Showing posts with label Zen Master Barry Magid. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Zen Master Barry Magid. Show all posts

“Dogen is saying that the act is polishing the tile, doing zazen, polishing the mirror. It's a particular use of of the idea of polishing, and he says "We don't polish it because there is dust on the mirror." This is our usual way of thinking about what we do in practice. Again, it's almost unavoidable that we create a contrast between clarity and confusion in our sitting. We want at some basic level our mind to settle down, to quiet down, retreat, with thoughts as noise and emotion as dust, as if they’re clouding the mirror with a contaminant that practice is going to wipe away, so that once and for all there will be clarity, silence, emptiness, whatever you say to yourself. Yet the basic work of practice is not eliminating dust, but eliminating the dichotomy between dust and clarity. To see the dust as empty, to see the content of our mind as empty is to eliminate the very notion the very idea of dust as something that can soil, contaminate our mind.

For Dogen, polishing the tile or polishing the mirror in doing zazen is an act of expression, not an act of transformation. In a certain sense, he's saying we polish the tile the way we polish the old silver. We polish the tile the way we might polish that old 1957 Corvette we wish we had in the driveway. We would just keep it clean and polished and in perfect shape all the time, not because we were going to turn it into something else by all that care or polish, but the activity of cleaning it will reveal it for what it is, will allow us, even as polish it, to enjoy, appreciate and know it's nature.


I think it's probably very basic in Japanese Zen that when they talk about appreciating something for its own sake, they usually manifest that by cleaning it. I mean the basic activity of work practice in a zendo is cleaning something. It's wiping down the floors and the walls in the kitchen and the bathroom, just endless, endless cleaning. And it's not really the kind of cleaning that is to be contrasted with things being dirty, because very often when they wipe down the floor in the zendo, it's already as shiny and clean as you can imagine, and yet we clean it one more time. The cleaning is an act of appreciation and attention that means we're getting down there on our hands and knees and touching and feeling, stroking, caressing the floor in our cleaning. We're really appreciating the feel, the texture, the substance of the floor. We're appreciating it's floor-ness, we're not just getting rid of the dirt.

Zazen is analogous to that. It's an act of appreciation. It's a kind of polishing the car, because we have enormous love and respect for the craftsmanship and the style of this old piece of machinery, and all we want to do is show it reverence in the intention we give it. This is something like the notion of polishing in zazen. It's an expression of appreciation for who and what we are, who and what this moment is, dissolving of any kind of dichotomy between our ordinary mind and Buddha nature and enlightenment. In that very act of sitting and appreciating and being, practice and enlightenment become one thing. In the action itself of polishing, the realization of Buddha and the actualization of the mirror, these become what they are through our participation and engagement.

So Baso, when he hears Nangaku say, "How can you become Buddha by practicing zazen? How can you make a mirror by polishing a tile?" he achieves great enlightenment, and then what does he do? He sits down again in zazen, continues to polish the tile, and continues to polish the mirror.”

  • Zen teacher Barry Magid

We think so often of a kind of verticality, of a mask on the outside, a false self on the outside, a true self deep inside, but as Merton is saying here, it wants to go back against all this fantasy of oh, I've got this precious true self deep inside. True self is moment after moment after moment. Instead of cultivating the fantasy that your true self is identified with some special state we cultivate in zazen, maybe your true self is the way you treated your partner this morning. Maybe your true self is how you were to the person next to you on the subway. We don't really want that to be our true self. That's our basic dilemma and in a certain sense, it's why we create a lot of metaphysical and transcendental stuff to believe in. We want to create this curative fantasy of purity and perfection and we treat our practice as if it is a purification project but it's not that at all. If anything, it's the opposite: it's allowing us to really stay with all the things we came here to avoid. To want to find your true self, your original face, you don't have to go farther than the bathroom mirror.

