INTENSE CITY

William Segal embodied a threefold life, that of a relentless spiritual seeker, an artist and a successful entrepreneur. In the 1950’s he published an exceptional men’s magazine called Gentry. The magazines was super-expensive to produce with actual swatches of fabric pasted in and art prints to complement the articles” (Image via)

More scans of Gentry on Flickr.

Here are two remarkable quotes by Segal:

“When one is still and listens, one begins to be in touch with a mysterious element that is within each of us, which can transform and shape us and can help to transform the world.” — William Segal (from his obituary in the New York Times.

“We can’t say why we search, except that there seems to be an innate need, in each human being, to know who one is, what we’re here for, how to live more poetically.” — William Segal, in the amazing film by Ken Burns, “Seeing, Searching, and Being”

You can also find more posts about him here.

“Men are reluctant to accept what is easy to grasp. Out of a perversity deeper than all Satan’s wiles, man refuses to acknowledge his own God-given rights: he demands deliverance or salvation by and though an intermediary; he seeks guides, counselors, leaders, systems, rituals. He looks for solutions which are in his own breast. He puts learning above wisdom, power above the art of discrimination. But above all, he refuses to work for his own liberation, pretending that first “the world” must be liberated. Yet, as Krishnamurti has pointed out time and again, the world problem is bound up with the problem of the individual. Truth is ever present, Eternity is here and now. And salvation? What is it, O man, that you wish to save? Your petty ego? Your soul? Your identity? Lose it and you will find yourself. Do not worry about God—God knows how to take care of Himself. Cultivate your doubts, embrace every kind of experience, keep on desiring, strive neither to forget nor to remember, but assimilate and integrate what you have experienced.”

— Henry Miller discussing Krishnamurti in “The Books in My Life,” p. 151

(Image from Uncertain Times via: Just Do It Henry)

(from t. van gieson)

“I wonder if you have ever known what love is? Because I think death and love walk together. Death, love, and life are one and the same. But we have divided life, as we have divided the earth. We talk of love as being either carnal or spiritual and have set a battle going between the sacred and the profane. We have divided what love is from what love should be, so we never know what love is. Love, surely, is a total feeling that is not sentimental and in which there is no sense of separation. It is complete purity of feeling without the separative, fragmenting quality of the intellect. Love has no sense of continuity. Where there is a sense of continuity, love is already dead, and it smells of yesterday, with all its ugly memories, quarrels, brutalities. To love, one must die.”

— Krishnamurti, “On Living and Dying“

The core of Krishnamurti’s teaching is contained in the statement he made in 1929 when he said: “Truth is a pathless land.”

Man cannot come to it through any organization, through any creed, through any dogma, priest or ritual, not through any philosophic knowledge or psychological technique. He has to find it through the mirror of relationship, through the understanding of the contents of his own mind, through observation and not through intellectual analysis or introspective dissection. Man has built in himself images as a fence of security — religious, political, personal. These manifest as symbols, ideas, beliefs. The burden of these images dominates man’s thinking, his relationships and his daily life. These images are the causes of our problems for they divide man from man. His perception of life is shaped by the concepts already established in his mind. The content of his consciousness is his entire existence. This content is common to all humanity. The individuality is the name, the form and superficial culture he acquires from tradition and environment. The uniqueness of man does not lie in the superficial but in complete freedom from the content of his consciousness, which is common to all mankind. So he is not an individual.

Freedom is not a reaction; freedom is not choice. It is man’s pretence that because he has choice, he is free. Freedom is pure observation without direction, without fear of punishment and reward. Freedom is without motive; freedom is not at the end of the evolution of man but lies in the first step of his existence. In observation one begins to discover the lack of freedom. Freedom is found in the choiceless awareness of our daily existence and activity.

Thought is time. Thought is born of experience and knowledge which are inseparable from time and the past. Time is the psychological enemy of man. Our action is based on knowledge and therefore time, so man is always a slave to the past. Thought is ever-limited and so we live in constant conflict and struggle. There is no psychological evolution. When man becomes aware of the movement of his own thoughts he will see the division between the thinker and the thought, the observer and the observed, the experiencer and the experience. He will discover that this division is an illusion. Then only is there pure observation which is insight without any shadow of the past or of time. This timeless insight brings about a deep radical mutation in the mind.

Total negation is the essence of the positive. When there is negation of all those things that thought has brought about psychologically, only then is there love, which is compassion and intelligence.

