HERE WE GATHERWhat will open the door onto a good society? What would a good society look like? What does the word ‘good’ even mean? Interestingly, among the etymological roots of this word, we find the following meaning; ‘to gather, to take up together’. To gather, to bring together. We are certainly not 'gathered' today. We are as divided as we are numbered. Divided as we are named. Divided as we are nationalised and beliefed. Divided as we are opinionated, and apparently everyone is entitled to theirs. We are as divided as we are political and religious. We are certainly, under no stretch of the imagination ‘gathered’. And so, we are not living in a 'good' society. We have men so numerically wealthy they choose between which palace to lay their head and we have children so numerically poor they have no choice between life and death. We have those who lead and those led, and the smaller number are the commanders and the larger number are divided from them and among themselves. Who is the right leader? Who is the one to follow? Who will provide my life with four or eight years of relative stability or tormented reaction related to my divided needs, before the whole ground shakes once more in the repetitive tremors of change? 'Gathered' is one group. One outlook, one religion, one government, one view, one people, one life, one death. There are one divided off group of people today looking, (it seems), to gather humanity, though this gathering is not truly a gathering, for in the nature of a true gathering, there is no one telling others how it must be gathered. Gathering, in nature, must be the very denial of all authority. A shared vision, rather than an enforced one. There can be no gathering, which in its nature implies a 'coming together', if the coming together is in way coerced, forced, or commanded. If I seek to walk to the right, and another pushes my life to the left, this is not a gathering. This is a dictating. Though a certain gathering does occur under dictatorship, as in North Korea, there exists under the surface of the 'gathered' a great fear, and on the surface a mask of absolute compliance. A good society. A gathered society. When young, so very young, we were set out on our journey through the twisting roads of our lives dividedly. Our classroom education taught us the merits of seeking 'success', in continual future growth. Not the success of all, the success of one. And one is divided from others, and what is divided from others, is not gathered. The success of one, is the failure of most. Only one can hold top position, there is no top position for those gathered. There is no measurement required. We were educated into memory, to living life in the past. To always living with and approaching life through days gone by, be those days as close as yesterday, or as far apart as the measurement of decades. And the nature of our lives was ingrained into us to hold ultimate meaning in the actions of building these remembered days past, into days’ future. The continuity of time our lives are lived within. The measuring of our value. The measuring of our value against the life of another. This movement is familiar to us all, the un-gathered. The divided, the seeking, the lost and forlorn and the confidently arrived alike. It is present in the life of the common man in his pursuit of progress. To study, to educate, be qualified, find a better job, build or buy a better house, a better car, reach the most senior position in life which the limitations of life may enable. Some have a much easier task in this respect. Or no task at all, they are born in a position few can ever hope to attain. They are born into a family which has already achieved such apparent nobility, so much so, it is guaranteed in collective memory into practical infinity. Born titled, born with a voice louder than a combined billions of others. Born to the respect of others who recognise this historical superiority over their lives. As far from 'gathered' as one might ever come to find. This progressive movement of becoming has led our world into the financial institutions of banking, pharmaceuticals, industry, technology, governance, politics, monarchy, to mention only a few. Some families have aimed past to future for so long, seeking their success, bringing failure to the lives of others, for these two are consistent and eternally related bedfellows. Success brings to life failure, as up brings down. As dark brings light, as good brings bad. Not the 'good' of etymological 'gathering', the good related to measurement, of the degree to which a life is lived in opulence, in comparison to the many which meet poverty. There are two goods. One is to live rightly, to meet life as it is and to respond to the meeting accurately and responsibly. Another is related to self-interest, which is divisive, measurement based, comparative, competitive, self interested, and so the seeds of bad, are held in this good. For this is no action of the gathered. And the gathered, are the only true good. We are educated into this, it’s roots run deep in the memory cells of all of humanity. In the workplace, we pay respect to those in more senior position than ours, we pay little respect to those seen as lower. In India, the caste system perfectly exemplifies this movement, the physical outer manifestation of this inner nature in continuity. The 'Untouchables', to the 'Brahmins'. The slave caste, to the priesthood. The dirt