi Impressions Books) and The Dreamer in the Dream – a collection of short stories (0 Books) – along with many other creations in house.  

I write, illustrate, design and print my books.   Watch this space.

Watching J.Krishnamurti (2) – Brockwood 1974

PART ONE – Here is my love-story from the Brockwood gathering in 1974 – the year of the storm when a great tree fell in the grounds.   I was 25.  For me, K was not an “intellectual”.  He spoke of relationship NOW. It was crucial in his private life with Rosalind Rajagopal and others, and his global life as a speaker.   Around his life thread, I noticed an acting-out of romance and love affairs.  It was in his energy field.  We were challenged by him, not to string “weights” on him or onto each other.  I tasted freedom, and it was an agony to fall back into the trap.

Krishnamurti’s talks are fully documented, so this memoir has just my memory of what he said, which I wrote down shortly afterwards.   Decades later, I bought the 1974 Brockwood tapes – you can hear the rain and the wind on the tent!  My digest had caught their gist well enough. But I added an extract from The Awakening of Intelligence.

My father has a vivid memory of K’s gesture in a crowded room;  a little old lady approached him with her difficulty.  K took her to a window seat, put his arm round her, and gave her his total, tender attention.   I see his birdlike intensity even now, soft and sharp.

An early painting of Krishnamurti

 **

 The hay ripples silver with the wind chasing games of sun and clouds.   Mind makes tracks for herself.  She walks through tangled shining trees and shafts of sunlight.  The soft black mud oozes up between my toes and splashes ankles.   My feet tread softly and sometimes slither, and thrill a little to the ground.:  soft with grass or sharp with earth and stones.

Somewhere in a corner of Hampshire are we, mind and I.  I am camping in a tent tonight.  We are here for a Krishnamurti gathering at Brockwood Park.  He spoke this afternoon in a marquee tent, vibrant, passionate, quivering and tender.

My tent is pitched near the house, a sagging little shelter of bleached grey canvas from my childhood, on leafy ground under the orchard trees.   Like a cat to settle, I prowled up and down to find the right place – where the action is, and also oasis, among all the other pointed private islands emerging.  The voices.  The soft bangs of a wooden mallet on pegs.   Woody smells break up from the rain-drunk autumnal earth, and big clouds traverse so great a sky, holding hands.

**

Skyscape 2009

**

And now – it is much later –  trying to sleep on damp soil, my small tent sags between two peaks, dark, with the full moon bursting out silver here and there.  A man picks a guitar in the tea-making tent nearby.  Sounds of laughter, of swearing, of someone drumming on a tin can.  Sounds of all these people sleeping, lovemaking, talking under canvas, under fruit trees that drip fat splats of dew.   Somewhere under the roof of the long, low white house, among his stalwart satellites, Krishnamurti went off to bed at 7.30.  He gets up before dawn, and does two hours of yoga.    Daniel, whom I got talking to, by the big tree in the grounds, talks most passionately of K.  He spoke to K a little earlier today, when they were all carrying blankets and things.

There were tall, towering trees and a luminous gold sunlight through the wet wind.

He came from Canada.  I noticed his gentle gesture among the people, earlier.  He came up to me near the big tree, when I was trying to sketch K from memory, and I covered my drawing nervously with my hands.  He talked from the core of himself – “Alone, alone?  a word – a shape – a gown!  Ah look at her, this so seductive idea.  She is an excuse to wrap around a fact that never changes.  What d’you mean, alone?  What is alone – what do you feel? right now?   See what doesn’t change – the stars, the trees.   Listen to this!  When you look at yourself without the eyes of time, what or who is there to look?”

“I don’t have anything,” Daniel said, his eyes glowing inward “if I have no silence of mind.   Is she, the idea, is she ever at peace?  What a fret her mirror is…”

Cold rain coasted onto the leaves over us, as night fell.   Suddenly we jumped up and ran and ran together, very swift, all the way back to the tents.   When my feet are bare, I almost fly.  He wore heavy boots on his, for the weather.   We hugged and kissed in the dark field after the rain… his long, childlike arms and black beard.

