視之不見，名曰微；聽之不聞，名曰希；搏之不得，名曰夷。此三者，不可 致詰，故混而為一。其上不皎，其下不昧，繩繩兮不可名，複歸于物。是謂無狀之狀，無物之象，是謂惚恍。迎之不見其首，隨之不見其后。執古之道，以御今 之有。能知古始，是謂道紀。
---《道德經：十四章》
"Look, and it can’t be seen. Listen, and it can’t be heard. Reach, and it can’t be grasped. Above, it isn’t bright. Below, it isn’t dark. Seamless, unnamable, it returns to the realm of nothing. Form that includes all forms, image without an image, subtle, beyond all conception. Approach it and there is no beginning; follow it and there is no end. You can’t know it, but you can be it, at ease in your own life. Just realize where you come from: this is the essence of wisdom."
---Tao Te Ching, Chapter xiv
故常無欲，以觀其妙；常有欲，以觀其徼。此兩者同出而異名，同謂之玄。玄 之又玄，眾妙之門。
---《道德經：一章》
Very Advaita Vedanta...
"One experiences without Self to sense the World,
And experiences with Self to understand the World.
The two experiences are the same within Tao;
They are distinct only within the World.
Neither experience conveys Tao
Which is infinitely greater and more subtle than the World."
---Tao Te Ching, Chapter i
* * *
"... So what happens? I am clinging not to you, but to the idea, to something which will help me to escape from myself. You may be attached to an experience, to an incident, which has given you great excitement, a great sense of elation, a sense of power, a sense of safety and you are clinging to that. That experience, which you have had, what is it? That experience is registered in the mind and you hold it. That something you are holding on to is dead and you also are becoming dead. If you see all this, without any direction, without any motive, just observe it, then you will see that insight shows the whole thing as on a map. When once there is that insight the thing disappears completely, you are not attached."
---Jiddu Krishnamurti, On Attachment
Some thoughts...
D: What a remarkable insight. The mind creates the illusion of existence which creates the 'grasping'. The mind is the trickster that deludes one from knowing that the one collective self is that which is infinite - that which alone exists. Everything else is noise.
Poesis: The more I get into Krishnamurti the more profoundly I "feel" his words - it's really remarkable.
Time is ceaselessly passing, like a running brook, as T.S. Eliot's poem "but that which is only living can only die" - after the mind's illusion of dead/dying experience "having shed its bright load, the relieved leaf unbent." (Nabakov) But then according to D time does not exist!
"...the end precedes the beginning,
And the end and the beginning were always there
Before the beginning and after the end.
And all is always now."
They were always there, and never there. Since 'all is always now', the need of grasping ceases to be. Everything else is noise. Hooray.
"It is astonishingly beautiful and interesting, how thought is absent when you have an insight. ... It is only when the mind is not operating mechanically in the structure of thought that you have an insight."
---Jiddu Krishnamurti
"You know, to love is to be free; both parties are free. Where there is the possibility of pain, where there is the possibility of suffering in love, it is not love, it is merely a subtle form of possession, of acquisitiveness. [...] So each struggle for comfort, for encouragement, really but betrays the lack of inward richness; and therefore an action separate, apart from the other individual naturally creates disturbance, pain and suffering; and one individual has to suppress what he really feels in order to adjust himself to the other. In other words, this constant repression, brought about by so-called love, destroys the two individuals. In that love there is no freedom; it is merely a subtle bondage." An enlightened ideal, perhaps?
---Jiddu Krishnamurti, The Book of Life
"So the 'me' is the creator of that emptiness. The 'me' is the empty; the 'me' is a self-enclosing process in which we are aware of that extraordinary loneliness. So being aware of that, we are trying to run away through various forms of identification. These identifications we call fulfillments. Actually, there is no fulfillment because mind, the 'me', can never fulfill; it is the very nature of the 'me' to be self-enclosing. [...] this ache of emptiness is extraordinarily strong. We do anything to escape from it. Any illusion is sufficient, and that is the source of illusion. Mind has the power to create illusion. And as long as we do not understand that aloneness, that state of self-enclosing emptiness - do what you will, seek whatever fulfillment you will - there is always that barrier which divides, which knows no completeness."
