In between yesterday and tomorrow

In conclusion to my first piece as Exposures Editor, ‘Conflict in the search of permanency,’ I return to California — this time a California less familiar to us. By abstracting these familiar scenes, the images create a new world. Accompanying an original poem are selections from Indian philosopher and thinker Jiddu Krishnamurti. 

Between yesterday and today,

What’s happening

in a sixteen-room house

down at the end of world

There is no try

Love saves the day

Snap to the present

Stuck in Entertainment America

“The pursuit of the ideal is the search for reward. You may shun the worldly rewards as being stupid and barbarous, which they are; but your pursuit of the ideal is the search for reward. You may shun the worldly rewards as being stupid and barbarous, which they are; but your pursuit of the ideal is the search for reward at a different level, which is also stupid. The ideal is a compensation, a fictitious state which the mind has conjured up. Being violent, separate and out for itself, the mind projects gratifying compensation, the fiction which it calls the ideal, the Utopia, the future, and vainly pursues it. That very pursuit is conflict, but it is also a pleasurable postponement of the actual. The ideal, the what should be, does not help in understanding what is; on the contrary, it prevents understanding.” (Commentaries on Living: Second Series)

“Truth is not opinion; truth is not dependent on any leader or teacher. The weighing of opinions only prevents the perception of truth. Either the ideal is a homemade fiction which contains its own opposite, or it is not. There are no two ways about it. This does not depend on any teacher, you must perceive the truth of it for yourself.” (Commentaries on Living: Second Series)

“The understanding of the actual is possible only when the ideal, the what should be, is erased from the mind; that is only when the false is seen as the false. The what should be is also the what should not be. As long as the mind approaches the actual with either positive or negative compensation, there can be no understanding of the actual. To understand the actual you must be in direct communion with it; your relationship with it cannot be through the screen of the ideal, or through the screen of the past, of tradition, of experience. To be free from the wrong approach is the only problem. This means, really, the understanding of conditioning, which is the mind. The problem is the mind itself, and not the problems it breeds; the resolution of the problems bred by the mind is merely the reconciliation of effects, and that only leads to further confusion and illusion.” (Commentaries on Living: Second Series)

“To understand anything you must live with it, you must observe it, you must know all its content, its nature, its structure, its movement. Have you ever tried living with yourself? If so, you will begin to see that your self is not a static state, it is a fresh living thing. And to live with a living thing your mind must also be alive. And it cannot be alive if it is caught in opinions, judgements, and values.” (Freedom from the Known)

“In order to observe the movement of your own mind and heart, of your whole being, you must have a free mind, not a mind that agrees and disagrees, taking sides in an argument, disputing over mere words but rather following with an intention to understand—a very difficult thing to do because most of us don’t know how to looks at, or listen to, our own being any more than we know how to look at the beauty of a river or listen to the breeze among the trees.” (Freedom from the Known)

“When we condemn or justify we cannot see clearly, nor can we when our minds are endlessly chattering; then we do not observe what is, we look only at the projections we have made of ourselves. Each of us has an image of what we think we are or what we should be, and that image, that picture, entirely prevents us from seeing ourselves as we actually are.” (Freedom from the Known)

Contact Julian Hammond Santander at [email protected]