Archive for perception
…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
hearing with the eye
How can we hear with the eye and see with the ear? We must first set down ‘the pack’ – the ideas, notions and positions that separate us from reality. We must take off the blinkers that limit our vision, and see for ourselves that originally there are no seams, flaws or gaps between us and the whole phenomenal universe. The 10,000 things are in reality neither sentient nor insentient; the selfish neither sentient nor insentient. Because of this, the teachings of the insentient cannot be perceived by the senses.
John Daido Loori, Male Stone
16 x 20cms
Fujix Print
~ rock and water
ceaselessly
practice together ~
Many people think the teachings of the insentient are similar if not equivalent to the teachings we receive from sentient beings. But hearing the teachings of the insentient is not a matter of ordinary consciousness. How then can they be heard? When body and mind have fallen away, in the stillness that follows, the teachings are intimately manifested in great profusion. Whether we are aware of it or not, they are always taking place. The teachings of the insentient are about intimacy, not words.
~ John Daido Loori, Sensei. From his book “Making Love with Light”
Text and image copyright John Daido Loori.
Find more wisdom and photography from John Daido Loori at the awakened eye website.
Cézanne and Nature’s Eternity
The most recent addition to the awakened eye website is Rupert Spira’s excellent essay on Paul Cézanne, Nature’s Eternity. It’s actually one of a collection of essays in Rupert’s book The Transparency of Things – highly recommended reading for anyone interested in nondual awareness and its deepest implications. The following excerpt presents the first few paragraphs from Nature’s Eternity:
Paul Cézanne said, “Everything vanishes, falls apart, doesn’t it? Nature is always the same but nothing in her that appears to us lasts. Our art must render the thrill of her permanence, along with her elements, the appearance of all her changes. It must give us a taste of her Eternity.”
That statement must be one of the clearest and most profound expressions of the nature and purpose of art in our era.
What did Cézanne mean, standing in front of a mountain, Mont St. Victoire, one of the most solid and enduring structures in nature, when he said, “Everything vanishes, falls apart…?”
Cézanne was referring to the act of seeing.
We do not perceive a world outside Consciousness. The world is our perception of the world. There is no evidence that there is a world outside the perception of it, outside Consciousness.
The seen cannot be separated from seeing and seeing cannot be separated from Consciousness.
….. continued
~ Rupert Spira, Nature’s Eternity.
From his book, The Transparency of Things.
Read the whole essay at the awakened eye website
in total attention there is no center
I do not know if you have ever noticed that when you give total attention there is complete silence.
And in that attention there is no frontier, there is no center, as the “me” who is aware or attentive.
That attention, that silence, is a state of meditation.
~ J Krishnamurti
Krishnamurti had quite a lot to say about nondual perception. You can find some excerpts at the awakened eye website, along with links to sites connected with his work and places to purchase his books.