"That intelligent, integrated state is aloneness. When the observer is the observed, then it is the integrated state. And in that aloneness, in that state of being completely alone, full, when the mind is not seeking anything, neither seeking reward nor avoiding punishment, when the mind is truly still, not seeking, not groping, only then, that which is not measured by the mind comes into being."
---On Sorrow and Aloneness, Jiddu Krishnamurti talk, February 3, 1952
(See the full article of Krishnamurti's talk on fulfillment and aloneness here.)
* * *
"The greatest gains and values are farthest from being appreciated. We easily come to doubt if they exist. We soon forget them. They are the highest reality. Perhaps the facts most astounding and most real are never communicated by man to man. The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening. It is a little star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched."
---Walden, by Henry David Thoreau
Poesis: 雖然眼睛看不見風，但風卻是存在的：聽得見，感受得著，在雲的舞姿裡觀察得到，當它吹在髮梢與樹葉的瞬間，亦能得見。
* * *
I broke your heart.
Now barefoot I tread
on shards.
---------------------------------------------
If there is something to desire,
there will be something to regret.
If there is something to regret,
there will be something to recall.
If there is something to recall,
there was nothing to regret.
If there was nothing to regret,
there was nothing to desire.
— both poems by Vera Pavlova, (translated by Steven Seymour)
“Remembering is only a new form of suffering.” — Charles Baudelaire
Some response...
Poesis: But then suffering is no different in its essence from absence of suffering, and pleasure no different from absence of it. Following this logic, remembering is no different from forgetting, hence 'forgetting is also only a new form of suffering.' Love is the greatest illusion in the apparent world of individuation. (What random streams of consciousness at midnight...)
* * *
Whatever is dependently co-arisen
That is explained to be emptiness.
That, being a dependent designation,
Is itself the middle way.
—Nagarjuna, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā 24:18
Whatever is impermanent is subject to change.
Whatever is subject to change is subject to suffering.
—The Buddha
Poesis: All of this is nothingness. "There is no difference between samsara and nirvana." Nagarjuna my hero!
* * *
"The suffering in these poems remains intact; it is neither resolved nor negated. What happens for the most part is, the poems dissolve, finally, into the cream of the physical world. If negative capability works at all, it works in reverse, a kind of negative negative capability—which would make it positive—where very real anxiety and irritability over mystery and doubt enable the poet—no, propel him—into the world of the eye, the pure perceptual habit that checks all cognitive drives, not before they’ve begun but after they’ve begun, and done their damage. [...] —until it seems that perpetual fear is a propellant into the innocent, fearless, and vulnerable world of the senses. So that the poet paralyzed with fear lying in a hammock on a beautiful day—unhappy man in a happy world—does not suffer any less when he looks around him; he does not cease to suffer, he only ceases to try to understand."
(Read Mary Ruefle's full essay 'On Fear' here.)
* * *
「荼蘼—韶華勝極」「開到荼蘼花事了，塵煙過，知多少？」
～《紅樓夢》＜壽怡紅群芳開夜宴＞
「一從梅粉褪殘妝，塗抹新紅上海棠；開到荼蘼花事了，絲絲天棘出莓牆。」～宋, 王淇春 ＜暮遊小園＞
佛說:「一切有為法，儘是因緣合和，緣起時起，緣盡還無，不外如是。」
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| Self Portrait by Francesca Woodman |
Woodman’s interest in self-presentation—and self-preservation—emerges even in a note written around the time of her first suicide attempt. “I finally managed,” she explains, “to try to do away with myself, as neatly and concisely as possible…. I would rather die young leaving various accomplishments, some work, my friendship with you, and some other artifacts intact, instead of pell-mell erasing all of these delicate things.” Woodman reverses the traditional terms of the arrangement: death, like photography, is simply a series of chemical reactions. Living is “erasing”; dying a way of ensuring that what was will continue to be, of fixing certain things in place. [...] ...her long exposures as a portrait of “legs—and time.” Her wording recalls a statement issued by early photographer William H. Fox Talbot in the 1830s, when he praised the infant medium’s ability to document “the injuries of time.”
---by Elizabeth Gumport, via New York Review of Books
Indian religious philosopher, thinker and spiritual teacher, Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895-1985)
"There is something haunting in the light of the moon; it has all the dispassionateness of a disembodied soul, and something of its inconceivable mystery." ---Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim
(*image: Nakazora n°983, by 山本昌男 Masao Yamamoto, 2004.)
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