Rumi:
“The essence of darkness is light.”
Darkness, like emptiness, is absence.
When your house is on fire, whaddya do:
Find and extinguish the source.
Build a new house.
Watch it burn.
Pray.
???
What comes first, the neurosis or the malaise?
You look for, and hopefully find, the way out.
Do you free yourself and let the house keep burning?
The house is the physical body. It is dying. It occurred to me today that where Nature is concerned, unlike all the other species , there may be no ‘necessity’ for Man to be ‘finished’, blossom, mature…that this may be all our own responsibility?
And the ‘tool’ for bringing about this transformation is not thought, but awareness of the ‘burning house’?
An ‘indifferent’ awareness?
An awareness that everything will burn?
It means your life changes all together & you are only aware of the change and not why did it occur ? k at places said that you are going towards say South & suddenly you change directions and start moving towards East.
In the case of the relationship of thought to suffering say, going in one ‘direction’, thought serves up an image that the brain reacts negatively to…but in a different ‘direction’ awareness ‘sees’ what is taking place and the image loses its impact?
Couldn’t get clearly what you want to convey ?Please elaborate.
I’ll try. The body is always here in the moment. But thought can imagine being somewhere else. A different setting. Into this imagined setting or situation, thought places you as the observer. Then you as the observer react to whatever is going on in that imaginary setting. The reaction can be pleasant or it can be painful. It doesn’t matter which because it is all totally imaginary…and we continue to go in that direction until the brain through ‘awareness’ of this process, awakens and ceases to ‘move in that direction’?
When K used this metaphor, I’m pretty sure he meant that the fire must be extinguished. But if I’m in a house on fire, I’m on fire with the intention to get out.
When K’s house-on-fire metaphor is seen this way, the house is the human condition (not the species), and if you don’t want to go down with it, get out and be outside where you can draw attention to the house on fire.
Intelligence is seeing things as they are. It leads to coherent thought and effortless right action.
Is the seeing of my stupidity the awakening of intelligence?
We are what we are. What we’ve accumulated, what we believe, our likes and dislikes, our interests, abilities etc…and as I read JK, he is saying that we’ve never really looked at ourselves without the idea of self improvement. Or judgement. ‘Intelligence’ then as I see it, sees clearly, what is?
I see this differently. The other metaphors of danger, the poisonous snake, the abyss ie. have to be jumped away from, avoided. And in the case of the “stream”, stepped out of… The energy of the ‘self’ has to be died to?
Is intelligence always present, always seeing clearly, but obscured by the noise of the self? Is it a given, like being? Is it subject to change: birth, death, growing, fading? Does the posing of questions like these foster intelligence or impede it?
“Differently”? It sounds like we agree that what one must do when the house is on fire is to get out of the house - not extinguish the fire, as I originally took the metaphor to mean. But even if we agree that K was saying that intelligence gets out of the burning house rather than extinguishing the fire, we still don’t know what K intended with his burning house metaphor.
If the burning house represents the speciousness of our species, I must escape/abandon it to be sane. But if the house represents the health and wellness of all earthly beings, I must extinguish the fire that burns in my brain. Either way, I must do what I cannot do until no representation will do.
Here’s my representation: we, most of us, are ‘unfinished’. We all, Plato , Einstein, you, me, JK, all have the same brain 
. In some cases brains ‘develop’ more than others but all except badly damaged ones have the potential to complete their development. They don’t ‘blossom’, become ‘enlightened’, be ‘transformed’ etc…They are ‘hobbled’ by something. And this finishing or maturity can only take place while the body/brain is alive. So for me, the “burning building” is the time left?
If the “house” is the conditioned brain, and it’s sleeping through the fire that threatens to immolate it, how much time does it need to wake up?
If this is what K meant by this metaphor, the answer (as K sees it) is that it takes no time to wake up and act intelligently because time is an illusion. Therefore, unless the brain awakens to the illusory nature of time, it will go up in smoke.