Yes I think the attachment to (identification with) the egoic self causes lots of problems. Thing is, it also causes lots of pleasure, excitement, even joy. It giveth and it taketh away. A profoundly mixed bag is the self. If it weren’t, it would probably be gobs easier to become free of. Or am I wrong?
That might be a better way of putting it.
Yes…
Hi Emile. I see that you have deleted your post, but I appreciated what you wrote (before it disappeared). I think that cultivating a relationship with nature is about sensitivity for sure, but I personally think it is more than that. I know we are not supposed to talk about love, but for me nature - by which I mean fields and rivers, the insects, the birds, the trees, the flowers, the squirrels and the hedgehogs - is a part of love, a part of compassion (compassion being a love for all living things). I don’t think this is just sentimentality (though it can degenerate into that). It is a part of what it means to relate to the whole of life and not merely to a part.
Sometimes I feel that K folk (and Buddhists too I might add) over-complicate these matters because we are so used to analysing everything into non-existence. But we are part of nature, we are part of this amazing universe, and we share a kinship with it all - even rocks, mountains, rivers, so-called inanimate nature. And as living, sentient creatures ourselves we obviously share a kinship with all living, sentient creatures. They suffer as we suffer. They enjoy as we enjoy. They want to live as we want to live. We share the same basic life. So we are family at that level.
This is why some of us have chosen to avoid - where possible - the killing of animals. Most people compartmentalise, and so they do not know the harm they are indirectly contributing to by continuing to eat meat, etc. Once we know what goes on in abattoirs and factory farms, once we have learnt about the abuse that livestock animals are subject to all over the world, we naturally alter our diets, becoming vegetarian or plant-based, so as not to contribute to this destructiveness. And it is the same with our awareness of the natural ecology around us. Once we have learnt about the way that our industries and factories pollute the rivers, the air, the soil, we seek to find ways of reducing the impact that our lifestyles have on the planet. It is only natural to do this. It’s like learning that fatty foods cause cholesterol or that too much sugar is bad for our teeth - we naturally begin to mitigate what we do to our bodies.
No one is perfect. There is no perfect way to live. All that we can do is to be sensitive to the harm we may be doing to others, to animals (as well as to the ecology), and to change our behaviour in the light of our own realisation of this.
None of this denies the possibility of something that lies beyond even life and nature - or which may be the essence of life and nature - but sensitivity is sensitivity. If one is insensitive to the natural world, to the lives of animals, birds, trees and rivers, how can one think of being sensitive to what may lie beyond the universe (if there is such a thing)?
I had to throw out my old vacuum cleaner today - it was just gathering dust.
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I read somewhere that Krishnamurti called T.S. Eliot a “complete bourgeois”(!). And this may be a fair assessment of him based on what we know of Eliot’s lifestyle and his rather conservative religious and political views.
But as a poet he remains one of the most quotable Anglo-American writers from the 20th century (or any century); so, for no particular reason, I thought it worth sharing a couple of my favourite extracts here.
Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves
Waited for rain, while the black clouds
Gathered far distant, over Himavant.
The jungle crouched, humped in silence.
Then spoke the thunderDA
Datta: what have we given?
My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment’s surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed
Which is not to be found in our obituaries
Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider
Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor
In our empty rooms(from The Wasteland)
Every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together)
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning…And any action
Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea’s throat
Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start…We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time…Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)(from The Four Quartets)
Krishnamurti found this “bourgeois”?
I think it was a comment on the person rather than the poetry. Eliot was an elite social conformist of a very peculiar type (an American born English gentleman, a royalist and a Catholic, as well as being a banker by profession).
Apparently Krishnamurti saw Eliot at distance a few times (I think they walked past each other on the street), and the “bourgeois” phrase was an observation K made to an acquaintance. But I don’t want to make a big deal of it. The poetry is the important thing for me.
I feel rather disappointed about the wrong way in which our society is been developed. How politics àrea less relevant t’han ever, and I wonder what to do. Is something just for specialists, for profs? WHAT CAN WE, COMMON PEOPLE WITHOUT ANY LETTERS TO ADD AFTER OUR NAME , DO TO IMPROVE THE SITUATION.
EVEN MORE, WHAT IS THE REAL SENSE. FOR LIFE, ANYTHONG MORE IMPORTANT THAN SEX&MONEY, PROPERTY OR POSITION?
No need to shout. We hear you…