  • Zen teacher Barry Magid

 

 

 

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2009:
From Zen Teacher Barry Magid:
(11:54 PM) AEN: "Being one with our moment-to-moment experience, as we are in the bottom-up practice of just sitting, gives us a taste of nonseparation that is more continuous with our daily lives. Being one with chopping vegetables may sound less glamorous than being one with the universe, but gradually we come to realize the whole universe is contained in that act of chopping.
(11:56 PM) Thusness: that's good
and until it becomes natural
(11:57 PM) Thusness: that is the fruition of deep insight and practice
(11:57 PM) AEN: ..."Our usual way of thinking is to think about something - we sit and think about something out there that our thoughts are describing or imagining. This kind of thinking is characterized by its descriptive content - what it's about. But what if instead of focusing on the content of thought, we see thought as an activity on its own right?
(11:58 PM) AEN: As something that we, or our body, does? Our foot itches, our knee hurts, our head thinks. It is just this perspective that labelling our thoughts come about. When we repeat the thought "thinking about 'the cat on the mat,'" our attention is no longer on the cat but on ourselves having a thought, engaging in the activity of thinking. Often in Zen literature we find the words not-doing used to refer to a not-separate mode of functioning. No thinker having a thought. Just the activity of thinking.
(11:58 PM) AEN: And what Dogen means here by "think not-thinking" is that not-separate activity of thinking - a thinking that is just the activity of thinking itself, as he says, beyond thinking about anything.
oic..
(12:01 AM) AEN: "According to the Buddha, all dharmas (things or moments of experience) are empty of any fixed or essential nature. This lack of any individual essential nature can also be seen as another consequence of oneness - all dharmas are aspects of a constantly changing, co-determined, interdependent whole. To speak of the self as empty is to remark on the transience of all experience, without positing any permanent experiencer or observer set up in the background who watches it all go by.
(12:02 AM) Thusness: very well said
(12:02 AM) AEN: When emptiness is used to convey impermanence, there is no one psychological state that corresponds to the "feeling" of emptiness, any more than there is a state of experiencing pure being. If I say an apple is round and red, how many attributes am I listing? Does it possesses being as an attribute in the same way it possesses redness and roundness? Could it have just the roundness and redness but not the being?
(12:02 AM) Thusness: it is to correctly understand this non-dual experience as action without the actor so that the insight of anatta can arise.
(12:03 AM) AEN: To posit some intrinsic being or appleness alongside the apple's physical qualities of color, shape, and texture (and their constant, if ever so slight, physical changes) is to posit the sort of fixed, unchanging essence that the Buddha's teaching denies. Likewise, the emptiness of the self is not an additional attribute in any way on top of, behind, or between the gaps of moment-to-moment experience. It is not the silence between or behind our thoughts. It is just a way of saying that this moment-to-moment experience is all there is.
oic..
(12:04 AM) Thusness: it is a realization that moment to moment of experience is just so.
(12:04 AM) AEN: icic..
(12:12 AM) AEN: anyway thats by an author "Barry Magid" who is also a psychiatrist and zen teacher
i borrowed the book from a library just now to take a look
(12:13 AM) Thusness: ic...well written
(12:24 AM) AEN: the book is called "Ordinary Mind"... now i realise zen is really all about that.. i remember his teacher charlotte joko beck also wrote about daily lives practice "Everyday Zen" and "Nothing Special: Living Zen". he wrote alot about distinguishing peak experiences from "just doing the dishes, just taking out the trash"

 

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“Yes Zen is about ordinary experience, yet you must understand what is meant by ordinary mind. 🙂 The ordinary mind is the mind of anatta. If we pretend to be ordinary and try to 'look' for expression of ordinariness then we are deluded. If we fail to realize that true ordinariness comes from the realization of anatta and mistaken the finger for the moon, we are deluded. Without the insight of anatta, how could we ever understand the essence of being natural, effortless and ordinary? This is what Buddhism meant by ordinary.

Yet I have seen people going after 'ordinariness', trying to be 'nothing special', attempting to look for expression of ordinariness. That is why for (Soh: I believe he meant certain misguided/deluded) zen practitioners, they will not understand the seven phases of experience. They are caught up by 'forms', by the stages of the ox herding and missed the insight. 🙂

Unless practitioners realize clearly how these insights lead to the ordinary and natural state, there is no meaning in looking for 'sweep floor and washing dishes' or 'chop wood carry water'. This is the next disease of Zen. These practitioners are actively looking for such expressions. They do not have the wisdom to discern. What you have to awaken is the insights into our empty yet luminous nature, then talk about ordinariness and the natural state. That is why I told you, don't talk about natural state or spontaneous arising. However people just like to talk about that. Once you realized anatta, ordinariness and the natural state mean something very different. You can breathe hard, you can breathe soft, yet both are considered natural and ordinary. You can take a deep breath or short breath, still as non-dual, natural and ordinary. Sincere practitioners can take many years to come to this natural state even after the initial glimpse of insight of anatta.” - John Tan, 2009

 

Writing to someone who is at the I AM phase but loves J Krishnamurti, I posted some excerpts by JK on Anatta.


