Question: Instead of addressing heterogeneous crowds in many places and dazzling and confounding them with your brilliance and subtlety, why do you not start a community or colony and create a reference for your way of thinking? Are you afraid that this could never be done?
Krishnamurti: Sir brilliance and subtlety should always be kept under cover, because too much exposure of brilliance only blinds. It is not my intention to blind or show cleverness, that is too stupid; but when one sees things very clearly, one cannot help setting them out very clearly. This you may think brilliant and subtle. To me, what I am saying is not brilliant: it is the obvious. That is one fact. The other is, you want me to found an ashram or a community. Now, why? Why do you want me to found a community? You say that it will act as a reference, that is, something which can be pointed out as a successful experiment. That is what a reference implies, does it not? - a community where all these things are being carried out. That is what you want. I do not want to found an ashram or a community, but you want it. Now, why do you want such a community? I will tell you why. It is very interesting, is it not? You want it because you would like to join with others and create a community, but you do not want to start a community with yourself; you want somebody else to do it, and when it is done you will join it. In other words, Sir, you are afraid of starting on your own, therefore you want a reference. That is, you want something which will give you authority of a kind that can be carried out. In other words, you yourself are not confident, and therefore you say, `Found a community and I will join it'. Sir, where you are you can found a community, but you can found that community only when you have confidence. The trouble is that you have no confidence. Why are you not confident? What do I mean by confidence? The man who wants to achieve a result, who gets what he wants, is full of confidence the business man, the lawyer, the policeman, the general, are all full of confidence. Now, here you have no confidence. Why? For the simple reason you have not experimented. The moment you experiment with this, you will have confidence. Nobody else can give you confidence; no book, no teacher can give you confidence. Encouragement is not confidence; encouragement is merely superficial, childish, immature. Confidence comes as you experiment; and when you experiment with nationalism, with even the smallest thing, then as you experiment you will have confidence, because your mind will be swift, pliable; and then where you are there will be an ashram, you yourself will found the community. That is clear, is it not? You are more important than any community. If you join a community, you will be as you are - you will have somebody to boss you, you will have laws, regulations and discipline, you will be another Mr. Smith or Mr. Rao in that beastly community. You want a community only when you want to be directed, to be told what to do. A man who wants to be directed is aware of his lack of confidence in himself. You can have confidence, not by talking about self-confidence, but only when you experiment, when you try. Sir, the reference is you, so, experiment, wherever you are, a whatever level of thought. You are the only reference, not the community; and when the community becomes the reference, you are lost. I hope there will be lots of people joining together and experimenting, having full confidence and therefore coming together; but for you to sit outside and say, `Why don't you form a community for me to join?', is obviously a foolish question.

I'm touch-sensitive. :)

Hits of Sunshine (for Allen Ginsberg) by Sonic Youth

today i
said goodbye
to my conflicted goddess
her lush eyes
show surprise
at how we could
gather knowledge
the painting has a dream
where shadow breaks the scene
and the colors run off
blue is bashful
green is my goal
yellow girls are
running backwards
until the nextime
with six hits of sunshine
the lights will
blind up with blues
in haiku
the shadow has a dream
where painters look to sea
the colors burn out

now i know where
i once saw you
stepping into muddy water
john's reflection
decried perfection
now you walk him
through the gardren
waiting in the wings
painters shade their dreams
with falling colors
see me wave good
bye forever
happiness the goddess lover
hurry back re
member last time
the hits of sunshine
the hits of goldmine
i'll see you back tonite
where painters love the light
and yellow shadow girls

today i
say goodbye
to my complicious goddess
her hushed eyes
show surprise
and how we captured knowledge
i'll see you back tonite
where shadows dream of light
let's slip on outside

