Placelore

What is Important

Gusts of a cool strong wind draw me to the balcony where in the frail periodically dimming electric light I write.

The monsoon has a long tail this year, the sound of ringing temple bells are modified by its sodden atmosphere. A little distance away is Vasanta Vihar, the city home of Krishnamurti, further south the green tree breathing space of the old Theosopical grounds at Adyar. I was just on twenty when I first read Krishnamurti but what did I understand of the boy-sage then? What do I understand of his legacy now? Some became disappointed when it was revealed that for many yeras he had a lover, but what of it. Others wrote defending him, why? The man is not the teaching, as he himself said, "The person who taught the teachings is unimportant.The teachings are important ... (Ojai, 20 March 1977)

The 'teachings are not something out there, in a book. What the teaching is or says, 'Look at yourself, go into yourself, inquire into what there is, understand it, go beyond it' ... you are to understand yourself. (Raighat, 25 November 1981).   

Now, I listen to the album It'll End in Tears the  words are softly shaken into night and there is a quiet wonder of beginning again.

Orientation

"The Alexander Technique, ... seeks to give to its students a new (to them, but really a very ancient) orientation. Modern man, when in activity, has very little awareness of such simple directions in space as backwards and forwards, and up and down, in relation to his own body, and what awareness he has is almost certain to be wrong — even as much as 180 degrees…

The science of physiology has not yet got round to recognizing this factor of orientation, even though it is the fundamental on which everything else depends.

I have stressed that an individual orientation of the body , in space, is an essential if the progressive deterioration of Man is to be arrested."

 

Patrick Macdonald The Alexander Technique AS I See It Chapter 3 pps 55–56

Five Stages

(A reminder from a friend received September).

There is a Japanese saying I recall once having heard of the five stages of a man’s growth:

 

At ten, an animal

At twenty, a lunatic

At thirty, a failure

At forty, a fraud

At fifty, a criminal

 

And at sixty I would add, (since by this time one will have  gone through all this), one begins advising one’s friends.

And at seventy, (realising that everything said has been misunderstood), one keeps quiet and is taken for a sage.

 

“At eighty”, then said Confucius, “I knew my ground and stood firm.”

 

--From Joseph Campbell’s Art of Living