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    These descriptions by J Krishnamurti are anatta:
    "Thought creates the thinker. Thought is always seeking a permanent state, seeing its own state of transition or flux or impermanence, thought creates an entity which it calls the thinker, the atman, Paramatman, the soul-a higher and higher security. That is, thought creates an entity which it calls the observer, the experiencer, the permanent thinker, as distinct from the impermanent thought and the wide distance between two creates the conflict in time.
    ...
    So we are asking, is there a holistic awareness of all the senses, therefore, there is never asking for the 'more'. I wonder if you follow all this ?. Are we together in this even partially?. and where there is this total-fully aware-of all the senses, awareness of it-not you are aware of it....the awareness of the senses in themselves-then there is no center-in which there is awareness of the wholeness. If you consider it, you will see that to suppress the senses...is contradictory, conflicting, sorrowful....To understand the truth you must have complete sensitivity. Do you understand Sirs? Reality demands your whole being ; you must come to it with your body, mind, and heart as a total human being.........Insight is complete total attention....
    When this is a fact not an idea, then dualism and division between observer and observed comes to an end. The observer is the observed-they are not separate states. The observer and the observed are a joint phenomenon and when you experience that directly, then you will find that the thing which you have dreaded as emptiness which makes you seek escape into various forms of sensation including religion-ceases and you are able to face it and be it."
    Buddha, Vipassana, J. Krishnamurti: K on Sensations
    BUDDHANET.NET
    Buddha, Vipassana, J. Krishnamurti: K on Sensations
    Buddha, Vipassana, J. Krishnamurti: K on Sensations
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    JK:
    "When you look at a sunset, there is the observer and the fact, the observed. There is a division between the observer and the observed. That division is time. The observer is not a permanent entity. Let me caution you here. Don’t say that the observer existed first—look at it as though you have not read a single sacred book. (Sacred books are not important anyhow.) Look at it as though you are looking for the first time, do not translate what somebody else said, that there is the original observer, the original entity, the silent watcher. You can spin a lot of words and theories, but you are missing the whole point.
    ...
    So, one sees division within oneself. And one sees that as long as this division exists, time will inevitably continue, cannot come to an end. And is it possible for division to cease to exist? Which is, the observer is the observed; the seeker is the sought. Don’t translate it into your own terminology, that the seeker is God, a spiritual entity or whatever it is; thought saying, ‘I am the Atman,’ or some other entity. If you say this, you are deceiving yourself; you are not feeling your way into discovery, you are merely stating or asserting something which has no validity at all.
    So, is it possible for this division between the observer and the observed to come to an end? As long as there is this division, time will go on, and time is sorrow. One who will understand the end of sorrow must understand this, must go beyond the duality between the thinker and the thought, the experiencer and the experienced. So what is one to do? I see within myself the observer is watching, judging, censoring, accepting, rejecting, disciplining, controlling, shaping. That observer, that thinker, is the result of thought. Thought is first; not the observer, not the thinker. If there were no thinking there would be no observer, no thinker; there would only be complete, total attention.
    ...
    We are trying to find out if there is, or is not, a permanent state - not what we would like, but the actual fact, the truth of the matter. Everything about us, within as well as without - our relationships, our thoughts, our feelings - is impermanent, in a constant state of flux. Being aware of this, the mind craves permanency a perpetual state of peace, of love, of goodness, a security that neither time nor events can destroy; therefore it creates the soul, the Atman, and the visions of a permanent paradise. But this permanency is born of impermanence, and so it has within it the seeds of the impermanent. There is only one fact: impermanence.
    ...
    Let's see. perceiving itself to be impermanent, insecure, and desiring permanency, security, thought brings into being the thinker, and then pushes the thinker on to higher and higher levels of permanency. So there is seemingly an unbridgeable gap between the thinker and his thought, between the watcher and the watched; but this whole process is still within the area of thought, is it not?
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    Self-Knowledge, as in the I AM realization, is a different realisation.
    J Krishnamurti went through I AM realization, he talked about his Self Realization in his early years, 1920s.
    In his later years he focused on anatta.