A Tale of Two Cookies

So, there is this story of the marijuana plant that probably was born somewhere in Bihar. The final step in its metamorphosis, in this particular story, was Bhaang (one of the many variants of Marijuana). This finally found its way into something everyone calls a Bhaang cookie. Two of these Bhaang cookies found their way from the government bhaang shop in Manikarnika Ghat, in Benaras, into the inside pocket of my lovely alternative looking olivegreen slingbag. It sat inside quietly waiting anxiously and wondering what its destiny will be. The bag got on to a train with me to Calcutta. It waited. It also made a trip to Shantiniketan. Still in waiting. Then the bag got onto a flight, still hanging on my shoulders. We reached Bangalore. After spending 8 days in Bangalore, it finally made its way with me to Prakash's house and on the evening of 27th January, 2010, was officially consumed. The effects thereof cannot be really condensed into words. All I can say is it was a wonderful planet we were on... Galaxy 7 Sector X33 to be precise. I also could see Interplanet Janet's kaleidoscope eyes, her checked shirt. We danced, govoreeted, chin-chined, bong'd out. The garden was fascinating, the world emerged in full format. We whispered secrets to the guava tree. And as I was installing my iMac in Prakash's house, the only two words that came out of my mouth was cookiecookie (the password I have been using for almost two decades). Is it coincidence or some kind of mystery that the cookies found their pixel counterparts? We have still not figured it out. Some sort of serendipity disguised in nine yards of existential fabric.

♥LetLoveBe♥

Garden-life

How fascinating,
They stand so motionless, yet so pretty.
A certain elegance.
No identity, no judgement, they just sway with the wind,
Happy, lost in the moment,
They listen to us talk to them,
And we constantly wonder what they are thinking
or feeling.
Oh how I love my wondrous friends of our earth.

Them, them

Those sounds of plastic and nylon, like digital pages flipped in 4/4,
Those syncopated rhythms, like armyboots hitting the ground in 4/4, left, right, left, right,
Those strange arrangements, like cactii in a lilac-coloured desert.
A combination of the senses, the heart and the soul.
A rediscovery of the lute, the art and the hyperbole.

(On the avant-garde jam at Prax's, baglama & nylon-string classical guitar)

She looked at me...

...and said, "there's a little emergency light that automatically switches on when the mountains go to sleep."
I said, "You have a nice immediacy."
She quietly looked at me. She didn't say another word for 33 years...

Just then...

...the earth shook.
Scarlet came crashing in,
Small window atmosphere.
Serif's dancing in unison
counting the descenders and making a face.
Just then the earth shook.
And everything was quiet, real quiet.
Like a feather brushing against cotton.
Real quiet.

Oh, and...

...those familiar images that continuously pop up on my Mechana Model A105, those syncs, and out of syncs. Flashbacks from those wandering times deep at night, hours after the 12.03 last. That flickering of communication breakdown, those blurry lines alternating from Alpha Red to Alpha Green, pixel to pixel, colourbars, that monotonous beep like human existence and robots.

I could not make out the colour of my consciousness. Its alright sometimes to see-saw between triphop and doldrums, its not alright to draw parallel lines on nature's progeny. I miss the clips of the sky, short films of flowers, proboscis tracking shots and, oh, the marvels of the earth, my new earth.

The castle is the pink freedom of society and her autumnal children. The diameter of the circle of sleep, like the last movement in the opera, the last kmph, speedometer destroyed beyond repair, hands and posture severing the half-breaks of that little thing we so fondly call revolution.

I'm so RGB, your so CMYK, I'm so method-acting, you're so breakbeat. Its like finding the fault in those milkshakes we often loved under those shacks, late afternoon, thinking of the sun, lost at sea, like rabbits in everlasting gaze.


- Excerpt from "Thoughtless Thoughts: A quiet afternoon, a quiet earth"

An Indo-Japanese Love Story.

Insignificance

Poverty, people living on the street, children, temporary life, the sub-strata of civilisation, the insignificant ones, the mechanical traffic cops moving their hands like robots, mechanical day in and day out, faces like stones, the lifeless dead.

