“The help which tends to make us spiritually strong is the highest help, next to it comes intellectual help and after that comes physical help.”
~ Swami Vivekananda
I spent a wonderful evening last night with a friend. Staring up into the starlit heavens, meditating on life, I had a number of moments of pure blissful no-thought. My friend and I tried to make it to sunrise, but sleep finally won out.
I am grateful Spencer got me up to see this spectacular sunrise. As I lay back down on the couch afterwards, I was thinking about a facebook post my spiritual friend Krishna posted yesterday by J. Krishnamurti: About seeking God, seeking Truth, about Love.
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Now what are you seeking?
Which of these do you want?
Do you want to search, to discover,
or do you want to find help, guidance?
Most of you want help, temporary relief from suffering;
you want to cure the symptoms rather than to find the cause of suffering.
“I am suffering; you say, “give me a method which will free me from it.”
Thus, most of you are seeking temporary relief, temporary shelter,
and yet you call that the search for truth.
When you talk of service, of understanding, of wisdom,
you are thinking merely in terms of comfort.
As long as you merely want to relieve conflict, struggle, misunderstanding, chaos, suffering,
you are like a doctor who deals only with the symptoms of a disease.
As long as you are merely concerned with finding comfort,
you are not really seeking.
Now let us be quite frank.
We can go far if we are really frank.
Let us admit that all that you are seeking is security, relief;
You are seeking security from constant change, relief from pain.
Because you are insufficient you say, “Please give me sufficiency.”
So what you call search for truth is really an attempt to find relief from pain,
which has nothing to do with reality.
In such things we are like children.
In time of danger we run to our mother,
that mother being belief, guru, religion, tradition, habit.
Here we take refuge, and hence our lives are lives of constant imitation,
with never a moment of rich understanding.
Now when you say, “I am seeking”,
you imply that you are seeking the unknown.
You desire the unknown, and that is the object of your search.
Because, the known is to you appalling, unsatisfactory, futile, sorrow-laden,
you want to discover the unknown, and hence the inquiry,
“What is truth? What is God?”
From this arises the question, “Who will help me to attain truth?”
In that very attempt to find truth or God,
you create gurus, teachers, who become your exploiters.
I am not asking you to follow my teachings,
for if you desire to understand truth you cannot follow anyone;
if you desire to understand truth you must stand entirely alone.
The pursuit of the variety and diversity of ideas about truth will not yield understanding.
You say to yourself, “I am going to listen to this teacher, then I shall listen to someone else, then to another; and I shall learn from each the various aspects of truth.”
But by this process you will never understand.
All that you do is to escape; you try to find that which will give you the greatest satisfaction,
and he who gives you most you cherish as your guru, your ideal, your goal.
So your search for truth has ceased.
Beware of the man who describes to you the unknown, truth, or God.
Such a description of the unknown offers you a means of escape –
And besides, truth defies all description.
In that escape there is no understanding, there is no fulfillment.
In escape there is only routine and decay.
Truth cannot be explained or described.
It is.
I say that there is a loveliness which cannot be put into words;
if it were, it would be destroyed;
it would then no longer be truth.
But you cannot know this loveliness, this truth, by asking about it;
you can know it only when you have understood the known,
when you have grasped the full significance of that which is before you.
So you are constantly seeking escape,
And these attempts at escape you dignify with various spiritual names, with grand-sounding words;
These escapes satisfy you temporarily, that is,
until the next storm of suffering comes and blows away your shelter.
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Alan Watts writes: “Buddhism isn’t denying that the experience which corresponds to these words (the Self, the great atman) is realizable. What it is saying is that if you make conceptions and doctrines about these things, your liable to become attached to them. You’re liable to start believing instead of knowing.
So they say in Zen Buddhism, ‘The doctrine of Buddhism is a finger pointing at the moon. Do not mistake the finger for the moon.’
Or so we might say in the West, the idea of God is a finger pointing at God, but what most people do is instead of following the finger, they suck it for comfort. And so Buddha chopped off the finger, and undermined all metaphysical beliefs. There are many, many dialogues in the Pali scriptures where people try to corner the Buddha into a metaphysical position. ‘Is the world eternal?’ The Buddha says nothing. ‘Is the world not eternal?’ And he answers nuttin’. ‘Is the world both eternal and not eternal?’ And he don’t say nuttin’. ‘Is the world neither eternal nor not eternal?’ And STILL he don’t say nuttin’.
He maintains what is called the noble silence. Sometimes called the thunder of silence, because this silence, this metaphysical silence, is not a void. It is very powerful. This silence is the open window through which you can see not concepts, not ideas, not beliefs, but the very goods.
But if you say what it is that you see, you erect an image and an idol, and you misdirect people. It’s better to destroy people’s beliefs than to give them beliefs. I know it hurts, but it is The Way.
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God and true love cannot be explained, they defy words. We cannot seek them. They just are. Truth is a pathless land says Krishnamurti. They cannot be approached from the intellect. Rather, they can only be felt in the pathless wide open space of an awakened silent heart ….