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  • Mr. A.P.: I've never understood the distinction between aspects 3 and 4. Shouldn't effortlessness (4) just be the result of dissolving the need to return (3)? (Referring to

    Four Aspects of I AM) 

    Soh: 3 is about uncontrivance.
    4 is about effortlessness, spontaneous emergence of presence.
    One is telling you to stop creating karma. The other is telling you the effortless spontaneity of presence.
    But all these are difficult without the correct insights... but we still have to practice in this way as a means of imitating what life is like in anatta. Means anatta has all the four aspects in maturity, but if you have not reached anatta, you consciously and knowingly imitate all those aspects and then with the right pointers and contemplation a breakthrough occurs.
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    Mr. A.P.: Thank you. Let me see if I understood. 3 is about not needing to return to presence. 4 is noticing that it's there even if you don't.

    Soh Wei Yu: Yes but not even a “noticer” remains

    In I AM just I AM, in seeing just scenery, both are nondual actualization and not the usual noticing or noting. Not as a subject object knowledge

    Although.. Even after anatta “in the seen just the seen...” initially it may be concentrative before it turns into totally effortless spontaneous presence

    2009:

    (3:05 PM) Thusness: did JK said that: When this is a fact not an idea, then dualism and division between observer and observed comes to an end. The observer is the observed - they are not separate states. The observer and the observed are a joint phenomenon and when you experience that directly then you will find that the thing which you have dreaded as emptiness which makes you seek escape into various forms ...?
    (3:07 PM) AEN: i think so why?
    (3:08 PM) Thusness: quite good...it never really occur to me he has put it so clear, though he is very persistent about no-self. 🙂
    (3:08 PM) AEN: icic..
    (3:09 PM) Thusness: His teaching though talk about no separate agent is still very much concentrative. Not so much of spontaneous perfection.
    (3:10 PM) AEN: oic.. UGK leh? more on spontaneous?
    (3:10 PM) Thusness: same
    (3:10 PM) AEN: icic..
    (3:17 PM) Thusness: sometimes you should rejoice how fortunate it is for you to have right understanding of this teaching of anatta at this age.

    ....

    Soh:

    In initial anatta, one has the realisation there is no one purest state to abide in or return to, no I to abide in.
    Just in the seen just the seen.

    Initial anatta should resolve the need to return and abide. (3)

    But effortlessness (4) reaches full maturity in later phase of spontaneous presence. Thats how it is for me. Then concentrative mode is not necessary.

    The (2) aspect of intensity of luminosity also varies even after anatta.

    Because JK is stuck at concentrative mode of anatta instead of maturing it into spontaneous presence, his over exertion in PCE mode caused life long energy imbalances and pain. Kundalini issues. 


  • .........







