"Jealousy implies dissatisfaction with what you are and envy of others, does it not?  To be discontented with what you are is the very beginning of envy.  You want to be like somebody else who has more knowledge, or is more beautiful, or who has a bigger house, more power, a better position than you have.  You want to be more virtuous, you want to know how to meditate better, you want to reach God, you want to be something different from what you are: therefore you are envious, jealous.  To understand what you are is immensely difficult, because it requires complete freedom from all desire to change what you are into something else.  The desire to change yourself breeds envy, jealousy; whereas, in the understanding of what you are, there is a transformation of what you are.  But, you see, your whole education urges you to try to be different from what you are - when you are told: 'Now, don't be jealous, it is a terrible thing.'  So you strive not to be jealous; but that very striving is part of jealousy, because you want to be different.

 

   "You know, a lovely rose is a lovely rose; but we human beings have been given the capacity to think, and we think wrongly.  To know HOW to think requires a great deal of penetration, understanding, but to know WHAT to think is comparatively easy.  Our present education consists in telling us WHAT to think, it does not teach us HOW to think, how to penetrate, explore; and it is only when the teacher as well as the student knows how to think that the school is worthy of its name."

     -- Jiddu Krishnamurti

Thank you all so much for reading. I really appreciate your support, your many stories and your creative ideas. I still have emails enabled so you can leave me messages if you like. I'll be back next week... and when I return, I will try to update more often now that more people are visiting.


Be safe; be kynd! ^_^

Love always,
Nikki

     "So, it is you who create authority; and having created the authority, you become its slaves. Belief is a product of authority; and because you want to escape from confusion, you are caught in belief and therefore continue in confusion. Your leaders are the outcome of your confusion, therefore they must be confused. You would never follow anyone if you were clear, unconfused and directly experiencing. It is because you are confused that there is no direct experience. Out of your confusion you create the leader, organized religion, separative worship, which brings about the strife that is going on in the world at the present time. In India it is taking the form of communal conflicts between the Mussalmans and the Hindus, in Europe it is the communists against the rightists, and so on and on. If you look into it carefully, analyze it, you will see that it is all based on authority, one person says this and another person says that; and authority is created by you and me, because we are confused. This may sound oversimplified verbally, but if you go into it, it is not simple, it is extremely complex. Being confused, you want to be led out - which means you are not understanding the problem of confusion, you are only seeking an escape. To understand confusion, you must understand the person who is making the confusion, which is yourself; and without understanding yourself what is the good of following somebody? Being confused, do you think you will find truth in any practice or organized religion? Though you may study the Upanishads, the Gita, the Bible, or any other book, do you think that you are capable of reading the truth of it when you yourself are confused? You will translate what you read according to your confusion, your likes and dislikes, your prejudices, your conditioning. Your approach, surely, is not to reality To find truth, Sir, is to understand yourself. Then truth comes to you you do not have to go to truth - and that is the beauty of it. If you go to truth, that which you approach is projected out of yourself, and therefore it is not truth. Then it becomes merely a process of self-hypnosis, which is organized religion. To find truth, for truth to come to you, you must see very clearly your own prejudices, opinions, ideas and conclusions; and that clarity comes through the freedom which is virtue. For the virtuous mind, there is truth everywhere. Then you do not belong to any organized religion, then you are free.

     "So, truth comes into being when the mind is capable of receiving it, when the heart is empty of the things of the mind. At present our hearts are full of the things of the mind; and when the heart frees itself of the mind, then it is receptive, sensitive to reality."

     -- Jiddu Krishnamurti

     [Question:] Why do you decry religion, which obviously contains grains of truth? Why throw out the baby with the bath water? Need not truth be recognized wherever it is found?

     [Krishnamurti:] Sirs, what do you mean by religion? Organized dogma, belief, rituals, worshipping any person however great, reciting prayers, repeating Shastras, quoting the Bible - is that religion? Or is religion the search for truth or God? Can you find God through organized belief? By your calling yourself a Hindu and following all the rituals of Hinduism or of any other "ism", will you find God or truth? Surely what I decry is not religion, not the search for reality, but organized belief with its dogmas and separative forces and influences. We are not seeking reality, but are caught in the net of organized beliefs, repetitive rituals - you know the whole business of it - which I call nonsense, because they are drugs that distract the mind from seeking; they offer escapes, and thereby make the mind dull, ineffective.

 So, as our minds are caught in the net of organized beliefs with their whole system of authorities, priests and gurus, all of which are engendered through fear and the desire for certainty - as we are caught in that net, obviously, we cannot merely accept, we must enquire, we must look directly, experience directly, and see what it is we are caught in and why we are caught. Because my great grandfather did some ritual, or my mother is going to cry if I do not do it, therefore I must do it. Surely, such a man, who is psychologically dependent on others and hence fearful, is incapable of finding out what truth is. He may talk about it, he may repeat the name of God umpteen times, but he is nowhere, he has no reality. Reality will shun him, because he is encased in his own prejudices and fears. And you are responsible for this organized religion, whether of the East or of the West, whether of the left or of the right, which, being based on authority, has separated man from man. Why do you want authority, either of the past or of the present? You want authority because you are confused, you are in pain, in anxiety, there is loneliness and you are suffering. Therefore, you want help from outside; so you create authority, whether political or religious, and having created that authority, you follow its directions, hoping that the confusion, the anxiety, the pain in your heart, will be removed. Can another remove your pains, your sorrows? Others may help you to escape from sorrow, but it is always there.

     -- Jiddu Krishnamurti

 

 

 

Animals are not ours to use, just as you and I aren't to be used by one another.

Animals have no voice, but if they did, please imagine for a moment what they would say about living life as permanent prisoners for painful, yet legal experiments.