It is bound to happen, in a place like this.   The pattern of relationships through the encampment is like the making of stars, and seems to be pre-existent to the known encounter.

In the kitchen tent, a French woman called Michelle, rather worn, strong and weathered, said cheerfully but with piercing eyes,  “and who is this lady?”   And who is she, to him? I wondered.

Some of us in the communal tent began to talk about cows.  I went off with him towards the house.   He wanted to find some blankets.  “What is your name?”  I asked.  His eyes are deep brown, and very brilliant … black hair and Sephardic nose.

“You,” he said “are at turning point almost imperceptibly but constantly.  And I think you have much difficulty in translating the frank or out-front part of you into this place.  It is looking for light, and you don’t know the rules there.”

And he wondered at himself.  Why, when he talks with intensity, is he unaware of his surroundings?  Shouldn’t he be aware of everything?   No, I said, it is selective.  When you dig out things, when you look deep into the well, the same awareness focuses the problem to hand.  He thinks he should be like K, he should be the tree, the blade of grass, the small creature, the house, the voice that speaks;  to exclude nothing.

We sat for ages looking in the well, and the moon went in.  Clouds, silvery night.

*

I didn’t sleep all night, because it was cold, and I had no mattress.  That dawn misery when you have failed to sleep in so lovely and open and grass-roots a situation near all the other eager people in the night, and what is the point of it all?  There really needs to be, should be two in a tent on the hard ground, to keep each other warm.

Birdsong.  The throaty drone of a pigeon.  More drips from the trees.  And voices raised again, in the kitchen tent.

**

profile

What a day of thunder, sun and wind!   What a talk that was!

Sat very close to K “at the Master’s feet” said Daniel’s friends, who smiled with me.  K talked aflame, like fire, about relationships.  Pungent in his spicy smell and presence, brown with white hair swept neatly over his crown, old and yet unaged, dynamic with the electricity, it quivers and burns within and through every fibre of his being, as he searches, pleads, despairs and laughs with us.

“We are attached … to the image – of wife, of sister, of brother, of husband, of boy, of girl, of child and all that, all the rest of it – Thank God I don’t have any of these!  so don’t impose them on me, please … but this is so serious, can you not see?  To abstract from fact, an idea, and make that idea into life, is INSANITY.

“Can we act, please, from what is – can we act from this alone, without time, without considerations, without analysis, to finish this problem today and not tomorrow …?

“You know what a movement is?  A movement has no end and no beginning, and therefore the movement in itself is the beauty, the glory.  Are you following this?  Do please look at this for yourself, please don’t merely listen to the speaker, and don’t be carried away by the words, by the philosophical concepts and ideals with which we are so careful to canalize and build a hedge around PASSION.”

 

**

(Added later, from The Awakening of Intelligence):

“Now, that passion is not lust, nor is it identification with some country or some mean little god, it is derived from the Latin word for suffering which again derives from the Greek and so on … but in the feeling of complete passion with the furious and total energy behind it, there is no hidden want.   To look at that tree, you must be free from worry, from anxiety, from guilt.  The passion to look at it completely, requires energy, but not the shoddy energy of a dissipated mind that has struggled, that has tortured itself, that is full of innumerable burdens.  Most minds, ninety nine point nine per cent of minds, have this terrible burden, this tortured existence.  And so they have no energy, energy being passion.

“Can we not share together a mind that is not tortured, that is fundamentally free, that has no barriers, that sees things as they are, that sees that an interval of time separates man from nature and from other human beings, that sees the meaning of dreadful, frightening time and space, that knows what is really the quality of love?

“If we could share this – not intellectually, not in a most cunning, elaborate, philosophical, metaphysical way, but actually partake of it, if we could do that, would not all of our problem end?

“But this sharing is not with another.  One must have it first.  Then when you have it, you have it in abundance.  And when there is this abundance, the one and the many are the same, like a tree that is full of leaves of which one leaf is perfect and is part of the whole tree.