    • badge icon
      Author
      And as I said, J Krishnamurti is closer to Zen than Theosophy (focused on I AM) is to Zen.
      To compare, here's another two Zen teachers on anatta I randomly searched and found from my "John Tan Wikipedia":
      2009:
      From Zen Teacher Barry Magid:
      (11:54 PM) AEN: "Being one with our moment-to-moment experience, as we are in the bottom-up practice of just sitting, gives us a taste of nonseparation that is more continuous with our daily lives. Being one with chopping vegetables may sound less glamorous than being one with the universe, but gradually we come to realize the whole universe is contained in that act of chopping.
      (11:56 PM) Thusness: that's good
      and until it becomes natural
      (11:57 PM) Thusness: that is the fruition of deep insight and practice
      (11:57 PM) AEN: ..."Our usual way of thinking is to think about something - we sit and think about something out there that our thoughts are describing or imagining. This kind of thinking is characterized by its descriptive content - what it's about. But what if instead of focusing on the content of thought, we see thought as an activity on its own right?
      (11:58 PM) AEN: As something that we, or our body, does? Our foot itches, our knee hurts, our head thinks. It is just this perspective that labelling our thoughts come about. When we repeat the thought "thinking about 'the cat on the mat,'" our attention is no longer on the cat but on ourselves having a thought, engaging in the activity of thinking. Often in Zen literature we find the words not-doing used to refer to a not-separate mode of functioning. No thinker having a thought. Just the activity of thinking.
      (11:58 PM) AEN: And what Dogen means here by "think not-thinking" is that not-separate activity of thinking - a thinking that is just the activity of thinking itself, as he says, beyond thinking about anything.
      oic..
      (12:01 AM) AEN: "According to the Buddha, all dharmas (things or moments of experience) are empty of any fixed or essential nature. This lack of any individual essential nature can also be seen as another consequence of oneness - all dharmas are aspects of a constantly changing, co-determined, interdependent whole. To speak of the self as empty is to remark on the transience of all experience, without positing any permanent experiencer or observer set up in the background who watches it all go by.
      (12:02 AM) Thusness: very well said
      (12:02 AM) AEN: When emptiness is used to convey impermanence, there is no one psychological state that corresponds to the "feeling" of emptiness, any more than there is a state of experiencing pure being. If I say an apple is round and red, how many attributes am I listing? Does it possesses being as an attribute in the same way it possesses redness and roundness? Could it have just the roundness and redness but not the being?
      (12:02 AM) Thusness: it is to correctly understand this non-dual experience as action without the actor so that the insight of anatta can arise.
      (12:03 AM) AEN: To posit some intrinsic being or appleness alongside the apple's physical qualities of color, shape, and texture (and their constant, if ever so slight, physical changes) is to posit the sort of fixed, unchanging essence that the Buddha's teaching denies. Likewise, the emptiness of the self is not an additional attribute in any way on top of, behind, or between the gaps of moment-to-moment experience. It is not the silence between or behind our thoughts. It is just a way of saying that this moment-to-moment experience is all there is.
      oic..
      (12:04 AM) Thusness: it is a realization that moment to moment of experience is just so.
      (12:04 AM) AEN: icic..
      (12:12 AM) AEN: anyway thats by an author "Barry Magid" who is also a psychiatrist and zen teacher
      i borrowed the book from a library just now to take a look
      (12:13 AM) Thusness: ic...well written
      (12:24 AM) AEN: the book is called "Ordinary Mind"... now i realise zen is really all about that.. i remember his teacher charlotte joko beck also wrote about daily lives practice "Everyday Zen" and "Nothing Special: Living Zen". he wrote alot about distinguishing peak experiences from "just doing the dishes, just taking out the trash"

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      Zen and Vipassana teacher Gil Fronsdal:
      Session Start: Sunday, January 25, 2009
      (2:54 AM) AEN: There are two forms of knowing that come into play in mindfulness. One form of knowing has to do with sensing. Sensing our experience. Then the question is, where does sensing occur? So if you sense your hand right now. Where does the sensing occur in your hand. Does it occur in the foot, where does it happen? Does the sensing happen in the mind?
      (2:55 AM) AEN: ...In your hand. Of course. Something happens in your hand, that gives you the sensations right, and I call that sensing. Sensing the hand in the hand. The hand is having its own experience of the hand. Your foot is not experiencing your hands. But that hand is having its own experience of the hand. The mind can know what that experience is, but the
      hand is sensing itself. Vibrations, tension, warmth, coolness. The sensations happen right there in the hand. The hand is sensing itself. There is a kind of awareness that exists in the location of where we are experiencing it. Does that make some sense? Any of you are confused at this point?
      ...Part of what mindfulness practice involves is relaxing into the sensing of the experience. And just allowing ourselves to become the sensations of experience. Bringing a sense of presence or involvement... allow ourselves to really kick in that sensory experience... whatever happens in life, whatever experience we are having, has an element of also being sensory. "Awakening beckons us within everything" is a suggestion - Go in, and dive in to the immediacy of how it is being sensed. That's a nondual world. There is no duality between the experience and the sensation, the sensation and the sensing of it. There is a sensation and sensing of it right there, right? There is no sensation
      (2:55 AM) AEN: without a sensing, even though you might not be paying attention to it, there is a kind of sensing that goes on there. So part of Buddhist practice is to delve into this non-dualistic world... this undivided world of how the sensing is happening in and of itself. Most of us hold ourselves distinct from it, apart from it. We judge it, measure it, define
      it against ourselves, but if we relax and delve into the immediacy of life... then there is something in there that the Buddha-seed can begin to blossom and grow.
      ~ Gil Fronsdal on Buddha Nature
      ----------------
      (another part)... And as that gets kind of being settled and dealt with in practice, in order to get deeper and more fully into our experience, we also have to somehow deal with [inaudible] very very subtle, which the traditions call a sense of I Amness. That I Am. And it can seem very innocent, very obvious, that I'm not a doctor, I'm not this and I'm
      (2:55 AM) AEN: not that, I'm not going to hold onto that as my identity. But you know, I am. I think, therefore I am. I sense, there I am. I am conscious, therefore I am. There is some kind of Agent, some kind of Being, some kind of Amness here. Just a sense of presence, and that presence that kinds of vibrates, that presence kinds of knows itself... just a kind of sense
      (2:56 AM) AEN: of Amness. And people say, well yeah, that Amness just IS, it's non-dual. There's no outside or inside, just a sense of amness. The Buddhist traditions says if you want to enter this immediacy of life, enter into the experience of life fully, you also have to come to terms with the very subtle sense of Amness, and let that dissolve and fall away, and
      (2:56 AM) AEN: then that opens up into the world of awakening, of freedom.
      ~ Gil Fronsdal on Buddha Nature
      (3:02 AM) AEN: "Gil Fronsdal (1954) is a Buddhist who has practiced Zen and Vipassana since the 1970s, and is currently a Buddhist teacher who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is the guiding teacher of the Insight Meditation Center (IMC) of Redwood City, California. He is one of the best-known American Buddhists. He has a PhD in Buddhist Studies from Stanford University. His
      many dharma talks available online contain basic information on meditation and Buddhism, as well as subtle concepts of Buddhism explained at the level of the lay person." he also received dharma transmission from a zen abbot.
      (12:13 PM) Thusness: The article by Gil Fronsdal is very good and very experienced.  