on the soles of feet, to the polished boots walking over the dirt. In the West this manifestation is found in divisions of people, Royalty, given the best of everything and the most of everything and all the power and the glory, from opulent birth, to opulent death. The scent of importance follows certain lives. Some born to this, lucky, or unlucky, perhaps equal measure of both, others spend their every breath in attempt to gain this, few truly succeed to such monumental proportions, those who do, become the newly arrived Kings, quickly forgetting their roots, they must be 'something' made of superior material to others, for so few arrive, and they have opened the golden door. Welcomed, by new brothers. Members of a new family. Is this not evidence of their 'intelligence', their 'prowess', their right to now take their place alongside all others of similar gigantic stature? Our lives are led into a continuing pyramidal structure of society in our classroom years. The pinnacle of our achievements is how well we can conform to the system being structured into our lives. How well we can automate this process into our lives. And we do automate this process into our lives. The marks of the many exams, providing gratification or disappointment, become the number we hunger for, the things we acquire, the life we can can later afford to buy. Or not. The golden keys to prosperity are forged from a conformity to this system, indelibly stamped into the brain cells of every child alive, from which every action in life is patterned. In this we imagine we have found our freedom, we are self-directed, masters of our own destiny. The damage our education brings to our lives is so large, there is no suitable adjective I can find to describe its effects. It is the reason for all chaos. It is the reason we hold no love in our hearts for each other. It is the reason our lives so often feel so meaningless. It is the reason for ever atrocity one man has ever partaken in action against the life of another. One group against another. It is the reason we hold no understanding of what the word 'religion' truly means, which is something totally removed from what we have accepted it to mean. It is the reason that wealth to quench our every thirst exists, for life is born into abundance, but most keeping the tap turned on continuously, find hardly a drop to be found. We were divided in our earliest of early years. At a time when our brains were developing, open, learning, they were closed tightly shut to the entertaining of any approach to life other than this pyramidal structure. Of seeking to 'progress' to an upper level than were we now stand. For some, as in the 'Untouchables' of India, this is denied outright. As it is to the Brahmin. To the street sleeper as it is to the King. To the majority, the illusion continues, this is order. This is the approach to bring to life its greatest of all meaning. One man at a time. Fight for your own salvation. Or die trying. Or just accept the whole pitiful arrangement and lead a life hardly worth living. This approach is found behind every movement of ambition. Every movement seeking success. Every movement seeking to maintain the position of success reached. And my success is only known in relation to your comparative failure. We have a few men of phenomenal success, standing on the backs of billions of comparative failures. This is not 'gathered' and so this is not 'good". Very good for some at the expense of every bad for the many, is overall, not good. Not balanced, not fair, and in a Universe of abundance, not honest nor true to life. Brainwashed, we all have been. We 'know', and what we know is the pattern of life conditioned into us. We have integrated into our lives a symbol so familiar to the ancient Egyptians. Life is a process of becoming, and its meaning is found in reaching the highest position possible. And remaining there. The pyramid with the overseeing eye is not only to be found on dollar bills, proudly proclaiming the virtue of this ordering of disordering leading our society. It lives and breathes within us all. And this, is the denial of a 'good' society, for this is the denial of our gathering. What would it take for all of humanity to gather as one? To live in recognition of what we truly are, rather than obedience to an unquestioned early years programmed acceptance of what we divisively have been led to believe we truly are? What would it take for us to gather, and to build a society representative of care for each other, rather than care, only for ourselves? What fuels the fire which continues the stumbling continuity of this dinosaur which needs end? Is it not us? Are we not each cellular components of a larger organism we name society which needs to end? What are we really, and what do we think we are? What we are, is what we are, what we think we are is what we believe ourselves to be. Are we really standing outside of this insane system? Are we blameless for the world we find ourselves living within? Are we the ordering principle? We seem to think we are, when we criticise and attack the actions of others, powerful or otherwise, for their eternal blindness. We seem blind to our own. Both criticising and appraisal are similar in nature, and found in every area of our life. From social media posts to harsh words or words of appreciation. Contradictory as these reactions may seem, they are uniform across the whole of our species, for we look at life from our own learned perspective. Here, we are divided. And divided, is not gathered. And not gathered can never build a good society. We seem to think we can do 'better'. We can do better, and so we take to streets burning buildings, we attack others who do not belong to our race, our culture, our tribe. We attack others who belong to divided class, name, religion, political affiliation, sexuality, colour, creed, belief, status and action. It is ‘them’ to blame, is the war cry of all sides. It is ‘we’ who understand better, is the common understanding of all men. 