A friend asked: Do you naturally feel like doing it [summa iru]? Are you personally convinced that you should drop … More
Category: Silence
The Quarrel with the Present: Human Love, Pleasure, and the Flight from Being Merely Human
Does human love — the love one person feels for another, sometimes unreturned — help or hinder liberation? This dialogue begins there and refuses the usual escape routes: no sublimating the beloved into the Beloved, no dissolving the particular person into metaphysics. It stays with the scandalously particular: this laugh, this handwriting, this way of falling silent mid-sentence. Along the way it separates the two strands entangled in every love — the ego-dismantling that cracks our solipsism, and the pleasure-seeking that certifies our lack — and examines the precise mechanics by which seeking rains on the parade to liberation: the misattributed ananda, the rented ego-death of sex, the anxiety of separateness managed rather than investigated. Krishnamurti’s “understanding is the action” and Ramana’s summa iru frame the inquiry, but the conversation turns its own weapon on itself at the end: isn’t liberation-seeking the final quarrel with the present? Why flee the human that Brahman itself created? Zorba the Greek enters, dancing on the beach after the mine collapses — and the dialogue discovers that the end-state looks embarrassingly like ordinary life fully inhabited, with one difference: no proprietor left behind experience, filing claims against it.
My Final Hurrah!
Just published on Amazon my 20th book (I hope this will be my last book) “Summa Iru: My Formal Renunciation … More
On the Stillness of the Mind — by J. Krishnamurti
“The mind is quiet when it sees the truth that understanding comes only when it is quiet…When I see the … More
I Am Sick of Thought
It is thought that tells meI am there, you are thereThis world is thereAnd perhaps there is God. It is … More
The Courage To Be Myself
I care NOT to be anythingNo, not even BrahmanThough I’m told I’m already thatWho put me on earthWho made me … More
Quit
“Life is not a battle worth fighting. Quit.” The word is a deliberate stumbling block. What is to be given up is not the body or the life, but the fighter — the ego whose founding myth is that life is a war to be won. Camus answered the question of life’s worth with revolt; Advaita takes the path he never considered: neither suicide nor defiance, but the dissolution of the one who asks. Quit the way a fist quits clenching. The battle is optional because the soldier is fictional. What remains is life itself — neither fought nor fled.
Truths and Half-truths — Claude Comments
“It is only gracious to allow people to hold on to their truths even if in our estimation they are … More
Hermann Hesse on Solitude
Most men, the herd, have never tasted solitude. They leave father and mother, but only to crawl to a wife … More
Summa Iru: Formal Renunciation for The Dissolution of the False Self
All my life I have been ending ignorance — reading, thinking, writing, seeking. Now the loose ends are nearly tied. Come July 16, my 62nd birthday, it will be summa iru: not a thing I choose, but what happens when the false self, strung together from my relationships, finally dissolves. The more I carve out this “Me Time,” the more I begin to disappear. Nothing defines me; nothing tells me who I am. And so the old question arises almost naturally — “Who am I?” — a question one can sit with, alone, and stand a very good chance of answering.