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        Soh
        , you forget this about Krishnamurti which I shared with you long time back 🙂
        Following is the excerpt of reaching the source experience by Krishnamurti.....
        The following was dictated by Krishnamurti on February 21, 1980. Here, as he frequently did, he refers to himself in the third person (as K.)"
        "K went from Brockwood to India on November 1, 1979 (actually October 31). He went after a few days in Madras staright to Rishi Valley. For a long time he has been awakening in the middle of the night with that peculiar meditation which as been pursuing him for very many years. This has been a normal thing in his life. It is not a conscious, deliberate pursuit of mediation or an unconscious desire to achieve something. It is very clearly uninvited and unsought. He has been adroitly watchful of though making a memory of these meditations. And so each meditation has a quality of something new and fresh in it. There is a sense of accumulating drive, unsought and uninvited. Sometimes it is so intense that there is pain in the head, sometimes a sense of vast emptiness with fathomless energy. Sometimes he wakes up with laughter and measureless joy. These peculiar mediations, which naturally were unpremediated, grew with intensity. Only on the days he travelled or arrived late of an evening would they stop; or when he had to wake early and travel.
        With the arrival in Rishi Valley in the middle of November 1979 the momentum increased and one night in the strange stillness of that part of the world, with the silence undisturbed by the hoot of owls, he woke up to find something totally different and new. The movement had reached the source of all energy. This must in no way be confused with, or even thought of, as god or the highest principle, the Brahman, which are projections of the human mind out of fear and longing, the unyielding desire for total security. It is none of those things. Desire cannot possibly reach it, words cannot fathom it nor can the string of thought wind itself around it. One may ask with what assurance do you state that it is the source of all energy? One can only reply with complete humility that it is so.
        All the time that K was in India until the end of January 1980 every night he would wake up with this sense of the absolute. It is not a state, a thing that is static, fixed, immovable. The whole universe is in it, measureless to man. When he returned to Ojai in February 1980, after the body had somewhat rested, there was the perception that there was nothing beyond this. This is the ultimate, the beginning and the ending and the absolute. There is only a sense of incredible vastness and immense beauty."
        Source: Lutyens, Mary. Krishnamurti: The Years of Fulfilment, (New York.: Avon Books, 1983) pp. 237-238

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        Anurag Jain
        This is not J Krishnamurti's own words, but a filtered report of someone else's encounter of J Krishnamurti. That being said, that description itself did say J Krishnamurti rejected Brahman consistently