'They’ have attacked us, we are 'innocent’ we so often self-righteously feel. Why do we never see that if attacking another’s life is wrong, and it is, that attacking back, in the name of defence, is to increase the burden of wrong action affecting all our lives? Is it that we are not a gathered people, and a non-gathered people are incapable of acting as good people? We fight war with war, we conflict against conflict, we argue our case against others arguing theirs. And so we, in our blindness, in our need to be right, in our need to stand on that pyramid in higher position than the other, conceptually, ideologically, numerically, religiously, politically, patriotically, are objects of continuity, in permanent continuity, seeking to end that which we ourselves are so passionately engaged within. We have a right to be. They, dont. The Bible is an incredibly contradictory book in so many areas. If we are a believer, we paper over such contradictions, we find a way to rationalise the divisive meanings given, to satisfy our childhood indoctrination we find security living within. There are words pointing to great truths in this book and words which make so little sense. How can one tell the one from the other? How to separate the wheat from the chaff? I can tell you now, you can’t, unless you have come to some understanding of life for yourself. Truths voiced are only recognisable to a man who has come to see the same. All else is an acceptance, and an acceptance of another's truth is never any understanding of truth you have found for yourself. You are in position of living a second hand life. No understanding of your own. I move now from the religious domain to the psychological we will come back to the religious a little later on. I have found these two to be closely related in life. What births the divisions which maintain our every conflicted action against another? If another seeks to bring my life to harm, is my only recourse to seek to harm him back? A vital question in this world today, this world so divided it calls for a need of nothing other than the most appropriate and responsible of action. Aside from an indoctrination to valuing my life over yours found in a classroom conformity to accepting life as a battlefield to navigate while following the instructions of an authority laying down the foundations of a life to be lived in the past, which is memory, which is knowledge and which is thought, we are conditioned to accept what we are. From another. Not what we actually are, this is a conceptual identity we are led into believing we are. And these conditionings, these programs, this sense of security offered which becomes the proliferation of all insecurity in later life, divide us all. And a divided people, are not a gathered people, and so we never come to meet a good world. What is the source of all our divisions, what about us prevents us from being 'gathered'? From acting for the benefit of all? What prevents society from being 'good'? Caring, Loving, Empathic, giving most to what and who needs most, sharing, and acting in interest unbounded by self? Interest in the whole, for the whole, is a gathering. And a gathering is the good. The beginning of our divisions lies in our childhood accepted indoctrination and in our conceptual understanding of what we subsequently come to think we are. In the identities we carry within which provide security to our lives which perpetually continue in our educated patterns of thinking and manifest in our daily repetitive collectively divisive actions. These go beyond the enclosing years of our lives. This divisive chaos we are all party to, has contaminated the lives of humanity for thousands of years. If I am educated to find my security in the Christian faith, I have broken my ability to connect to the gathering of humanity as whole. I value the proliferation of my own now isolated, (from the whole), outlook on life, and seek to convert others to seeing as I do, through missionary work. And others have been indoctrinated to other beliefs, and have their own missionary work to do. Some do so religiously. It is the meaning of their lives. Some do so violently, for better perhaps a man lose his life, than to lose his soul. All divide, and division is the ground of all conflict, historically, as true as to this day. Burning at the stake of days now gone, beheadings of another group, the commonality of killing another who does not see the conceptual accepted 'love' you hold in your mind as the only true love. The methods have changed, the group delivering the ultimate betrayal of human life in the name of the conceptually conceived carried conceptual understanding of the sacred, has changed. The movement remains the same. The movement is a movement of chaos. In the name of religion. This chaos is not isolated to religious divisional outlooks, it is found