Imagine a Life

Krishnamurti said it in very clear, unmistakable terms nearly a century ago. So did the ancient sages of India, the early Sufis, the original Zen masters of China, and the great Meister Eckhart, all in their own way. So there is no room for confusion anymore. Cease being entangled in your own, unfounded beliefs. Stop breeding and comforting them by thinking them out, perceiving them away, and feeling them in, therefore giving them a reality of their own. Be reasonable for once. All this ceaseless activity must come to an end. Remember what Krishnamurti said in such irrevocable terms.

Stop giving the world a reality of its own by pushing it at a distance from yourself. It will make you retreat in your body, where you will feel small, unsafe, required to manage a universe, and make impossible choices. Stop thinking to be your body only, squeezing your self in such pitiful way, bullying it, hurting it to the point where it is made unhappy and careless, fearful and resentful, its original innocence and beauty transformed into some hideous thing. All this could be avoided in one single glance and action, if only we had truly listened to these words that Krishnamurti uttered and hammered during the many decades of his life:

“The observer is the observed.”
~ J. Krishnamurti

Imagine a life lived with this vision — the observer is the observed — not only for the occasional moment, or during a propitious insight, or even intermittently, but at every non-second of it, a life filled to the brim with yourself — the observer — being raised to infinite dimension, and receiving every single part of the ten thousand things of experience — the observed — as your own self, as life itself, united, plentiful, leaving no room for a division or a conflict, annihilating suffering, and melting your being with its once hidden, and now revealed glorious making.

Imagine a life lived with this understanding. How are you now expected to suffer, when every sense of separation and multiplicity has been abolished? How could you have your so many conflicts thrive, when every possible ‘other’ is now seen as an extension of yourself? How will you ever experience the world as made of hard matter, when you see the many thousand things as your own true body? How could you ever be threatened by experience when you are a self that moves, works, and acts like a wave does in the sea? How will you now live the old life? Can you even fathom the implications born out of such realisation?

Imagine a life lived with the implications contained in ‘the observer is the observed’. These implications are: Love, peace, beauty, and freedom in your life — which means the absence of an ‘other’, the abolishment of time or distance, and the annihilation of the search for fulfilment. Imagine that life. The irony in that matter, is that you need not imagining it. In fact, everything but that reality is left to imagination. We live our present life in the field of imagination, thoughts, beliefs. We experience only the unreality of life, its illusory aspects, and we drown in it. We suffocate in it. This is what happens when the observer is not the observed, when the thinker is not the thought, the feeler not the felt. This is how you create a non-existent self and bow to its non-presence. This is how you miss the glory and majesty of your true and only self. The unfortunate thing is that we don’t want to die, to be abolished, to go into the flame. We want to stay an observer, a thinker, a feeler, a controller, a doer. So we separate all the time, to keep us alive. We take no responsibility for anything. We flee where it is most cozy, and we suffer for it.

.

~~~

.

“The observer is the image which has been created. He is the censor, the entity that judges compares, all that. And then he looks at the object, either the tree or his own experience, or his relationship with somebody, another. So the observer is the image looking at the image which he has created about the other. So the relationship between the observer and the observed is not a relationship, it is two images looking at each other. Now, when the observer has no image at all — which is quite a tremendous problem, inquiry, which is meditation, all that — then the observer is the observed. ‘What is’ is the observer, not the observer looking at ‘what is’. Right?”
~ J. Krishnamurti (‘The Real Revolution’ Series, Ojai California – 2)

.

~~~

Text and photo by Alain Joly

Quotes by J. Krishnamurti (1895-1986)

~~~

.

Listen to this video from ‘The Real Revolution’ series by J. Krishnamurti on YouTube…

Read this illuminating page on ‘The Observer and the Observed’ by J. Krishnamurti…

Bibliography:
– ‘The First and Last Freedom’ – by J. krishnamurti – (Rider Book)
– ‘Krishnamurti’s Notebook’ – by J. Krishnamurti – (Krishnamurti Publications of America, US)

Websites:
– J. Krishnamurti
– Krishnamurti Foundation Trust

Suggestion:
– Other ‘Reveries’ from the blog…
– A Day at Brockwood Park (Homage to J. Krishnamurti)

.

Back to Pages

.