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        In 1982 he rejected Brahman or permanence too, so we know his views on this matter is consistent to his death
        1982, JK:
        If we are to go into the question of death, we must understand what you are – a name, a form, man or woman, with certain qualities, certain tendencies, idiosyncrasies, desire, pain, anxiety, uncertainty, confusion. Out of this confusion, you invent something permanent – the Absolute, the Brahman or God. But what you actually are, is the movement of thought. That thought may invent the idea that you have got the spark of divinity in you, but it is still the movement of thought. So what are you apart from your physical reactions, differently educated, rich and poor? Actually, when you look at yourself, what are you? Aren’t you all this? If there is something permanent in you, then why seek permanency in something else? Do you understand my question? As we said, begin with uncertainty, begin with not knowing. This is what you are. You know your face when you look in a mirror. Also, inwardly, you are all the struggle, the pain, the conflict, the misery, the confusion. That is what you are actually. That is the state of all human beings. So your consciousness is not yours but is the common ground on which all human beings stand and share. If that is clearly seen, then what is death?
        Talks in New Delhi - 4th Public Talk - 7th November, 1982 - ‘In Ending, There is a New Beginning’ | J. Krishnamurti
        JKRISHNAMURTI.ORG
        Talks in New Delhi - 4th Public Talk - 7th November, 1982 - ‘In Ending, There is a New Beginning’ | J. Krishnamurti
        Talks in New Delhi - 4th Public Talk - 7th November, 1982 - ‘In Ending, There is a New Beginning’ | J. Krishnamurti

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        Consistently anatta and anicca.

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        I also posted previously:
        Soh Wei Yu
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        J Krishnamurti's insight and experience is nondual just like Vedanta, but his view is different. More like anatta instead of atman-Brahman. Therefore he is not talking about a metaphysical essence or source.
        "A notable distinction should be drawn between Krishnamurti and the tradition of Brahmanism or Hinduism with respect to the nature of the ultimate. Brahman is conceived of, or described, as being permanent, unchanging, and eternal – even though the word itself implies "swelling" and brahman is said to "breathe without breathing" (i.e., to manifest without manifesting)(Rig Veda, x.129.2). Yogacara, insofar as it posits a positive entity, would also seem to hold that ultimate reality is permanent and unchanging. For Krishnamurti however, both brahman and the Atman (or universal Self or soul which is identical with brahman) are projections of the "me" which seeks to ground itself in permanence. For Krishnamurti, the "other" as the source is described as the essence of creation and destruction: "In it al1 creation takes place. Creation destroys and so it is ever the unknown" (KN, 18). "It is totally 'new,' a state that has not been and never will be, for it is living."(18) This is to say that it is totally without time, for time implies continuity; and in this state "there... [is] no continuity but only being" (21). Elsewhere he claims "There is only one fact, impermanence."[9] Time as we know it, of course, is both an apparent fact (there is process, growth, decay) and a function of thought and memory (the comparison of the memory of the perception of the pendulum at time T1 with the present perception at time T2). There is apparently some evidence that space-time is discontinuous in the sense that the electron, for example, is an abstraction based on discontinuous appearances – i.e. that matter is always popping in and out of existence. For Krishnamurti, there is no time in the present, which is outside of thought and memory and which is a "timeless dimension" as a movement "without beginning or ending" – without continuity or duration. This is seemingly identical to Nagarjuna's theory of sarva-samskara-anitya – that all conditioned things are impermanent and that there is therefore "No duration."[10] In general, Takakusu says, the Mahayana schools hold the doctrine of constant flux and momentary destruction (ksana-bhanga),[11] though I have conjectured that the Yogacarins posit a primordial, positive, unchanging source at the basis of all flux."
        Krishnamurti and Traditions of Unitive Mysticism by Alan Gullette
        Krishnamurti and Traditions of Unitive Mysticism by Alan Gullette
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        · 40w · Edited
        Soh Wei Yu
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        That quote is right in pointing out the difference between J Krishnamurti's view vs Advaita (in his later years after insight into nondual anatta), but it characterizes yogacara wrongly as if it is positing some primordial unchanging source. That is not a correct understanding of yogacara. In Yogacara, consciousness is nondual but *momentary*.
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        · 40w
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        Krishnamurti and Traditions of Unitive Mysticism by Alan Gullette
        Krishnamurti and Traditions of Unitive Mysticism by Alan Gullette

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