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