“Can we, today, share this quality, not with the speaker, but by having it and then sharing it?  Then the question of sharing need no longer arise.  It is like a flower full of scent which doesn’t share, but is always there for every passer by to delight in!  And whether anyone is very near in the garden, or very far away, it is all the same to the flower, because it is full of that perfume, and so it is sharing with everything.

“If we could come upon this, it is really a mysterious flower.  It only seems mysterious because we are so full of emotion and sentiment – to beget our ideas of children, sex, fellowship – but this thing, why is it that we haven’t got it?  For when it is, then all problems, whatever they may be, come to an end.

“And haven’t you wondered lazily on occasion, when you were walking by yourself, in a filthy street, or sitting in a bus, or when you were by the seaside or in a wood with a lot of birds, trees, streams and wild animals, hasn’t it ever come upon you to ask – why is it that man who has lived for millions of years, why is it that he hasn’t got this thing, this extraordinarily unfading flower?”

From The Awakening of Intelligence

**

Oh YES, and thus must finish this human imagery of myself, of the other, of Daniel and of the relationship back home which has shot its bolt and which I try to end.  It is to be finished!   Today!  It grows nothing but weeds to choke, or be choked by the image of it that is fostered like a great parasite onto me or you.

When K speaks, his slender hands rest quietly to each side of his chair.  But his whole body seems to dance and strain like a small child.  It leaps, like candlelight.

“How,” he tells us, laughing “can I be attached to you who are moving about from place to place, a distinct body in yourself?  No!  What I am attached to is not you, but the IMAGE of you.  Look, please, with passion into this image we are holding onto.  And let us ask – what is the truth in it?  Concentrate, please, not on what the speaker is saying, but on what you are seeing.  Oh!  this is very, very serious!  What is the body, the bulk of this image we hold to ourselves?  What does it feel like?  Fear!  It is fear to have it taken away. 

“The mind that is free from fear is the mysterious flower that is open to the scent, the sound, the dew and the colour of the garden. It is with you and in you now.   It is not tomorrow, nor is it some other place or any of all that.  Come, let us finish completely the problem now and for always, to be the thing that this is TODAY.”

**

Silverbirch & beech 1999

When I hold onto an image, there is relationship no longer.  In fact there is very little relationship at all, anywhere.  And drawing people?  My drawing, oh dear, of K, is that a be-possessive?  I can’t not try to draw.  Then draw what is there – not the image!   Image is lies.  If only what is true could use me as a medium.  How wonderful is the wind tossing this great tree in whose branches I sit bewildered and adrift with my notebook.  How wonderful the sound of the wind, the branch.  If I could be only this great old tree and nothing else.  A different kind of flower is stirring up trouble and turbulence now in my mind, and I strive to let go of it, to sit in this tree and be nothing and nowhere else.

The wind is the music.  The wind is the speaker.  I am sitting on rocks, gently.

I am plastered with imagery. Strip it off.  I hate it.  Imagery is imaginary conversations, and what he’ll think of me, and preparing myself for five minutes later.

Let go, let go.  Is it so great a terror to drop?  Be right here with the sting.  Don’t think of what they’ll think.  To prepare is to be AFRAID of all comers, to put on my battledress, my sex or my lack of it.  To prepare is to be afraid.

No fear, please realize this.  Just here.   No conceptual states of me – just this, which is.

That wind, the wind which comes from nowhere.  It breaks on the back of my neck.  It moves the bough of the great old tree like a ship.  I wish I were nothing but the wind, the tree…  What is it of pain and stories and descriptions that I know and am attached to like nothing other, which is the traveling curse of my being, that sort of … taste of living?

There should be time no longer.  In action is there no time.  In time is just an endless tomorrowing.

**

Krishnamurti listening, circa 1974

**

“Hand,” said Daniel, shading the torch redly with his fingers in the dark tent, so I saw all their veins transparently – “what a piece of work, isn’t it?”  He walks and speaks with grace and simplicity.   There is no mess, trouble or possessing.

