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April 28, 2011

Have We Prostituted Ourselves For Busyness?

Here is Krishnamurti, in what might be, the most powerful 1 minute and 7 second sound bite ever recorded…

Krishnamurti’s powerful message seems to touch upon something we have forgotten, and because we have forgotten it, we project our responsibility upon society, religion, medicine, industry, and everything else. We sit around, imprisoned in the busyness of our own lives, waiting for some reformer, politician, or guru to liberate us. But if Krishnamurti’s words strike a chord with you, as they have with me, it is because they ring true. They are empowering words, not because they are idealistic, but because they remind us of our only responsibility, namely to be ourselves. Since we have misplaced the experience of simple being, we must make time and exert ourselves. Otherwise, we will continue to wander around aimlessly in a vague and meaningless world, which is nothing more than a projection of our own confusion.

“Unless you viciously carve out time to work on yourself it’s not going to happen.”~Reggie Ray of the Dharma Ocean Foundation

“For the total development of the human being, solitude as a means of cultivating sensitivity becomes a necessity.

One has to know what it means to be alone, what it is to meditate, what it is to die; and the implications of solitude, of meditation, of death, can be known only by seeking them out. These implications cannot be taught, they must be learnt.

One can indicate, but learning by what is indicated is not the experiencing of solitude or meditation. To experience what is solitude and what is meditation, one must be in in a state of inquiry; only a mind that is in a state of inquiry is capable of learning. But when inquiry is suppressed by previous knowledge, or by the authority and experience of another, then learning becomes mere imitation, and imitation causes a human being to repeat what is learnt without experiencing it.” ~from Life Ahead: On Learning and the Search for Meaning by Jiddu Krishnamurti

“Solitude is a way to defend the spirit against the murderous din of our materialism.” ~Thomas Merton

Here is a dark, but accurate video where Thomas Merton elaborates on “the murderous din of materialism.”

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