Look and be simple

Surely, since you have burnt yourself in politics, your problem is not only to break away from society, but to come totally to life again, to love and to be simple. Without love, do what you may, you will not know the total action which alone can save man. "That is true, sir: we don't love, we aren't really simple." Why? Because you are concerned with reforms, with duties, with respectability, with becoming something, with breaking through to the other side. In the name of another, you are concerned with yourself; you are caught in your own cockleshell. You think you are the center of this beautiful earth. You never pause to look at a tree, at a flower, at the flowing river; and if by chance you do look, your eyes are filled with the things of the mind, and not with beauty and love. "Again, that is true; but what is one to do?" Look and be simple.

--

JK

Piano keys around his neck, turtle-neck
Eyes white.
No direction, no focus, no movement.
He wore AOTE Model 1 (Limited Edition).
----
XY177, Hinterland

I dreamt of a live show of two bands, Dholdrums and A Strange Arrangement.

Morning love

As I stepped out of my house on a really cold winter's morning, the old lady who lives next door said she has a New Year card to give me. Such sincerity. Its so heart-warming, suddenly the biting cold didnt matter anymore, I felt warm and fresh inside. She came running back with a postcard of Krishna & Radha I am presuming (my knowledge of the old Hindu myth is rather weak) and handwritten behind it in English "Happy New Year 2010" with 2010 double-stroke outline and all. :) Such love... suchness and isness: the wonderful serendipities of life.

The Sense of "I am" (Consciousness)

When I met my Guru, he told me: "You are not what you take yourself to be. Find out what you are. Watch the sense 'I am', find your real Self." I obeyed him, because I trusted him. I did as he told me. All my spare time I would spend looking at myself in silence. And what a difference it made, and how soon!

My teacher told me to hold on to the sense 'I am' tenaciously and not to swerve from it even for a moment. I did my best to follow his advice and in a comparatively short time I realized within myself the truth of his teaching. All I did was to remember his teaching, his face, his words constantly. This brought an end to the mind; in the stillness of the mind I saw myself as I am -- unbound.

I simply followed (my teacher's) instruction which was to focus the mind on pure being 'I am', and stay in it. I used to sit for hours together, with nothing but the 'I am' in my mind and soon peace and joy and a deep all-embracing love became my normal state. In it all disappeared -- myself, my Guru, the life I lived, the world around me. Only peace remained and unfathomable silence.

- Nisargadatta Maharaj

Postcards from Hinterland

So, I have started creating the Postcards from Hinterland. I hope to have about 12 atleast. Each of them have a note from one of the residents of Hinterland. They are all writing to Dara Okat, the founder of Hinterland. Unknowingly, they all speak, in their own words, of the same thing, a sort of awakening of the consciousness.

----

From XX303, Hinterland

My name is xx303. I have made a discovery in Hinterland. I found out that the mind is actually like the earth, it can be excavated, it can be walked on, or it can just be watched from space. Personally, I prefer the third variation. It can also be archaeologically studied. An excavation of mental make-up so to speak. Jealousy, greed, lust, anger, hate and other silly things. This earth we call our mind is a complex piece of machinery. Its designed with a lot of care, a lot of thought. I seriously cant begin to express my inquisitiveness in this existential thing. Its the size of Russia. Up until now, until very recently, when I started looking at my mind from space, I found peace. Not peace of mind. Peace of no-mind. It was refreshing to be thoughtless. Like a sort of throughness, a nothingness. Nothing. Its a lovely little thing once it is understood and above all, experienced. It makes life a lot simpler.

Here in Hinterland we hear your name a lot. We have seen your artwork and read some of your abstract writings. I have been here four years now and I haven’t yet seen you. Your teaching to us has been very much a sort of in absentia type of spirituality. Somehow your energy has translated into the air that is in and surrounds this wonderful piece of earth. Mr. Dara Okat I salute you for translating air. I sincerely hope our paths cross someday because I would like to shake your hand and say,

"Thankyou."