miscellany

A transcendent spontaneity of life – a creative reality, as Krishnamurti calls it  – reveals itself as immanent only when the perceiver’s mind is in a state of alert passivity, of choiceless awareness. Judgment and comparison commit us irrevocably to duality. Only choiceless awareness can lead to nonduality, to the reconciliation of opposites in a total understanding and a total love. Ama et fac quod vis. (Love and do what you will.) If you love, you may do what you will. But if you start by doing what you will, or by doing what you don’t will in obedience to some traditional system – of notions, ideals, and prohibitions – you will never love. The liberating process must begin with the choiceless awareness of what you will and of your reactions to the symbol system which tells you that you ought, or ought not, to will it. Through this choiceless awareness, as it penetrates the successive layers of the ego and its associated subconscious, will come love and understanding, but of another order than that with which we are ordinarily familiar. This choiceless awareness – at every moment and in all the circumstances of life – is the only effective meditation. All other forms of yoga lead either to the blind thinking which results from self-discipline, or to some kind of self-induced rapture, some form of false samadhi.

Huxley then quotes Krishnamurti as saying this spontaneity … this creative reality … 

is not a gift; it is to be discovered and experienced. It is not an acquisition to be gathered to yourself to glorify yourself. It is a state of being, as silence, in which there is no becoming, in which there is completeness. This creativeness may not necessarily seek expression; it is not a talent that demands outward manifestation. You need not be a great artist or have an audience; if you seek these, you will miss the inward reality. It is neither a gift, nor is it the outcome of talent; it is to be found, this imperishable treasure, where thought frees itself from lust, ill will, and ignorance, where thought frees itself from worldliness and personal craving to be. It is to be experienced through right thinking and meditation.

And he returns to sum up, ending what he has to say by again quoting Krishnamurti, this time on love:

Choiceless self-awareness will bring us to the creative reality which underlies all our destructive make-believes, to the tranquil wisdom which is always there, in spite of ignorance, in spite of the knowledge which is merely ignorance in another form. Knowledge is an affair of symbols and is, all too often, a hindrance to wisdom, to the uncovering of the self from moment to moment. A mind that has come to the stillness of wisdom “shall know being, shall know what it is to love. Love is neither personal nor impersonal. Love is love, not to be defined or described by the mind as exclusive or inclusive. Love is its own eternity; it is the real, the supreme, the immeasurable.”