 

List of companies that DO NOT test on animals

List of companies that DO test on animals

 

This message is brought to you by:

Stop The Testing

     "The decoration of the outer is the very nature of our present civilization, which is based on industrialization. Not that I am against industrialization - it would be absurd to destroy industries. But merely to cultivate the outer without understanding the inner must inevitably create those values which lead men to destroy each other; and that is exactly what is taking place in the world. Beauty is regarded as an ornament to be bought and sold, to be painted, and so on. Surely, that is not beauty. Beauty is a state of being, and that state of being comes with inward richness - not the inward accumulation of riches which we call virtue, ideals. That is not beauty. Richness, inward beauty with its own imperishable treasures, comes into being when the mind is free; and the mind can be free only when there is no fear. The understanding of fear comes through self-knowledge, not through resistance to fear. If you resist fear, that is, any form of ugliness, you merely build a wall against it. Behind the wall there is no freedom, there is only isolation, and what lives in isolation can never be rich, can never be full. So, beauty has a relationship to reality only when reality manifests itself through those virtues which are essential. 

     "Now, what do we mean by truth, or God, or what you will? Obviously, it cannot be formulated; for, that which is formulated is not the real, it is the creation of the mind, the result of a thought process; and thought is the response of memory. Memory is the residue of incomplete experiences; therefore, truth, or God, or what you will, is the unknown and it cannot be formulated. For the unknown to be, the mind itself must cease to be attached to the known, and then there is relationship between beauty and reality, then reality and beauty are not different; then truth is beauty, whether it is in a smile, the flight of a bird, the cry of a baby, or in the anger of your wife or husband. To know the truth of what is, is good; but to know the beauty of that truth, the mind must be capable of understanding, and mind is not capable of understanding when it is tethered, when it is afraid, when it is avoiding something. This avoidance takes the form of outward decoration, ornamentation: being inwardly insufficient, poor, we try to become outwardly beautiful. We build lovely houses, buy a great many jewels, accumulate possessions. All these are indications of inward poverty. Not that we should not have nice dress, good houses; but without inner richness, they have no meaning. Because we are not inwardly rich, we cultivate the outer, and therefore the cultivation of the outer is leading us to destruction. That is, when you cultivate sensate values, expansion is necessary, markets are necessary; you must expand through industry, and the competitive expansion of industry means more and more controls, whether of the left or of the right, inevitably leading to war; and we try to solve the problems of war on the basis of sensate values.

     "The seeker after truth is the seeker after beauty - they are not distinct. Beauty is not merely outward ornamentation but that richness that comes through the freedom of inward understanding, the realization of what is."

   --  Jiddu Krishnamurti

 

This picture is a contrast between rich and poor. Paris is a good symbol to illustrate the ego and vanity of the rich in the face of struggle for survival on the part of others in our world.

Special thanks to Fish for shopping this image!! 

 

Special thanks to Amanda for this message:

  "The one who wanders independent in the world, free from opinions and viewpoints, does not grasp them and enter into disputations and arguments. As the lotus rises on its stalk unsoiled by the mud and the water, so the wise one speaks of peace and is unstained by the opinions of the world."

 

          -- excerpt from the Sutta Nipata

 

     [Question:] Is your self-confidence born of your own release from fear, or does it arise from the conviction that you are solidly backed by great beings like the Buddha and the Christ?

     [Krishnamurti:] Sirs, first of all, how does confidence come into being? Confidence is of two types. There is the confidence that comes through the acquisition of technical knowledge. A mechanic, an engineer, a physicist, a man who masters the violin, has confidence, because he has studied or practiced for a number of years and has acquired a technique. That gives one type of confidence - a confidence which is merely superficial, technical. But there is another type of confidence which comes from self - knowledge, from knowing oneself entirely, both the conscious and the unconscious, the hidden mind as well as the open. I say it is possible to know yourself completely, and then there comes a confidence which is not aggressive not self-assertive, not shrewd, not that confidence which comes from achievement; but it is the confidence of seeing things as they are from moment to moment without distortion. Such confidence comes into being naturally when thought is not based on personal achievement, personal aggrandizement, or personal salvation, and when each thing reveals its true significance. Then you are backed by wisdom, whether it is of the Buddha or of the Christ. That wisdom, that confidence, that extraordinarily swift pliability of mind, is not for the exclusive few. There is no hierarchy of understanding. When you understand a problem of relationship, whether with physical objects, with ideas, or with your neighbor, that understanding frees you from all sense of time, of position, of authority. Therefore, there is not the Master and the pupil, the guru sitting on a platform and you sitting down below. Sirs, such confidence is love, affection; and when you love somebody, there is no difference, there is neither high nor low. When there is love, this extraordinary flame, then that itself is its own eternity.

     [Question:] Can we come to the real through beauty, or is beauty sterile as far as truth is concerned?

     [Krishnamurti:] Now, what do we mean by beauty and what do we mean by truth? Surely, beauty is not an ornament; mere decoration of the body is not beauty. We all want to be beautiful, we all want to be presentable - but that is not what we mean by beauty. To be neat, to be tidy, to be clean, courteous, considerate, and so on, is part of beauty, is it not? But these are merely expressions of the inward release from ugliness. Now, what is happening in the world? Every day, more and more, we are decorating the outer. The cinema stars, and you who copy them, are keeping beautiful outwardly; but if you have nothing inside, the outward decoration, the ornamentation, is not beauty. Sirs, don't you know that inward state of being that inward tranquility, in which there is love, kindliness, generosity, mercy? That state of being, obviously, is the very essence of beauty, and without that, merely to decorate oneself is to emphasize the sensate values, the values of the senses; and to cultivate the values of the senses, as we are doing now, must inevitably lead to conflict, to war, to destruction.

     -- Jiddu Krishnamurti