— A statement written by Krishnamurti himself on October 21, 1980 in which he summarizes his teachings (via)

Other Links:

Krishnamurti’s Notebook

Observing Without The “Me”

Krishnamurti’s Talks on You Tube

We always have some sensation of our body; otherwise our postures could not be maintained, our movements would be made haphazardly, or not at all. But we are not conscious of this sensation, we are unaware of it, except in extreme situations when an unusual effort is required or when something suddenly goes badly or goes wrong. The rest of the time we forget about it. In order to know and observe ourselves and to study our body and later to support our work, we need to have this sensation. This calls for a new relationship to come into existence in me: I-conscious of-my sensation. Actually much more than just a new connection is involved. Really a new situation arises within us in this effort and, undoubtedly, this is what is most important, but we do not yet have enough actual experience to speak of it.

What we need immediately is a stable sensation; that is, we need to develop a more steady and longer lasting consciousness of our body and its situation. The first idea which then comes to mind, of course, is to try to follow this awareness of our body in the midst of the movements and activities of our life. We can try; but we soon see, on the one hand, that the sensation never remains the same so that it is extremely difficult to stay in touch with it and, on the other hand, that our activities distract us and cause us to lose all possibility of following our situation.

In fact, if we wish to experience sensation of ourselves and to develop the possibility of remaining aware of it, we must work in much less difficult conditions. We must put ourselves in specially favorable circumstances which correspond to what is possible for us; and, at the start, in a field we do not know yet, where nothing is developed as it should be, almost nothing is possible for us. Moreover, in our work on ourselves, it will always be so. This work only makes sense if it enables us one day to go into life in order to manifest there to the full that which we recognize as being and to accomplish what depends on us. There will always be two lines in our work on ourselves: on the honestly possible, at least once, if not twice, and perhaps even, more. On one hand, inner work in quiet conditions suitable for the development of certain possibilities, and on the other, putting ourselves to the test in life, to an extent proportionate to the inner development that has been realized. But life is a tempest in which one must be very strong inwardly not to be upset by the opposing elements. And before putting ourselves to the test or taking big risks, it is necessary to have developed patiently, in sheltered and favorable conditions, the forces and faculties (powers) which will preserve us from disaster.

As regards the sensation of ourselves, before being able to follow how it changes as we move about and live, we need to know it in a basic condition where we can immediately return to it, always the same, whenever it is needed for our inner work. Just as a zero or a norm is needed in all measurement, in the same way we need a point of reference in evaluating ourselves, a yardstick, the measure of a situation that is always the same. And for the sensation of oneself, we can find this base only in complete relaxation.

We must therefore put ourselves in conditions where complete relaxation is possible. Having realized this is necessary, we must promise ourselves to try it every day, so far as this is honestly possible, at least once, if not twice, and perhaps even, more.

— Jean Vaysse, “Toward Awakening” p.161. The image is by Bruce Conner, entitled, “Sound of Two Hand Angel”, 1974. Thanks to one of my favourite Tumblrs, Uncertain Times, for finding it.

This passage is from one of the most easily accessible and practical books on the teaching that Gurdjieff left that I have encountered. There is another post that explores the central topic of sensation here as well.

“The true meaning of purifying your feeling is to become as empty as the sky. To possess the All, it is first necessary to be empty, to be void. And in that void, your deep-rooted impressions…will naturally arise in form. To give up everything in order to gain everything this is the key to all practice of Yoga.”

— Sri Anirvan, “Inner Yoga” (Image from Astro Inquiry via: Serpentskirt)

I wonder how many people in this city
live in furnished rooms.
Late at night when i look out at the buildings
I swear I see a face in every window
looking back at me
and when I turn away
I wonder how many go back to their desks
and write this down.

— Leonard Cohen from “The Spice Box of the Earth.”

Photo: Jason Langer, Secret City

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps his purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox;

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering;
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth
tending as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was a bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened
or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

— Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems, Volume I)

(Photo: Francisco Aszmann from Lotus Feet)

The leaves are falling, falling as if from far up,
as if orchards were dying high in space.
Each leaf falls as if it were motioning “no.”

And tonight the heavy earth is falling
away from all other stars in the loneliness.

We’re all falling. This hand here is falling.
And look at the other one. It’s in them all.

And yet there is Someone, whose hands
infinitely calm, holding up all this falling.

— by Rainer Maria Rilke

(Painting: Egon Schiele, “Four Trees,” 1917)