Self and the New Year [videos]

[Ari]

somehow i finally clicked play on the streaming pad thingy...
it rendered me speechless, only to sit here, listening to it over and over to take in every little nuance.

(especially since it reminds me so perfectly of an attempted, yet sadly-failed process from last year, which ultimately brought my last relationship to an end)

Whenever I look at you, I do not see you.
I see an origami of your age, your job, your class, your gender, your sexual orientation, your race, your nationality, your religion, your beliefs, your thoughts, your past, your future.
Labels upon labels.  Conditionings upon conditionings.  Time upon time.  To look at you is not be with you, but to relate with the images, ideals, and impressions I have made of you.
To look at you is not to interact with you, but to interpret you.  Sizing you up.  Fitting you in a category.  Molding you after my thoughts.  Turning you into an object of my interest.  Comparing you to my standards.  Breaking you into analyzeable parts.
Transforming you into something compatible with my beliefs.


To look at you is to get trapped in the skin of our mental projects about each other.

We read the script of the conventions and the traditions of our society, performing an addictive, convenient drama.
A persistent pattern of relating, indelibly imprinted in deep recesses of our minds.
To look at you is to separate myself from you.  I am your other and you are mine.  Mine for you have become something I can own, and therefore I can control.
As my other, you are a prisoner of my expectations and demands.  To look at you is as vindictive, persistent, deceptive, and subtle as its identical twin.  Look at me.  To look at you is to kill you.

I'm tired of being your murderer.
I resign.
Now I am just here.
With totally naked eyes looking beyond you, connecting with you not with words, thought, nor beliefs, but with the brilliance of the burning silence of our unmediated presence.  And in this space I listen to the melody, smell the fragrance, relish the rapture, and feel the warmth of what you are as you unfold.
And not as how you were folded by your conditionings, by my thoughts, by my desires, by my interpretations.

[Kai]

REAL SILENCE IS EXPLOSIVE

You can never understand the tremendous peace that is always there within you, that is your natural state. Your trying to create a peaceful state of mind is in fact creating disturbance within you. You can only talk of peace, create a state of mind and say to yourself that you are very peaceful — but that is not peace; that is violence. So there is no use in practicing peace, there is no reason to practice silence. Real silence is explosive; it is not the dead state of mind that spiritual seekers think. "Oh, I am at peace with myself! There is silence, a tremendous silence! I experience silence!" — that doesn't mean anything at all. This is volcanic in its nature: it's bubbling all the time — the energy, the life — that is its quality. You may ask how I know. I don't know. Life is aware of itself, if we can put it that way — it is conscious of itself."

- UG Krishnamurti

Hell. Yes.

I know what he means, too. The sort of peace I know is the sort that is spontaneous and energetic. It's as if I, suddenly, have this well of energy to draw upon, yet my mind is clear and fluid. It is not lethargic and still at all, it is volcanic, just as he said.

[Don Coyote]

Life is active, death is passive?

[Ari]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=V-mkia0RE6A

The Illusion of the Ego - Alan Watts

"We must abandon completely the notion of blaming the past for any kind of situation we're in and reverse our thinking and see that the past always flows back form the present. That now is the creative point of life. So you see its like the idea of forgiving somebody, you change the meaning of the past by doing that...Also watch the flow of music. The melody as its expressed is changed by notes that come later. Just as the meaning of a sentence...you wait till later to find out what the sentence means...The present is always changing the past."