Archive for awareness
great work comes from self-forgetting
Mindfulness, or awareness, does not mean that you should think and be conscious “I am doing this” or “I am doing that.” No. Just the contrary.
The moment you think “I am doing this,” you become self-conscious, and then you do not live in the action, but you live in the idea “I am,” and consequently your work too is spoiled.
You should forget yourself completely, and lose yourself in what you do. The moment a speaker becomes self-conscious and thinks “I am addressing an audience,” his speech is distributed and his trend of thought broken. But when he forgets himself in his speech, in his subject, then he is at his best, he speaks well and explains things clearly.
All great work–artistic, poetic, intellectual or spiritual–is produced at those moments when its creators are lost completely in their actions, when they forget themselves altogether, and are free from self-consciousness.
~ Walpola Rahula, in What the Buddha Taught
…and colour was god
The earth was the heavens and the heavens the earth. Everything was alive and bursting with colour and colour was god, not the god of man. The hills became transparent, every rock and boulder was without weight, floating in colour and the distant hills were blue, the blue of all the seas and the sky of every clime. The ripening rice fields were intense pink and green, a stretch of immediate attention. And the road that crossed the valley was purple and white, so alive that it was one of the rays that raced across the sky. You were of that light, burning, furious, exploding, without shadow, without root and word. And as the sun went further down, every colour became more violent, more intense and you were completely lost, past all recalling. It was an evening that had no memory.
~ J Krishnamurti
Krishnamurti’s Notebook
Painting by Fritz Raugh
source – Fritz Raugh’s website
awareness cannot be seen or known
That we know this awareness exists means only that we have an idea of awareness.
We do not see that awareness as itself an object, nor can we ever do so.
If we are to know the awareness by itself, first we would have to drop knowing its objects, its reflections in thought, including the ego-thought, and then be it, not see it.
~ Paul Brunton, Notebooks
