The Intimacy of Experience

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘First Leaves, near Nantes’ – Camille Corot, 1855 – WikiArt

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I will tell you where to be. Be where every experience feels an equally good experience. Don’t be attached to judgment and comparison. These are the mind’s favorite tools and activities. The mind tricks you to believe that experience is an uneven ground. That according to the content of your experience, you will be gifted with either happiness or suffering, peace or conflict, harmony or disorder. So the experience you are having becomes extraordinarily important. We become dependent on what happens to us, and come to dread it. So we retire into the secure place of our habitual self, with its cortège of worry, control, expectation, and manipulation.

There is a place in us where you don’t find experience to be such a determining factor. Where you will not let experience determine you, fix you, limit you. You won’t be shaped by its content. You won’t be made into something, someone, with qualities and flaws, to be judged, evaluated, compared with — the likeness of experience — in fact, just another object. The mind is a manufacturer of objects, entities, persons, fixing the insubstantial nature of your being into a self to be moulded and made either happy or miserable. To be made happy by an experience is to be cheated on by it: we are being manipulated, and made to believe an illusion. To let experience make us miserable is sheer deceitfulness, it is us being easily dazzled by the treachery and artifice of objects.

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Continue this exploration of the nature of experience… (READ MORE…)

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The Controller

Posted on by Alain Joly

Think in terms of flow. Don’t think that you have to exercise control over your life. Who would be this controller? Do you want to go back to the little, struggling entity that feels separate and wants to gain self-worth through control? Control is illusory. It never happens, although we buy the illusion that we are this controlling agent. It makes us feel good for a while. But this is not the truth. And as all untruths must eventually do, it will recede, give up its fake reality in favour of the only one reality there is, which is our own one being. To keep that sense of being in sight is all the control you need. It’s the only control that needs neither a controller, nor a controlled. For the simple reason and truth that the controller is here the controlled, as Krishnamurti so often said. There are not two things that can possibly act on each other, because these two things never acquire any reality of their own. There is only your natural, ever present being, which controls you rather than it be controlled by you. This being is the flow you need to follow. It will take you where you are and where you need to be. It will keep you safe. It will move you in the right direction. You won’t need to exert yourself, or to practice. Efforting will fade away. You will be taken by its flow.

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“Meditation is a state of mind in which the operation and exercise of will is not.
It has no direction. It is not seeking any experience. It is no longer seeking at all.
Therefore a meditative mind is free of all control.”
~ J. Krishnamurti (Public Talk 3 Bangalore, 1973)

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Text and photo by Alain Joly

Quote by J. Krishnamurti (1895-1986)

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Bibliography :
– ‘Krishnamurti’s Notebook’ – by J. Krishnamurti – (Krishnamurti Publications of America, US)

Website:
– J. Krishnamurti

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Other ‘Ways of Being’ from the blog…

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