wherever division is found, wherever one man projects from his own limited knowledge based understanding of life basking in monumental ignorance of what he does not and can never know. This movement is as witnessed in the charred remains of the inquisition years now passed, as it is in the headless bodies which lie to rot in the hot desert sands. We are all standing on shifting sands, if we consider we have right to cast blame on anyone. The chaos comes about when our life security is founded on knowledge which orders our world, traditional and educated in nature, which we have never come to question the validity of and so never seen the danger of possessing. This knowledge forms within us a central image of what I am. We are educated to many things in life. We are educated to conceptualise the world into symbols. Languages, beliefs, all a continuity of tradition from the past. Educated to live in memory, and to act from the past. Thought is memory. We are educated to find security in authority, and of course, acting from memory, we remember this. We remember our childhood education well, and this forms a background we carry through life. A background of thinking, which we act upon, and so we continue our divisive tendencies into perpetuity. We are now psychologically divided from others, and as we act on our thinking, which is home to the divisive conceptual knowledge we now carry, battle, is an inevitability. We find security in beliefs, these beliefs provide sense of order, in a world where there is none. We find security in belonging to nation, belief, political allegiance, partner, qualification, bank balance, numerical wealth, title, position, groups and parties of every description and we are as much possessed by all of this and more, as all of this and more, possesses us. All of this is given continuity in the outer world in the relationships and lack of relationships with others who hold similar values and others who hold values in opposition to our similarity. A divisive continuity bringing us all to war for as long as we have breathed the air on the communal ground we stand. Factually belonging to the same physical home, psychologically, living within a broken field of so many houses it becomes impossible to count. And the continuity of all this, is psychological. It is held in the indoctrinated background stored in the memory cells which drives my repetitive thinking, which drives my repetitive divisive actions. If we are to end war, we must end what causes war, which are these valued blind allegiances to concepts we have never questioned, yet find security living within. We must study the cause of the problem, and the cause of the problem is human thinking in identification with traditional and educated concepts. Coming back to the Bible now, and a quoting of a short text of absolute truth pointing to this fact. I am not a Christian, for what should by now be obvious reasons. I hold no belief. In anything. If I see it, I see it, if I stand alone in a darkened room, I explore the nature of the darkness which envelopes me. Exodus 14:14: 'The lord will fight for you and you have only to be silent. To be 'silent', is to be without sound. Inner sound. It is you, which must be silent. A silent mind sees life as it is. A silent mind is beyond corruption of any divisive imagery held in memory and projected from the brain in a continuity of any divisive societal conditioning. Seeing life as it is, is a gathering. It is a gathering, for to see life void of historical traditional beliefs and outlooks, one comes to find oneself standing on a ground which is undeniable and cannot be argued against. The same ground for every man. Truth is the same for every man. One has moved one’s life from the shifting sands of belief, to the solid ground of what actually is true to life. And what a life it is found to be here. A silent mind is free from self and so free from ambition, fear, depression, anxiety, effort, division, desire, bias, and prejudice of every kind. Free from self-interest, what is perceived which was before greatly ignored, hidden behind walls of conceptuality, reveals. A much larger field than can be contained in limited remembrances from the past. An infinite field. Timeless and majestical. An infinite universe stands proud before a silent mind. A world free of every and any division, where every man’s life is held in equal value to my own. For the unity of life, is in the removal of that which breaks it into pieces. Death has gone, the fear of the ending of the continuity of the concept which I have been educated to see as what I am. Death dies its death forever, when a human mind moves out with the limitations of thought. And in all this is unimaginable beauty, for the mind which has travelled so far, has travelled to the source of creation. Life, as it is, is met in a timeless place. It is always now. The past has died, and taken it's divisive future with it. To quote once more from the Bible, and to stipulate once more I am no Christian, but wisdom found in the writings of others, wherever it is found is useful to outline a case: Revelation, 21:4: “He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.” Our ‘former things’ are what we carry in memory, recorded from the past, educated into us and gathered from experiences. Expressed in divisive actions of a divisive self.