Some time after K’s talk on that thundery day, we walked across a golden cornfield and through singing woods under a wind chased luminous sky.  The cold prickled my skin.  We felt rather speechless, like a gate.  Our bodies exchanged warmth.  He was looking for something in a wood.  He spread maybe his anorak out vaguely on the ground – and mine as well?  I’ve forgotten.  We made love among the high nettles, among tall fluttering trees.  “I told you,” he said “I didn’t know what to do with my body.  This thing beat up between us like a barrier.  I could go no further without crossing it with you.”  And I had felt the wild pounding of his heart.

Naked.  Thighs white in the autumn.  Afterwards, peace and speechless surprise.  Mosquito bites and fiery nettle stings.  Our whiteness in the wood.  He black haired, slender and strong like a willow, gleaming.

Returning across the cornfield, I began to strew my faithful and agonizing trail of muddles, insecurity and webs of divided loyalty.  It is desperately vulnerable and fragmented.  It is the spill of something broken.  We managed to sweep it up somehow in the grove, near the house.  “The greatest and best and most loving thing we can do for each other,” he said “is to have no illusions.  Ever.”

He has a piercing serenity, and all the time in the world for what is not emotional trash.

**

I tried to finish the Krishnamurti drawing that night, curled up in a corner of the crowded library in the main house, because I wanted to give it to him, but it went wrong.  He saw it and laughed.  “How you’ve changed it!”   We sat in semi darkness with two boys who were playing chess, and Daniel talked about being a student, and tried to locate a ferocious nettle sting that throbbed in one of his long delicate toes.  My feet too were on fire, repeatedly bathed in mud and cleansed in wet grass throughout the day.  And stung all over.

The moon shone in a cuttlefish of thin cirrus in a clear dark starry sky.  The wind was icy.  “That moon,” he said “is the craziest thing in this romance with you.”  Full Moon.

We made love again in my tent, and talked and rambled softly together at length.  After he left, I heard the joyful grunts of other canvas copulations, and felt now satisfied and not left out at all – not like last night.

These are the first wild, wild days of September.  The wind, coming from who knows where, vibrates the leaves in a mighty orchestra of its song, to begin the Fall.

We laughed at the story going round that someone from the house approached Israeli David (who was also helping out in the kitchens and with blankets and things) with a razor, and informed him politely that Krishnamurti would prefer him to shave his stubble.  Whether or not this was by direct command, it is a fact that K is as fastidious and sleek in himself and surroundings, as a healthy cat in its wholeness.  He wears beautiful brown leather shoes, hand made to his narrow feet, and he polishes them every day.   He came into the food tent, during the lunch-time babble, it was raining hard.   He moved gently among people in a macintosh.  When he walked outside, his movement was a fragile leaf;  the wind blows him a little to one side.   “That is a GOOD person, isn’t it?”  said Daniel and someone else, smiling at me.

There was a little black dog, thin, eager and pleased at the comings and goings of so many milling and magnificent grubby humans.  He jumped, barked and played.  He examined the rubbish bin and licked the water-drips from the tap.  And he ran and ferociously chewed twigs, so that someone would come and play a tug-of-war.

To make love is a temple which the mind, with machinations, para-considerations and rememberings, defiles.   It is in fact, a secret sacred place.

**

 TO BE CONTINUED …

row-boat and sea bird 2007

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My adventure invites fellow travellers.  I am a poet, an artist and a seer.  I welcome conversation among the PHILO SOFIA, the lovers of wisdom.

This blog is  a vehicle to promote my published work – The Sacred India Tarot (with Rohit Arya, Yogi Impressions Books) and The Dreamer in the Dream – a collection of short stories (0 Books) – along with many other creations in house.  

I write, illustrate, design and print my books.   Watch this space.

Watching Krishnamurti (1) – 1967

Krishnamurti in the tent at Brockwood, 1974

*

This is the first in a series of impressions of Jiddu Krishnamurti.

I was exposed to Krishnamurti’s teaching from the age of 11, when my father became a student. 

