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the transforming mind
excerpts from a talk given by
stephen james smith
on the transformative psychology of
j krishnamurti
... To engender a new way of seeing is, it seems to me,
the most urgent human task. Seeing and being are closely aligned. For,
it is when we see clearly that we truly are. We are then not what
we think we are - which is, to put it briefly, a thought-world of
conditioning - but we discover that what we thought we were - and what
we are in terms of thought - is just a fiction of circumstances, one
more image making its appearance in the hall of mirrors we call reality.
Trouble is, it has no substance; to attribute, as we do, such importance
to it is to lose ourselves in an endless, painful game. When we wake up,
the game is over. We are now looking down a different track or, to put
it more accurately, down the same track seen differently. Here, words
can take us only so far because the act of seeing transforms the
reality. We are seeing, literally, with eyes made new: the seer is the seen, instantaneously.
The very perception of this urgency, which is certainly a perception of
what is, is in itself a call to awakening - perhaps it is part of
awakening. For, in the world of thought, things are sequential; in the
world of perception they are not: they are direct. By this I mean that
there is no intervening mechanism, nothing that translates the seen into
the known. In fact, in this moment, in this act of insight, the seer
is the seen and there is instantaneous perception. Action then
follows from the insight itself - it is not translated, not mediated -
and can thus be said to be free of time, which is the heart of freedom,
freedom-in-itself. Such action contains no trace of conflict, since its
place of origin is beyond mentation, the corridor of opposites, the hall
of mirrors. Being thus free, it engenders freedom also. That is why
those who live in that freedom create the space for others to be free -
which does not mean they can do their work for them.
This is where the journey begins:
observation without the observer.
Characteristically, it is expressed via the negative. For, we have
acquired nothing - quite the reverse - we have abandoned our baggage,
nothing more.
The observer has been enfolded into consciousness and what is looking is
consciousness itself, free of the distortion of the me. This
means that things are seen as they are and not as we would like them to
be. The revelation can be devastating! The crux of the matter, however,
is that what flows from this seeing is accurate and true and, among
other things, establishes order.
The dark continent of consciousness awaits us, with its depths, dangers,
and unforeseen vistas. And, as we journey through it and it unfolds
before our eyes, we realize we have never been here before, that most of
what we did was foreplay, at best. This is the real thing, happening
now. There is nothing final or determinate about it. It unfolds
constantly out of itself, like a flower in its own furl. And, as well as
being constant, it is never-ending: at no point is there any arrest.
And, this is the nature of the transforming mind.
Copyright 2006 by Stephen James Smith
This is Part 2 of a
talk given at the International Conference on Krishnamurti and Consciousness,
Hyderabad, India, January 2006.
You can read Part 1 on the KINFONET site
HERE
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creativity without time
eckhart tolle
education
frederick franck
j
krishnamurti
nonduality
original face
scientist meets philosopher
seeing without shadows
the art of learning
the art of seeing
the eyeless eye
the
way of nen
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