| Subject: "Inability to Love" |
Author:
Kate
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Date Posted: 13:56:14 06/25/02 Tue
I like the subject's having been brought up, and I generally like James Baldwin-- the man was a fire. Yet something in this statement sits a-kilter for me. So let me offer a wee bit o' Krishnamurti to this soup:
"Compassion is not hard to come by when the heart is not filled with the cunning things of the mind. It is the mind with its demands and fears, its attachments and denials, its determinations and urges, that destroys love. And how difficult it is to be simple about all this! You don't need philosophies and doctrines to be gentle and kind. The efficient and the powerful of the land will organize to feed and clothe the people, to provide them with shelter and medical care.[Ah, the idealistic naivete of our spiritual forbears-- Kate]... But organization does not give the generosity of the heart and hand. Generosity comes from quite a different source, a source beyond all measure. Ambition and envy destroy it as surely as fire burns. This source must be touched but one must come to it empty-handed, without prayer, without sacrifice. Books cannot teach, nor can any guru lead to, this source. It cannot be reached through the cultivation of virtue, though virtue is necessary, nor through capacity and obedience. When the mind is serene, without any movement, it is there. Serenity is without motive, without the urge for the more."
What I have been catching glimpses of lately, in my meditation practice, and its extension, my relationship practice, is something I could call serenity, or equanimity, or stillness-- or simplicity. "Simplicity" is a word I prefer at the moment to "freedom" with that word's overtones of struggle, heroism, inter- or intra-personal politics. Simplicity just appears, after all the shouting's died down; it isn't an attainment at all. It certainly isn't the result of some sort of muscular spiritual effort, or grimly determined ascetic amputation. Those strategies' results maim and cripple Being; they do not reveal it in its perfect, and native, simplicity.
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