When we were children, there were two things we mocked our father incessantly about.   When he arrived back from a London trip, we left for him, in the front door porch, cartoons of tangled high-brows sitting cross-legged with bubbles coming out – I MUST NOT THINK.  Some of the bubbles contained CND posters – another of my father’s commitments.   K’s bubble was blissfully blank.   We kindly allowed my father a reduced activity in his.

In his bookshelf among spines of philosophy, fruit management and violin playing, lay a very slim little volume – “Who Am I?”   This too, prompted roars of childhood mirth.   Inside the book was an old photo of one of those white-haired Indian saints, sitting on a rock with a kettle beside him.  He had beautiful deep brown eyes.  So did Krishnamurti.  I remember remarking this especially, and searching through the bookshelves for more.

Krishnamurti’s influence on my teens, gave me many existential difficulties.  After leaving school, I traveled with my father up from Somerset, to Wimbledon Town Hall for one of the early Krishnamurti gatherings:

September 1967

Even lavender passes into the air, in the end.  One should be brave enough to move all the time in tune with the present.   When I’m alone in the City, I look for what is behind, and my eyes are in front.   I should like to feel, and only then write or speak.

When Krishnamurti sits and speaks, the whole of him to his beautifully shined boots, quivers with his message – to Be.  It is as simple as that.  But we would rather make life difficult, and hide behind it.

My father sat downstairs, next to a friend of his called Ralph.  I sat up in the balcony among rich old ladies, earnest businessmen, young Indians and hippies, a few cranks and intense women.   Next to me, a man with a big nose in bright purple trousers watched, as I sketched.  We got talking about Art and God.  His name was Barry Fantoni, and he was more or less running the Sixties scene at the time, and painting a portrait of Beethoven.  We exchanged addresses and wrote some letters.  He became an intermittent but kindly friend.

Balcony, Krishnamurti gathering at Wimbledon, 1967

(“Barry” is just behind the Afro, to the right.)

**

**

Shortly after, amid all the bustle below, a distinguished small figure with brushed-over silver hair and nut-brown, clear cut features, ascended the improvised platform.   This was Himself.   As the hush swiftly dampened the shifting crowd like an asbestos blanket, he sat down on a narrow chair, exquisitely dressed before a barrier of microphones, moved his hands a bit beside him, and waited.   This one little person concentrated all the Unity which was lacking in hundreds.

Then he started to speak.  Microphones, tapes, were adjusted;  then all was still, before him.

It was all familiar stuff … but from K himself, this time.  He is at peace when he has no fear.  I found it hard to stop thinking about everything going on, and to concentrate.  The essence radiated out before him.  I feel we are all diseased.

He only answered two or three questions at the end – mostly from an American moustache, who didn’t understand his concept of “discipline”.  Then he got up and walked down and out.   He never speaks for more than an hour.

The next day’s Talk, I sat downstairs.  I shut my eyes and his beautiful words probed my being.  He spoke of peace, violence and the gap between the observer and the observed.  He said there isn’t one.  When people asked questions, he only showed them that he had already answered them.

*

The drizzle spat from the sky.  I love to associate certain areas of London with … Putney with Joe, Battersea with Ben – and yet how dare I, why must I, after hearing Krishnamurti speak of the paralyzing, destroying power of image and association?   No!   Sentiment is not worth sorrow.  Romance shines in every moment, if one is open.  I mustn’t be afraid to turn my back to the luscious past, for its glamour only bleeds to death.

Yet the torment, the sentiment, the turmoil, won’t stop.

September 1967

A Poet & his Daughter 1968

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My adventure invites fellow travellers.  I am a poet, an artist and a seer.  I welcome conversation among the PHILO SOFIA, the lovers of wisdom.

This blog is  a vehicle to promote my published work – The Sacred India Tarot (with Rohit Arya, Yogi Impressions Books) and The Dreamer in the Dream – a collection of short stories (0 Books) – along with many other creations in house.  

I write, illustrate, design and print my books.   Watch this space.