shadow of a wine glass

Jiddu Krishnamurti, quote, desire, passion, emptiness

"If you destroy desire, you may destroy life itself. If you pervert desire, shape it, control it, dominate it, suppress it, you may be destroying something extraordinarily beautiful.

We have to understand desire, and it is very difficult to understand something which is so vital, so demanding, so urgent, because in the very fulfillment of desire, passion is engendered, with the pleasure and the pain of it. And if one is to understand desire, obviously, there must be no choice. You cannot judge desire as being good or bad, noble or ignoble, or say, ''I will keep this desire and deny that one.'' All that must be set aside if we are to find out the truth of desire - the beauty of it, the ugliness, or whatever it may be. It is a very curious thing to consider, but here in the West, the Occident, many desires can be fulfilled. You have cars, prosperity, better health, the ability to read books, acquire knowledge, and accumulate various types of experience, whereas when you go to the Orient, they are still wanting food, clothing, and shelter, still caught in the misery and degradation of poverty. But in the West as well as in the East, desire is burning all the time, in every direction; outward and deep within, it is there. The man who renounces the world is as crippled by his desire to pursue God as the man who pursues prosperity. So it is there all the time, burning, contradicting itself, creating turmoil, anxiety, guilt, and despair.

I do not know if you have ever experimented with it at all. But what happens if you do not condemn desire, do not judge it as being good or bad, but simply be aware of it? I wonder if you know what it means to be aware of something? Most of us are not aware because we have become so accustomed to condemning, judging, evaluating, identifying, choosing. Choice obviously prevents awareness because choice is always made as a result of conflict. To be aware when you enter a room, to see all the furniture, the carpet or its absence, and so on - just to see it, to be aware of it all without any sense of judgment - is very difficult. Have you ever tried to look at a person, a flower, at an idea, an emotion, without any choice, any judgment?

And if one does the same thing with desire, if one lives with it - not denying it or saying, ''What shall I do with this desire? It is so ugly, so rampant, so violent,'' not giving it a name, a symbol, not covering it with a word - then, is it any longer the cause of turmoil? Is desire then something to be put away, destroyed? We want to destroy it because one desire tears against another, creating conflict, misery, and contradiction; and one can see how one tries to escape from this everlasting conflict. So can one be aware of the totality of desire? What I mean by totality is not just one desire or many desires but the total quality of desire itself. And one can be aware of the totality of desire only when there is no opinion about it, no word, no judgment, no choice. To be aware of every desire as it arises, not to identify oneself with it or condemn it, in that state of alertness, is it then desire, or is it a flame, a passion that is necessary? The word passion is generally kept for one thing - sex. But for me, passion is not sex. You must have passion, intensity, to really live with anything; to live fully, to look at a mountain, a tree, to really look at a human being, you must have passionate intensity. But that passion, that flame is denied when you are hedged around by various urges, demands, contradictions, fears. How can a flame survive when it is smothered by a lot of smoke? Our life is but smoke; we are looking for the flame, but we are denying it by suppressing, controlling, shaping the thing we call desire.

Without passion how can there be beauty? I do not mean the beauty of pictures, buildings, painted women, and all the rest of it. They have their own forms of beauty, but we are not talking of superficial beauty. A thing put together by man, like a cathedral, a temple, a picture, a poem, or a statue may or may not be beautiful. But there is a beauty which is beyond feeling and thought and which cannot be realized, understood, or known if there is not passion. So do not misunderstand the word passion. It is not an ugly word; it is not a thing you can buy in the market or talk about romantically. It has nothing whatever to do with emotion, feeling. It is not a respectable thing; it is a flame that destroys anything that is false. And we are always so afraid to allow that flame to devour the things that we hold dear, the things that we call important.

After all, the lives we lead at present, based on needs, desires, and the ways of controlling desire, make us more shallow and empty than ever. We may be very clever, very learned, able to repeat what we have gathered, but the electronic machines are doing that, and already in some fields the machines are more capable than man, more accurate and swifter in their calculations. So we always come back to the same thing - which is that life as we live it now is so very superficial, narrow, limited, all because deep down we are empty, lonely, and always trying to cover it up, to fill up that emptiness; therefore, the need, the desire becomes a terrible thing. Nothing can fill that deep void within - no gods, no saviors, no knowledge, no relationship, no children, no husband, no wife - nothing. But if the mind, the brain, the whole of your being can look at it, live with it, then you will see that psychologically, inwardly, there is no need for anything. That is true freedom.

But that requires very deep insight, profound inquiry, ceaseless watching; and out of that perhaps we shall know what love is. How can there be love when there is attachment, jealousy, envy, ambition, and all the pretense which goes with that word? Then, if we have gone through that emptiness - which is an actuality, not a myth, not an idea - we shall find that love and desire and passion are the same thing. If you destroy one, you destroy the other; if you corrupt one, you corrupt beauty. To go into all this requires not a detached mind, not a dedicated mind or a religious mind, but a mind that is inquiring, that is never satisfied, that is always looking, watching, observing itself, knowing itself. Without love you will never find out what truth is."

Múm, Green Grass Of Tunnel

Down from my ceiling
Drips great noise
It drips on my head through
A hole in the roof

Behind these two hills here
There's a pool
And when I'm swimming
In through a tunnel
I shut my eyes

Inside their cabin
I make sound
In through the tubes
I send this noise

Behind these two hills here
Fall asleep
And when I float in
Green grass of tunnel
It flows back

Down from the ceiling
Drips great noise
It drips on my head through
A hole in the roof

Behind these two hills here
There's a pool
And when I'm swimming
In through a tunnel
I shut my eyes

Concierto De Aranjuez, Chet Baker , Paul Desmond , Jim Hall , Ron Carter, Steve Gadd, Roland Hanna

Chet Baker ,You Go to My Head

a love poem

i see you
through faces,
moments
space
and time

all is you.
light in your eyes
and  shadow.

your smile,
then the stone,
polished blank.

your worries,
your joy
and your loneliness.

all this i see.
your poison
and your gift.

your radiance,
fragility,
fear.

your kindness,
presence,
withdrawal.

i see no words.
in the end,
i see essence

moving
through all,
even me.

evening with horse, flowers, sky

Genesis ,Hold on my heart (1991)

Jorge Luis Borges, quote, A New Refutation of time

"And yet, and yet… Denying temporal succession, denying the self, denying the astronomical universe, are apparent desperations and secret consolations. Our destiny … is not frightful by being unreal; it is frightful because it is irreversible and iron-clad. Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges."



full text of the essay (out of: Labyrinths)

http://heavysideindustries.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/borges-a-new-refutation-of-time.pdf



source for today:

https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/09/19/a-new-refutation-of-time-borges/?mc_cid=ddefbb8098&mc_eid=d4633eff0a

Genesis , Your Own Special Way

~~~  ~~~  ~~~

Genesis ,Entangled

Genesis , In the Cage

Genesis ,Ripples