We believe such words, with little understanding of them. We posit that the continuity of our peculiar divisive educated and historical stance is the only accurate one. Never realising, this is what needs to end. This, is the nature of our 'former things'. This is what came before, with us, carried for thousands of years, this is what brings us to tears, the inevitability of our battling against each other, and the continuity of this isolated past, is the ground of our knowledge from which we act, the nature of the inner self. 'Death shall be no more', for the ending of all this accumulated self-interest, which is the ending of the inner self, is the ending of death itself. A mind empty of self-interest, beliefs, attachments, has no death, for nothing remains to die in a state of inner emptiness, which is silence. Death, has already been met. A very different potential exists for humanity than how we collectively divisively live this day. An awakening to what we are, which is what we were, before we were convinced we were divisively something else. A life finding meaning, the greatest of all in an awakening to the senses. In the silence of all projected thoughts held and acted upon which divide one man’s life from another. Not an enforced silence, rather a silence which comes when the nature of the self has been understood. When the danger of how we are all living this day, has been clearly seen. Self-observation leads to self-awareness, and self-awareness leads to an understanding of the ways of the self. Freedom from the self is freedom from every prejudice against every other and so the birth of a new mind. This new mind is the birth of a new 'gathering' society. A good society. For minds free of concepts meet in the same place and the same time, and void of self-interest, void of self-identification at all, void of self, are available for providing to life what life needs, where it needs, and when it needs. Without the corruption and distortion which self interest always brings to action. This is the order of all of life. No life grows without a given environment needed to sustain and flourish. Gone are the divisive movements of seeking divisive futures, in continuity of divisive pasts, which are now over. The past, has died. The nature of the past is held in memory and builds the continuity of self in image. Gone is all self-interest, and so a freedom to respond to life as it is. As it was, and as it always has been, before humanity developed the quirk of valuing the conceptual as more important than the actual. Of valuing the word as more important than what the word points to. “The lord will fight for you and you have only to be silent”. Because the Lord, (or the creative, the sacred, God, life, the Universe, that which provides all and births all), the name is not important at all, is met in silence. Silence is peace, silence is golden, and silence has no need for a single thing. It has arrived, and its arrival is always where it is, resting in what it is. Resting, in nothing at all. Will you give the energies of your life to the understanding of what this all means? Or will you continue to defend your educated and traditional corner, attacking back those who attack you, adding more flames to an already over burning world? Adding chaos, where chaos needs to end. Fighting war with war. And feeling justified and self righteous in doing so. A peaceful mind will build a peaceful world. And a peaceful mind is a silent mind. A mind which has died to its past is a mind, which is nothing at all. Here, we gather.
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AuthorHello to all, I am a 60 year old man who has spent the best part of his life studying the teachings of J.Krishnamurti. My name is Henryk. I am rather unimportant, although what I talk about on these pages, has great importance. Particularly today, in this dark world, led by men of infinite wealth, unfortunately without the intelligence to match. My work here stands on the shoulders of that of J.Krishnamurti. Without this man's passion and great life understanding, this website would never have existed. His effect on my own life has been immeasurable. A man of infinite vision and wisdom, who spent over 60 years of his life travelling the world and discussing life and societal problems. Krishnamurti passed away in the 1980s. Anyone interested in the nature of discussion in the content of this site, will likely find great interest in the work of Krishnamurti. Hundreds of videos may be found on YouTube. There is a link above dedicated to his work to which new content is planned to be regularly added. The beauty of truth in life, is that it is identical for each one of us. Truth is the place we all come to meet in unity. And truth belongs to no man. Only pointless opinions, divisive, traditional, educated into and gathered by us, may be claimed as ownership. The change in our world so desperately needed this day, is within us, not external to our lives. All man's actions begin in the area of human thinking, it is this needs understood and brought to revolution. Thanks for taking the time to visit, a few posts are being added to the site weekly at the moment, when I find time. If you would like to support the work here, you can do so from the price of a cup of coffee each month, contributors are invited to online discussions. If you would like to contribute, our Patreon page may be found at the following address: www.patreon.com/rainbow_warriors. Archives
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