Questioner: I have had what might be called a spiritual experience, a guidance, or a certain realization. how am I to deal with it? Krishnamurti: Most of us have had deep experiences, call them by what name you will; we have had experiences of great ecstasy, of great vision, of great love. The experience fills our being with its light, with its breath; but it is not abiding, it passes away, leaving its perfume. With most of us the mind-heart is not capable of being open to that ecstasy. The experience was accidental, uninvited, too great for the mind-heart. The experience is greater than the experiencer and so the experiencer sets about to reduce it to his own level, to his sphere of comprehension. His mind is not still; it is active, noisy, rearranging; it must "deal" with the experience; it must organize it; it must spread it; it must tell others of its beauty. So the mind reduces the inexpressible into a pattern of authority or a direction for conduct. It interprets and translates the experience and so enmeshes it in its own triviality. Because the mind-heart does not know how to sing it pursues instead the singer. The interpreter, the translator of the experience, must be as deep and wide as the experience itself if he would understand it; since he is not, he must cease to interpret it; to cease, he must be mature, wise in his understanding. You may have a significant experience but how you understand it, how you interpret it depends on you the interpreter; if your mind-heart is small, limited, then you translate the experience according to your own conditioning. It is this conditioning that must be understood and broken down before you can hope to grasp the full significance of the experience. The maturity of mind-heart comes as it frees itself from its own limitations and not through clinging to the memory of a spiritual experience. If it clings to memory it abides with death, not with life. Deep experience may open the door to understanding, to self-knowledge and right thinking, but with many it becomes only a stirring stimulation, a memory, and soon loses its vital significance, preventing further experience. We translate all experience in terms of our own conditioning, the deeper it is the more alertly aware must we be not to misread it. Deep and spiritual experiences are rare and if we have such experiences we reduce them to the petty level of our own mind and heart. If you are a Christian or a Hindu or a non-believer you accordingly translate such experiences, reducing them to the level of your own conditioning. If your mind-heart is given over to nationalism and greed, to passion and ill will, then such experiences will be used to further the slaughter of your neighbor; then you seek guidance to bomb your brother; then to worship is to destroy or torture those who are not of your country, of your faith. It is essential to be aware of your conditioning rather than to try to "do something" about the experience itself, but mind-heart clings to the experiences of yesterday and so becomes incapable of understanding the living present
Posted on: Sat, 29 Jun 2013 13:37:11 +0000
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